Columns

To the two-thirds of you reading this in a lecture: take a pen and scribble out the “Dr.” in the “Dr. Nick” – this week I want to speak as a pleb. The other third: just cover the “Dr.” with your thumb or something; don’t go hunting for any makeshift ink in the library toilets.

The reason I want to speak as a title-less Joe Blogs is because this week’s topic is one of the big ’uns and generally sounds wankier than Saturday night at St Margs when coming from medical folk: alcohol.

Cards on the table: New Zealand has a horrendous attitude towards alcohol and addiction. We fucking celebrate it. Getting maggot, blacking out, injuring ourselves – it’s all just a story to be told in the morning. “I got kicked out by the bouncer,” “I’ve been hungover all day,” “I woke up in bathtub of ice with one less kidney” – alcohol is our friend even when it’s (literally) poisoning us.

I could spend this week’s column going on about the symptoms of dependence, the AUDIT score, or stats about suicide, violence and abuse, but who is gonna read that while pinching a loaf? Instead, I want to embrace my proletarian status and talk about the most humiliating situation I’ve been in, hoping that you don’t just brush it off as an isolated event that doesn’t concern you.

Awkward situations and I are pretty well acquainted. In the bingo card of embarrassment I would have easily checked off the row that begins with “be walked in on while masturbating” and ends with “get naked in front of 150 colleagues and employers.” Really though, there’s only one event I look back on and still feel that cringe of shame: the night I was admitted to hospital for being pissed.

This wasn’t an admission for breaking my arm while attempting drunken acrobatics or anything – this was purely an alcohol overdose. To cut a very long story very short, I finished work in the Emergency Department around 4:00 p.m., went out, got hammered … and ended up back in the Emergency Department by around 9:00 p.m. It was bad.

Here’s the thing though: nobody treated it as bad. Nobody treated it as the massive red flag that it was. In fact, most people laughed it off, particularly as I was being looked after by the people I had just finished working with. It was just another story to be shared because we all think getting pissed is normal, overdoing it is normal and, while getting admitted to ED is certainly abnormal, it’s not so far removed that we pay it the attention it desperately needs.

That admission was a symptom of a whole mess of other things going on in my life, and was also the perfect point for somebody to pipe up and point out just how off the rails things had gotten. But it took ten months of further out-of-control drinking before anybody seriously addressed the issue with me. Everybody could see that something was seriously wrong, but nobody touched the issue because it was just alcohol – and we love alcohol in New Zealand.

Undoubtedly many of you will think that this story doesn’t relate to you – that you’re not that bad. Many of you will be right. I was out of control for a very long time and it showed in the extremes my behaviour reached. The thing is that even when I was running around at some of my worst times, I truly believed I didn’t have an alcohol problem – I just got out of hand when drinking. Let me tell you – every single one of you – that loss of control is a problem, regardless of diagnostic criteria for problem drinking or the amount you’ve had to drink.

Now I’ll still get pissed, I’ll still save a drowning queen at the bottom of my vessel, and I’ll still drink on the call of “never have I ever had a dick piercing,” but I’ll do it within my limits. Every Scarfie on the piss needs limits, so give yours a think before you wash your hands and walk away.