Residential Rehabs

…but more often than not, I’m afraid, it is.

In rehab, they told us, only two out of ten of us would still be clean & sober at the end of one year. Several of us were likely to be dead. Some wouldn’t last twenty-four hours outside of the walls before we’d be drunk or high. Some of us would be back again, and a lucky one or two would find the strength to surrender.

I heard my brothers and sisters describe their bottoms. Sure, there were a couple that everyone figured would be in jail or worse. They were the loudmouths, pissed because they’d been pressured into something they “didn’t need.” Everything was fine with them if others would just leave them alone.

I don’t know how quickly we were supposed to fall, but I do believe that we were the exceptional class that exceeded even the hardened, pessimistic expections of the rehab staff. We exchanged addresses & phone numbers, and Mike, the guy brought in after the car accident with stitches in his head and a whole pile of broken ribs who’d just dropped his two-year-old daughter off a few minutes before he slid into a tree, crushing the passenger side where she’d been strapped in her car seat, took it upon himself to keep everyone connected. He kept it up. For almost a month.

Bill corresponded with me. We e-mailed back and forth. IM’d a few times. By two weeks, he admitted a “slip.” By a month, he stopped returning my e-mails.

Ryan, who’s parents owned the bar, a place he swore was his last chance for employment, made it almost three weeks.

Kim never responded. She went back to the middle-class home and the PTA meetings, believing that if she could just accept her role in life, be happy with it, she’d be okay. Meetings weren’t necessary, and besides, her husband would never understand why she’d want to keep in touch with a bunch of junkies. Someone saw her name in the paper for a D.U.I. That was about a week after her release.

I don’t know what happened to the rest. Mike said he just lost touch with them. At the end of the year, only he and I remained. Only he and I were going to meetings, staying clean and sober one day at a time. That doesn’t make us superstars or anything else. Just a couple of folks who had had enough.

Jessica was supposed to call me to take her to a meeting tonight. She went with me last Tuesday, and Friday night when I called her, she told me she had a medical emergency. Something about a reaction to antibiotics she was taking for an ingrown toenail. She “hated to miss a meeting,” but she was too sick to go. She thought she might go to the E.R. and see if they’d give her something for pain. I was having a hard time connecting the different directions her part of the conversation was taking. She promised to call the next day. Didn’t show up for the meeting that night. Yes, I’ve tried to call her.

Jessica had asked me to be her sponsor a week ago. She’s been out of rehab for almost a month.

I guess she’s right on schedule.