One Day Reprise and story

One Day

One day the man

Woke up and realized

All the flat

Places

Filled with all

The flat

Faces

Were just

Paper filled trays

With words

And numbers from

Pain filled days

Chris McQueeney    4/14/13    12:00 A.M.

I stumbled into the emergency room and I asked for help…From what I heard later I had a blood alcohol level of point seven four. You might ask how someone could get a blood alcohol content so high, well, you drink a lot that is how. I don’t remember much from that stay in the hospital. They put me in the psychiatric ward because I was mentally unbalanced. This was before I was diagnosed with toxic encephalopathy…I think they diagnosed me that time with psychotic disorder and depressive disorder. I spent nine days wandering around that psych ward not really knowing what was going on. What started that particular incident was losing my children. I got home from jail and my house was quiet and it shouldn't have been. I broke, my reason for living was gone, and I broke. I started drinking because I wanted to kill myself and I spent about a week in that state. See I don’t want to kill myself, there is just something broken in my head that makes me want to end my life. When I started drinking that day I stopped wanting to kill myself. I was sober when I got home…I was sober when I went to jail…I was sober when I decided to drink rather than kill myself. The problem with the situation was that I am an alcoholic on top of everything. That complicates things because of the nature of the disease. Alcohol is a wonderful medication for things like a broken heart, grief, and a broken mind, if you are not an alcoholic. Alcohol was bringing me to my knees while it was saving my life. I was able to get it across to the doctors that I was talking to that there was something wrong underneath the alcohol consumption. I got it across to them that I was broken and the drinking was a temporary bandage for the wound, at one point while I was detoxing I was sitting in a little room with a doctor as little monsters ran around his feet, I was hearing things and seeing things that were not there. At first I thought that was because of the alcohol. I know now that it is because of the encephalopathy. It took another few trips to the psych ward for that diagnosis to come about. Like I said I had started drinking a solid week before this episode and I had bought a fifth of gin that night and drank it on the bus ride out to the hospital. I ended up passing out in the bus stop across the street from the hospital emergency room for a few hours. When I came to I finished the fifth and stumbled across the street. When the staff saw what condition I was in they put me in a bed in the hallway…I sat there for hours while they tried to figure out what to do with me. At one point I asked for a sandwich and they looked at me so funny. I am at a crossroad in my life where the medication they are giving me is barely working, I am having a real hard time with it too. The one thing that I have going for me is that I don’t have to drink to keep from killing myself any more, aside from that at times I still feel like that man who was wandering that hospital psych ward……..


Chris McQueeney    12/15/14    2:09 P.M.