letitgo

Great to hear from you all.
Great idea tooshabby. HALT has been really helpful to me.glad your doing well Angd1978, tokidoki, Sleepie, holds, sleepie and upward.
Hope you feel better CBF.
Glad your excited about work BBB. Was you leave at work confidential for you medical reason? Sorry to pry but i am curious how it works in the UK.
Running out of my medicine (lexapro and xanax fo anxiety) and my doctor wont give a refill. So i now have anxiety about my withdraw anxiety to come. Really worried i will want to drink to help ease my anxiety. My dr wont give me a refill unless i see him. But i am still out of town for another week. A relapse seems like a great copout to blame the dr. Its all his fault. My av is a tricky son of a gun. Going call my pcp on Tuesday and hope they can help me. Gonna go to a pharmacy and see if i can get a 5 day supply. I doubt they will because the dr wont refill it. Getting anxious already.
Bob, i am about 40% through the book and its hard to rationalize the end of cravings like Mr. Carr says it so easy. His plant is a great example. He rambles about global warming and taking medications are so unnatural. Technology is so bad for us. He is right to an extent. I think he wore tin foil hat until he passed lol. Anway his logic is sound. But i can so relate to the fly. I did learn to like the taste of the nectar. It became a habit or daily routine. Still in the danger zone at 60 something days.

From reading sr and my past experiences i just can not negiote with alcohol. Not one drink or sip. Easier said then done. Thats why everyone has a plan or a craving playbook. Carr makes great points but addicts cant see logic because we have been blindsiding ourselves.
Hard to cut the chains with something you attached to everything

Tooshabby

Hmm...that's not good. I would suggest, if a pharmacy won't help - which they may not - going to see a doctor at a 24 hour drop-in type place, and explain the situation to them. Just say you need 5 days to keep you covered until you can get back to see your G.P. You could take your last box/prescription to prove you are not just shopping around doctors, if you wanted. I know some doctors are wary of that, and rightly so. But the fact remains, you are on medication and should not be forced into withdrawal in an impromptu fashion. Some professional should help you with that - it is only good practice. Just my take :-)

letitgo

Maybe i should the call pcp now vs. waiting till tuesday. They may tell me to go to a 24 hour place like you said. Thanks so much for your perspective. I have my anxiety end ofworld blinders on lol.

Dee74

yep, I'd call letitgo

D

BobBFree33

I third this. Xanax withdrawal is not good.

On Carr making it seem light you just snap your fingers and your over it; I think some salesmanship and re-using his cigarette material is what is going on there. The fundamental concepts are really strong though. Like cbf and I have found, our little monkey-brains get programmed for certain responses and it take a while to un-wire those stupid connections!

BringingBackB

Letitgo - I also think you should call.

About my leave from work, they don't know about alcohol no - nor will I be telling them. My Dr gave me a sick note for depression/ anxiety.

HFA

Been catching up on everyone's post. Glad to see so many still here. I'm still sober on day 68 or so. Even though I don't post much reading in here helps.
Bob,
If suggest you stay here instead of going to another month. When I had over a yr and a half and slipped I went to that months group. Just didn't feel the same. Didn't help me as much. I think I was just too whatever to invest all that time and sharing again. I think it's better to stay here and share the journey.. Good and bad. But that's just me.
Maybe I should post more too.

Stay strong and sober on.....

letitgo

I think thats great BBB that your DR could do that. I know when I took FMLA it was the same. They keep everything confidential. Its nice to have some privacy.
Congrats HFA and its great to see you post again!

I went to the local pharmacy and they cant help. Left 2 messages for my pcp with no response. I am just going to go to the urgent care. If that doesn't work i am going to be pissed. I am going to fire my psychiatrist. Just so frustrated i cant get a 5 or 10 day refill. I am not sleeping well here either. Maybe a sign to get checked out anyway.

tokidoki

Hi Julyers,

Hold1235- Glad you checked in.
HFA- Same. 68 days, great!
Cbf- I was wondering how you were doing. Happy to hear from you again.
BBB- Great to have an understanding boss and good that you're performing well at work.
Letitgo- Have a bit of experience with xanax myself- I really hope you can get the refill. In the meantime, perhaps you should be rationing the remainder (or maybe you're already doing that?)
Tooshabby- Great start on the plan. Gotta say, my plan is always in flux. If nothing else, I stick to the "just for today" mindset. Oh, may I ask, how are you doing on the drinking/non-drinking front?

