The past few years have represented some significant changes in my life, particularly with respect to my health and wellbeing. Between car accidents, alcohol abuse and a tonic clonic seizure due to alcohol withdrawal… I’ve had more run-ins with our fantastic health care system than I would like. 

I had been abusing alcohol for a while; exactly when it went from semi-casual consumption to out-of-control alcoholism, I can’t really say. However it had obviously been long enough that, when I decided to take a break from booze, I had a withdrawal seizure less than 36 hours later. Regardless of how long the road was, the destination was the same and the facts are irrefutable. 

With the seizure, I experienced a posterior dislocation of my left shoulder and I am quite certain that I also anteriorly dislocated my right shoulder which subsequently popped back in. My shoulder being in a funky sling for a few months was the primary thing that I had to deal with but the long term effects of that dislocation continue to nag me. I am plagued with pain and have to be careful about what I lift and how I lift them. But the most significant and disturbing change that I have noticed since going sober is with respect to my brain. The first things that I can recognize as having changed are my memory, my ability to process information and being able to focus.

I often have trouble remembering the specifics of events or, sometimes, entire events themselves. There are times where I can recall the memory if someone reminds me of a few key parts of it however there are an equal number of times where recollection is just not possible. It’s gone. In addition to memory, being able to process information has been impacted. Being able to take a situation and break it down in my head, figure out the important facts and then extrapolate or apply that to other situations is much more difficult now. Then throw in the struggle associated with staying on task? It’s kind of difficult to know exactly what I’m going to be like from one day to the next. 

I also find that my judgment is questionable at times. I think that’s related to my aforementioned issue of difficulty in processing information… the faster I have to make a decision, the more likely it will be that the answer should be highly suspect. 

From what I’ve been able to read, both alcoholism and seizures will cause some level of damage to the brain. So, it’s really difficult to say how much I had done to myself before the seizure and how much damage was directly related to the seizure. I feel like I don’t really have a solid connection to the person I was before the seizure and the alcoholic blur my life was before it so I can’t really tell when the degradation of who I am started.

Immediately after my seizure, I attended a week-long session about substance abuse recovery and took away a lot of lessons… of particular note were the recommendations to start taking a vitamin B complex. Alcohol decimates vitamin B levels in your body and brain and, considering how important vitamin B is to the body, I felt that I needed to try to limit the damage and maybe try to feed my brain again. Maybe a case of ‘too little, too late’ but I’m not giving up hope.
My emotional state? It’s related but… I think that’s maybe best saved for another post at another date.