Good going, generic.

It's interesting, I was just reading grace's Cured post and she talked about how she misses the "warm glow". I've been chuzzling beer down so fast for so long, I'm not sure I even remember what the "warm glow" feels like anymore; I pretty much just go from sober to drunk. On nal, I've started to drink slower and am also finding I enjoy it more.

Keep the good trends going!

Interesting to hear you echo the same Skylar.... I definitely lost that warm glow period. In fact, that period was always pretty short for me. Even the first time I ever drank, the warm glow was very quickly replaced by a desperate need for more booze. Now, on the other hand, I get a nice relaxed feeling followed by sleepiness. Pretty nice!

Anyway, on a different subject I wanted to share some new data. I sequenced my mu-opioid receptor, and here are the results:



The highlighted "A" right in the middle there is the famous A118 that in some people is a G on one or both of their chromosomes. I have the genotype "AA" which according to some studies, predicts a poor response to naltrexone. I feel that I have experienced an AMAZING response to naltrexone. Unfortunately, this isn't particularly scientific as I am both the subject and the examiner in this case, but as an anecdote I can tell you that so far Nal has been a miracle to me despite my genotype. Maybe I'll post this in general too....

Here are more data that are exciting to me. My average consumption WHEN DRINKING. That is to say that AF days were ignored. A T-test demonstrates that my average consumption pre and post nal are significantly different (** P<.01). YEEE-HAAAWWWW! This sh*t really works for me!!!!!



Beyond the simple metric of average consumption, which is important to my liver obviously, you can see that there is really just that ONE night that I went above 10 units. This is probably what has made the most noticeable difference in my life. Each one of those pre-nal outliers did serious damage to my relationship, to my mental well-being, and to my baseline anxiety for at least 3-4 days.

Last week my wife had a nightmare that the pills stopped working altogether. She sees such a difference, that she is actually afraid of something happening to change things back to the old days. I've warned her that I may still be in a bit of a honeymoon phase, but that even if I bump back up a little for a while, it should come back down eventually. Still, she was a big skeptic in the beginning, but is a huge believer now.

Well, another weekend come and gone and only more of the wonderful same to report. Drank a little too much both Friday and Saturday. By a little too much, I really mean a LITTLE too much, as opposed to my former euphemistic use of "a little too much," which meant three quarters of a bottle of whiskey. Saturday around midnight a friend bought me a scotch. Liquid gold, smokey, peaty, delicious kryptonite. An hour later he says: Are you still drinking THE SAME DRINK? Yep. I was. And a half hour after that when it was time to go I still hadn't finished so he chugged it for me. Went home drunk but not sloppy. Didn't even cross my mind to have a post-bar pre-bed drink. My usual routine is to open a bottle of wine at the very end of the night and pour myself a heaping glass. Then when my wife goes to the bathroom I chug from the bottle so that I can go back to the glass when she comes out, and voila! Extra half bottle of wine as a night cap.

Nope. Not anymore. I woke up Sunday with a hangover, but it was this diminutive, adorable little hangover that normal people must get. A headache that was cured by a couple of ibuprofen and a vitamin water. Went for a nice bike ride through the Mission after that, made some delicious dinner, and then a little wine because I wanted it, not because I needed it. Bully for me. My old hangovers were more about waking up drunk and having to either sober up and deal with the withdrawal associated anxiety and the feeling of having mini-strokes all day, or to keep drinking in secret and try to pass for sober until 3-4pm or so.

So anyway, I am nowhere near what any reasonable person would consider "cured," but honestly I never had a problem with being a heavy drinker. I had a problem with getting fall-down-a-flight-of-stairs-and-get-10-stitches-in-my-eyebrow-drunk. My wife feels the same. She wanted me to quit before nal came along. On Saturday she bought me a 1.75 liter bottle of Johnny Black because she knows it now has a fighting chance of lasting more than a work week. This is how I feel today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVWeqAPQUXc&ob=av2e

Well...you are a VERY quick study. Is your type of science one that you could use to continue to research TSM, and bring it to the light of day and make all those Big Buck$$ that seems to alluded Sinclair and Eskapa??? You know, it's just a matter of time before someone cashes in - why not YOU? Let me know where to send some money; I want to invest at the ground level

No, you're doing incredibly well and it's fun to read your weekly reports and watch those graphs...doesn't look like much of a rollercoaster to me, but just good, solid progress.

Thanks Chrissie. I realize my progress seems very fast, so am keeping in mind that I may be in line for a regression, and am keeping my hopes tempered. With each weekend that passes though... Wow, it gets harder and harder not to just see the really bad drinking years as a terrible, wonderful, absolutely fascinating part of my past.

I wonder if my progress seems better because I have been mapping daily consumption rather than weekly. I don't know whether to categorize myself as a binge drinker or a daily drinker since for years I did both. My daily drinking totals for each week are still kinda high probably, but that doesn't really bother me.

Unfortunately I am not likely to make any money off of this... I'm not really that kind of scientist, and the scientists are usually not the ones to make any money anyway. Your money would be better invested in superhero figurines or something like that. Thanks for the vote of confidence though

Two weeks since my last update... One totally uneventful weekend and one more eventful. First weekend went by as usual. Up early both Sat and Sun. Went to yoga both days! Really feeling healthy all week because of that.