This is the first weekend of younger daughter's start at college. I've been needing to keep my mind occupied. Went to yoga yesterday and am hitting a class again later.

Hope you all are having a great day/night.

letitgo

Went to urgent care and they said no way. Talked to my pcp doc and he said he couldnt because he would need to see me.
After spending most of the afternoon on this i finally got the psch to grant a refill which i need to have transferred.
I abandoned my coping mechanisms and had a panic attack over this sillyness. I should have meditated and let it go lol. But i have nothing else to worry about so i had to create something to worry about.
I ended up at the bar at Outback. Not to drink. I just dont like sitting at a table alone. The bar is always more comforting then alone at a table. Yes i know about the barber shop metaphor. I wish i could take the steak to go but i dont have any real silverware. I have tried eating steak at the hotel with plastic. Very primintive and caveman because it came down to my hands and teeth.
I was really thinking about the Allen Carr book and his thoughts. A posionous trap alcohol is. Many flies at outback that had no clue or care about the nectars power over them.

Anyway thanks for your support and i know how to avoid future situations. I neglected to exercise yesterday so its go time.

Dee74

I'm glad you got it resolved let.


D

Tooshabby

Good God, that is ridiculous you were put through all that stress and rigmarole. You didn't create the worry, and I think you handled it really well. Exercise out all those frustrations - good idea!

Thanks Toki - I had a slip up (nice little euphemism) last week. Each successive time that happens I feel progressively worse. I'm seeing much more clearly what this is doing to my sense of self-worth, what I can offer people, my life etc....which I think is a good thing. It's like I'm coming out of denial, and I think SR is helping with that a lot.

I think this idea about the questions could be quite useful. I mean, if I force myself to say out loud "Do you want to hurt your son by drinking? NO", I find it hard to imagine I would go ahead and do it anyway. I have to somehow get myself off the crazy train (as Dee puts it) once it's started rolling. If I ask that question (and others) when it first begins to move, it may give me the impetus to jump out of the carriage (and do one of those cool roll maneuvers).

Have a great sober day/night all :-)

BobBFree33

letitgo, glad you got that worked out. The medical system is such a pain to deal with. I recall on several occasions running out of insulin for my son on a holiday or weekend. I almost got violent with the pharmacy tech when she calmly stated that all we had to do was wait until Mon and they can fill it....Being type 1 he'd be dead by then. Another pharmacist gave us insulin but they never made that mistake again after I emailed one of the vp's the news release I was going to write if my boy got sick. The "medical system" is an unthinking beast.

Congrats HFA and thanks. Although I don't mind re-hashing from the beginning I'm not even done with the present.

Toki I'm remembering my daughter's trek to move to Colorado. Stressful for me. Lots of pics of cornfields on the way from her :-) Now she and my granddaughters are coming back in Oct! YAY!

A quiet eve for me with no AV or cravings. I did shine a light on my thoughts the other day when I slipped. Just teasing out how I was thinking. It was a brief series of fatalistic self-destructive thoughts, oddly, after being happy earlier in the day. I talked about this a month or so before but the anhedonia, or lack of feeling is still around. Not as much, but heck, I don't feel much of anything. And when I did feel joy that was a big move on the richter scale. As my brain heals I"m going to need to deal with this. I still believe my neurotransmitters are not balanced out from the years of drinking. It takes a long time for that.

Anyway, I've prattled on enough. Have a great sober eve ya'll.

Holds1325

Hi all,

AV screaming around mostly because Im bored and its a night before a holiday and Id easily get buzzed on a night like this,

Sorta glad Im just about broke otherwise maybe i would have. I dont know im pretty sure i would have anyway i always found money for it, selling stuff, counting loose change, borrowing etc.

The anxiety is still there but its disipating somewhat. Now its just mostly boredom from night to night.

Oh well at least im going to bed sober tonight!

Hope everyones having a good night

Tooshabby

Yep, Holds, boredom can be a big trigger, eh? I'm starting to notice though that for me, my AV will try and convince me I'm 'bored' as a ploy to get me glugging again. Once I get past the craving, I find I am easily interested in things again. Funny.

