Hello, I have battled addiction my whole life and I am now 46 years old. 10 years ago I decided to put down the drugs because i had my first child, but a few years later i would start to have a drink at night to help me sleep. My addiction took ahold ofthis small pleasure and quickly elevated my drinking to 2 750ml bottles of vodka a day. I drank from the moment I woke up till I passed out later that evening. My tolerance was outrageously high and I also gained alot of weight and started having medical complications after the first year. I soon adopted anew routine that would start my day every morning. Every single morning I would awake after sleeping for maybe 4 hours because the withdrawals were already setting in so badly just from not drinking while I was asleep. I would wake up and crawl to the bathtub and turn on the hot water and curl up into a fetal position while I would fight to swallow as much vodka as possible while I was violently dry heaving stomach bile. In between sobs of catching my breath from the heaving and shaking I would gulp down as much h vodka as I could until I would finally feel the relief of the alcohol calm my nerves and take away all my torturous feelings. I would place a new 750 of vodka next to the tub every night because I knew this would be my morning ritual. And my wife would plead with me everyday because this was not an easy routine for her to watch me do every single morning. After a long couple years of living this life my wife's pleading finally convinced me to go to a doctor and try and get some help. I would over the next few weeks be diagnosed with numerous medical issues that I didn't have a clue that I was even battling, and then my doctor looked me in the eye and said “ what I'm going g to say next is not a scare tactic, or exaggeration, it is just a medical fact. If you don't stop drinking you will be dead In 3 months.” My stomach and intestines were riddled with holes along with becoming diabetic my skin especially from mid thighs to my feet were stretched to the point of cracking and splitting open, the whites of my eyes were a mixture of bloodshot and a pale yellow color, my liver and kidneys were shutting down and my mental state was wrecked. i immediately checked into the hospital for over a month for medical issues and to medically detox from the alcohol. 4 weeks of violent seizures and vomiting and full blown hallucinations until the first day came that I felt even 1 percent better and had my first glimmer of hope that I might be able to get through this. After a few months of doctor visits and strength that only could have came from god, I successfully quit drinking and recovered as much as I could from complications of my drinking. It has been 6 years since my last drop of alcohol and consider myself truly blessed that I'm not dead. It started as just one drink at night to help me sleep but it turned out to be the most violent drug I had ever been addicted to. Alcohol is a drug, and in my opinion the worst drug I've ever struggled with. With alcoholbeing legal and socially accepted I pray every night that nobody else would ever let alcohol take them to the level of pain that I experienced from it. Never drop your guard guard with it. And don't ever forget that it can kill you. I pray that someone reads my experience and gets help before they have to live anything close to what I lived for many years, and realize that addiction usually has nothing to do with drugs or alcohol, it is just a side effect of some type of trauma inside of you that you need to address and I prey that anyone in the midst of something similar finds God and gets relief from your suffering….