This weekend wasn't quite as smooth... Saturday was a night out with co-workers and scientists drink harder than you might imagine. I started early - 3:30 pm at a BBQ - and finished around 1 am. I even had a cigarette which was a terrible idea. I felt fairly miserable for most of yesterday. Focusing on the positives however:

1. Didn't black out (some points were light gray, but no black).
2. Didn't pick any fights.
3. Total for the whole day was still well below a pre-nal binge and I never switched to straight hard stuff.
4. No post-bar, pre-bed drink.
5. Had 1 cigarette, not 1/2 pack.
6. Didn't have to sneak a half bottle of wine Sunday morning to level myself out.

I guess what worries me is that it seems like a slight move toward the old days. I will say that it seems like I WANTED to keep drinking and so I did, rather than my old standard of turning into "Dr. Zombie, liquor annihilater." Because of that I can kind of take more responsibility for being a dumbass and realize that I had a ton of fun, in exchange for a hangover on Sunday. My biggest concern is how far this regression will go, but from reading here it seems that over time for most people things plateau or continue to drop. If this is the new "low" that I can sink to, that's cool with me. I just want to make sure that I am not replacing old endorphin driven drinking patterns with new non-endorphin driven patterns to get to those non-endorphin rewards.

In which I am regressing, unfortunately...

No big surprise as I have heard all the warnings about the honeymoon phase, but over the last couple of weeks it's been harder to keep consumption at less than a bottle of wine. The draw isn't nearly as strong as it was pre-nal, but the pull is definitely back somewhat.

I still feel pretty great compared to before. I still made it to yoga on Sat morning, which was nearly impossible before. If I plateau here for a while I guess that's okay though not ideal. I still haven't had the same kind of really ugly night that used to be a weekly or bi-weekly occurrence. I still haven't day-drank to rid myself of a hangover as was the case almost every Sat and Sun.

I am developing a weird new relationship with alcohol. It's like the endorphin rush was a steam whistle that wouldn't let me hear all of the other, smaller reasons for drinking. Now I hear those much more and they range from the totally acceptable (to me) reason "it's fun," to the more problematic issues of self esteem / boredom / sadness / stress / etc. I never noticed that I was self medicating because that wasn't the biggest reason for an epic binge.

I don't have any alcohol in the house right now, not because I went on a bender but just because I ran out. I kinda wonder how long before I make the effort to go get some more. In the old days waiting wouldn't have even been a consideration, but now I am thinking that it isn't worth a special trip to the store. We have groceries to last us for at least another week... When I think about it I get pretty nervous about the idea of not having any booze to rely on, but I did 3 AF days in a row last week and it was no sweat.

Has anyone else noticed that after some AF days the first day drinking is usually heavier? This was the case pre-nal and still is. If I go just one or two AF, that's the worst. After that the rebound effect seems to lessen.

Anyway, hope everyone here is well and progressing down their paths. Cheers!

In which the rye whiskey did me in...

Hello fellow Nalchemists,

I haven't been around much lately, and for that I apologize. My journey with nal started off with a bang, but did some regressing, unfortunately. I went on vacation in July and found myself having close to a dozen beers a day. I stuck with the nal because I believe in the drug. I can feel the difference... There is less urge... But I just still love drinking. Since summer it has been up and down. I had a party in December in which I became incomprehensible at one point... thought strangely managed to grab some sodas, and sober up. Since then I have had some notable successes - Went on a wine tasting weekend where the agenda called for drinking from 11am-4pm both Saturday AND Sunday. I didn't get sloppy at any point! UNHEARD of for me pre-nal.

I also have been able to maintain something that I never could before - a stocked bar. Almost full bottles of vodka, tequila, and whiskey sit on my shelves without screaming my name. This arrogance made me pay last night though - half a bottle of wine and then a couple of tall delicious rye whiskeys are making today a tough one. I've gotten to the point where beer and wine don't seem to get me in a lot of trouble anymore, but that damned devil whiskey won't let me out just yet.

So here I am. 10 months in. I quit counting because I spend a lot of time beating myself up about "heavier" days or weeks, and that self-loathing is one of my reasons to drink. Going off of feel, I can tell you that I am at about half the consumption that I was at when I started. Beyond the numbers though, I feel far more in control. I embarrass myself LESS, but not never, sadly. Without the embarrassment, I don't spend my sober hours regretting and so overall I spend WAAAAAYYYYY less time either drunk or thinking about booze...

Sometimes I feel like I am SO close to where I want to be, but then I get so drunk at a party that I cry about my dead grandmother. She died in '95. Le sigh.

Even if this is all the nal has to offer me, it has set me free. I think on my 1 year anniversary I'll try to take stock and see if there isn't a set of more conscious efforts that I can make to keep me from ever having a truly ugly night again. Keep on keeping on everybody!

Hi generic,
Sorry to hear you've hit a rough patch but it appears that this happens to everyone (or almost everyone).I am right there with you about wine and beer - basically if I stick to those I am unable to really get sloppy and black out drunk, basically drinking through the nal. Bourbon is by far my favorite drink, though, and that gets me into a lot of trouble. I think I may have to just accept that I can't drink it anymore, which is scary but if it saves my mental health and relationship...I guess so be it.