God Bob, I impressed you stopped yourself from taking a swing in that instance. Geez. I have a good friend who has the worst case of arthritis in Australasia. After countless operations already (fused vertebrae, new knees etc...) she is now due to have her *entire* spine replaced. Lecturers hold up her x-rays in lecture theatres to teach students just how bad things can get. She has been in constant agony since I have known her (decades), and to look at her, it is quite obvious there is something seriously, seriously wrong. On many occasions she has had pharmacy assistants and other medical professionals sneer at her and accuse her of being some kind of a druggie because she is there to pick up pain medication. She is the kindest person I have ever met, (her and Mr TS), despite her predicament. She doesn't tell me about these incidents any more because I think she is frightened I might kill someone. You can understand.

Rant over :-)

letitgo

Its so ironic because i dealt woth someone thats was extremely frustrated this week because life isnt fair. At the time i thought everyone knows this.
I had my 2 year old melt down yesterday over this ordeal felt the same way. I guess i am hooked on the meds. I have tried getting off them and i had a bad panic attack. They looked at me like a dr. Shopper at the urgent care. I strongly believe the meds are helping me be less anxious now but i hate feeling like a criminal or druggie for a refill. The withdrawals causes anxiousness and brain zaps. I tried to get off early this year. I was sincerely afraid if I got extremely anxious i would drink to cope. s
Sill early and again i relapsed at 90 days last year.
On the bright side the one pharmacist I talk to was ver helpful, caring, empatetic and told me how to proceed. My pcp called me back and was awesome. He is a new guy just out of school. He also seemed empathetic and concern my issues. He told to go to another urgent care. I was considering lieing if i went back to an urgent care. Because the first one wouldnt help me when i just need to see a doc for refills.

I want to strangle the psychiatrist more then anyone. I mean he drug tested me to make sure i was using my scripts. Never had that happen by a dr before. He never called me back. I told him over text i sm not sleeping well and dont want to be withdrawing for him to finally cave in. It feels that like a lot of uneccessary stress. Any way i will go see him and tell him i am displeased and will likely leave the practice.
I called the psyc weds and Saturday to have more then enough time for a refill. I never actually got a call back which is extremely concerning. Ok rant finally over and time to let it go. Thanks for listening

letitgo

Bob, my daughter had surgery a few years ago and brought me to my knees. Nothing worse then your child having pain or being sick and being completely helples. We travel
8 hours to see an orthopedic. I only want the best for her. Thats another life is unfair moment. Crap on me but not on my kids ya know.
She will have another surgery late this year or early next so i am preparing my game face for that hell.

Tooshabby

Gosh, that sounds hard letitgo. Worry is the hardest thing about being a parent. It is for me, anyway.

Do you mean you tried coming off Lexapro too? Cos it's pretty cool being on that stuff (SSRIs) over the long term, and can be quite helpful. Xanax is a bit different. It's easy to get into a situation where all it is achieving is staving off withdrawals and not much else. Not giving advice; these are just well known facts, and you probably know them already! Have you tried other things besides xanax for anxiety?

I'm pretty much right these days re anxiety but I know what it's like - not pleasant. Great you got this recent situation sorted, and good for you planning to let your psych know you are displeased. It will be interesting to see how he responds. Like you say, it might be better to go elsewhere...time will tell.

letitgo

Yes i attempted to get off lexapro but i ended up drinking hoping it would fix the brain zaps. The sad part is i am truly more intelligent then this.
I am sure you all understand. I felt better and the i thought i didnt need the meds. Wound up with a major panic attack or depressive episode. So i went back on the meds. The culprit really was the drinking.

Anyway i stole dees article from new comers sinces it worth a read and sharing it.

take charge of your life ---- story of the frog in boiling water

remind yourself that you are too smart to be complacent about a steadily deteriorating situation.



you’ve no doubt heard the story of the frog in boiling water. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it immediately jumps out (or so the story goes). However, if you put a frog in a pot of room-temperature water, and then bring the water to a boil very, very slowly, the frog will stay in the water until it dies. It’s an odd experiment that i have no intention of testing in my kitchen, but it’s an apt metaphor for how people sometimes deal with slowly deteriorating situations.

When we are confronted with an abrupt negative change, we tend to react immediately and decisively. Coming in contact with a flame will cause us to pull away instantly to avoid getting burned. We don’t think about it; we just react. Yet we will sit in the sun for hours and get badly burned. We know full well that we’re getting burned, but we tend to sit there anyway, because there is no instantaneous sensation to trigger a decision to get out of harm’s way.

It’s this absence of decision triggers that causes people to miss opportunities or to get into trouble that could have been avoided. Fortunately, being smarter than frogs, we have the ability to create decision triggers for our own good. If we’re sunbathing, for example, we might place an alarm clock deliberately out of reach and set it to go off every half hour. When it goes off, we have to get up, go over to it, and turn it off. This triggers a decision: “should i expose myself to another half hour of sun, or have i had enough?” without the clock, deliberately placed at an inconvenient distance and annoying us every 30 minutes, we are likely to keep telling ourselves, “just a few minutes more,” and then a few minutes more after that, and so on, until it’s too late. The “time to get out of the sun” decision trigger arrives the following morning when we turn over in bed and wince in pain. By then, it’s too late to avoid the trouble.

The frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, as i like to call it, can arise in other, more serious, situations throughout our lives where we willfully ignore an increasingly dangerous situation, telling ourselves that we’ll do something about it “soon.”

take putting on weight as an example. Nobody decides to get fat, yet many people will just keep putting on more and more weight without doing anything about it. They keep telling themselves, “i’m going to lose some weight soon.” similarly, people don’t make a conscious decision to keep smoking until they get lung cancer. They tell themselves, “i can stop anytime, and i will, but another day, or week, or month won’t matter.” so they remain like the frog in the pot, slowly burning up their lungs.

The frog-in-boiling-water syndrome doesn’t apply just to self-destructive behaviors. It can trap people facing important career decisions. This is the case for people who stubbornly remain in a job or occupation that isn’t satisfying or isn’t offering sufficient opportunities. Like the simmering frog, they stay where they are, telling themselves that things might improve while knowing they won’t, instead of changing employers or acquiring new professional skills. They may complain about the situation to others, but they never do anything about it until they find themselves trapped in a miserable, dead-end job, or worse, they lose their job without any updated skills to go forward in a more successful direction.

People stuck in deteriorating or stagnating relationships also fall prey to the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome. They are unhappy, but they just go on being unhappy without deciding to do anything to improve the relationship or to get out of it. Just like the frog, they stay where they are as the water slowly reaches the boiling point.

This syndrome can also trap people who are not in a relationship but would like to be. They do not take any action to help themselves meet someone, and the years pass. Slowly they lose their “window of opportunity” to meet a person who might become a lifetime partner.

Some people even believe that the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome applies to the way a society can ignore critical decisions. For example, we may be gradually depleting our limited resources without making any conscious decisions about replenishing them or slowing the depletion. Instead, we’re letting the situation boil away until it becomes too late to preserve a sustainable environment. We may be creating global warming, yet we ignore or reject any solutions until our polar ice caps melt away and we find our coastlines submerged. Likewise, as the economic gap between the lower and upper classes increases, we do nothing to avert the inevitable ramifications from such a gap. We sit in the water of our own apathy and denial without taking action.

Don’t be like our friend the simmering frog. You are smarter than the frog.

Step back from time to time and take stock of situations in your life such as your health, your relationships, your career or job, your business and your investments. Do this regularly. You might take stock on new year’s day, your birthday, or every three months. Set that alarm clock, and put it someplace where you’ll have to get up and go over to turn it off. Remind yourself that you are too smart to be complacent about a steadily deteriorating situation.

Moreover, if you think a friend is falling into the boiling-frog syndrome, share this story. It might save a life.

Taken from

decide better! For a better life
improve your life through better decisions
by

michael e. Mcgrath [chapter 1]

tokidoki

So much stuff that resonates with me. Will try to write just a little now and probably again later...

Letitgo, I'm very glad you got that (finally) settled. Sorry, but your shrink sounds like a d*****bag. Honestly, getting you tested? I am lucky to have a shrink that trusts me. I once lost, yes lost, an almost full bottle of xanax when traveling. I called the nurse and she said that they would refill it, but "We can only do this once". I just hope I accidentally threw it away so that someone else didn't get their hands on it. One great effect of sobriety is that I am tapering a bit and I can see getting off it eventually.

Bob- Wow, you did the right thing emailing that potential press release. Sometimes you just need to scare the people at the top to get them to do what's obviously right.

TS- Yikes, I'm in pain just thinking about your friend...