The Difference Between Relief and Solution in Recovery – Jim S.

And we're not going to break the chain on how somebody found a relationship with God. Hello, everyone. I'm Jim Shackelford, and I'm an alcoholic. It's wonderful to be invited here today, and I do so much appreciate the committee asking me and Kathy to be part of your weekend. Already, I'm very grateful for the fact that you folks are giving me a clock. I think there might be a message. Is there a history of speakers speaking over their allotted time? You weren't given the clock. He just picked it up. Okay. Well, we've heard a couple of great talks already this weekend, haven't we? Some fabulous talks. I'm from Indianapolis, Indiana. And we are so fortunate to have Dudley and Marge and Jill in our community. Some wonderful things are happening in Indianapolis. And I'm sure there's wonderful things happening in your community too. I'm always amazed. Maybe amazed is not the right word. I'm almost overwhelmed when I see the force of God moving through people's lives. and as I continue to observe and watch that phenomena the enrichment of my second step continues to expand it's a powerful force Dudley early asked me if I was a little bit nervous today and actually I'm not because I have the foggiest idea what I'm going to say when I start to orchestrate things then I get real nervous but when I don't have a particular hard theme to talk about then it's really interesting to hear what I have to say actually my sobriety date is October 20th, 1984 that was not the first time I came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous myself. One of the things I do want to talk about is the progression of alcoholism, and initially I want to tell you about the reason why I drank. I so much, oh by the way, you had talked about that you're a crier. I'm going to cry. I am really going to cry. Also, before I go any further, I want to introduce my wife, Kathy, who is not only my wife but she's my friend and lover and counselor and teacher. She has been my companion now for 34 years and the fact that she's still sitting here is a testimony that something's happening in our lives it's beyond me because believe me i have given her more than one reason to terminate our marriage and what's really interesting is you know how where i first met Dudley first time I met Dudley he was representing my wife in her lawsuit to divorce me tell me if there's not a God in that somewhere amazing isn't it I love the doctor's opinion men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol the sensation is so elusive that while they admit it as injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false sometimes today I still have problems with differentiating the true form the false probably more so than I care to admit but boy that line about the reason I drank for the effect and that's exactly what I did the first time I took a drink I was 14 years old and I was with some guys that were 16 and 17 at that age and I wanted to be part of them and they reached around and they took the coke out of my hand and they opened the corridor and they poured it out and they pushed down the seat pulled out some cherry vodka poured it in there and gave it back to me and the effect that I liked was that I felt a part of I felt connected to them and I liked it my drinking proceeded through high school what a surprise and the affect that I was looking for then was fun and camaraderie. And that was the effect I was looking for. And we would, my buddies and I, we would get a six or a 12-pack and get in the car on a Friday night or Saturday night and we would go to the local drive-in restaurants and drive laps around and try to pick up girls. And of course, all we did was try. We were never really particularly successful. But the effect I was thinking for was fun and good times. And I had a lot of fun and a lot of good times. And then in 1967 at the ripe age of 17 I graduated from high school. I had been accepted to go to Purdue University but it did not have the economic means and trust me, I was not an excellent high school student. So there was no scholarship. and my draft number was six. There's a man that understands what that means. And so I'm always looking for options. You know, good managers always do. And I ended up believing in an Air Force recruiter at the age of 17. A couple weeks after high school, I went into the Air Force. and in the Air Force my drinking took on a little bit different dimension again it was for fun and good times but I saw people who really knew how to drink and I began to learn the fine art of drinking you just don't drink large sums of alcohol without some kind of background and training for example you have to know what to eat before you go out and drink and then through trial and error you find out what not to mix in terms of different drinks or when you get back to the barracks late at night and that room is spinning so bad I don't know why but the ball of my left foot if I could just get that on the floor and put not my total body weight but just the right amount of pressure on that ball of left foot the room wouldn't spin as much I mean those are techniques that you have to acquire. And I was a fairly good student at that point, and it was fun in good times. And then I got orders. I was medic, and then I get orders to Vietnam to fly Aerovac. It was at that time that my drinking began to change. The effect I was looking for was a lot different, but I was still drinking for the effect there was a lot of craziness and insanity of what was going on day to day and at the end of the mission at the day back at the base I'd get a fifth of whiskey and get drunk because I wanted to forget I wanted to take the edge off I couldn't deal with what I was feeling or what I Was seeing or what I was smelling, and I got drunk. And it worked. It did for me what I could not do for myself. It worked so well that I did it every chance I could. And that was the effect I was looking for. There's one particular event that happened there that I talk about which has bearing towards It kind of demonstrates the change that takes place in a person's life. I was on this one particular mission, and there was a fellow who was a double amputee. And I was walking down the very narrow aisle working on all these different casualties, and this double ampotee grabbed a hold of my leg. And he kept screaming over the roar of the engines, man, I'm not going to make it back to the world. I'm just not goingto make it. And I kept saying, I kept placating him, yeah, you are. You've got to let go of my life. I got to go work on this other guy. I had to go suck out a tracheotomy and keep this guy's airway open, but you got to let go of my leg, and he wouldn't do it. So I kicked him off of me, and then I came back down the aisle a little while later, and he was dead. I got a fifth whiskey that night, got good and drunk, took it all away. The next day, I got up and did it again. And eventually my tour was over, and I came back. And that's when I – GI Bill is a wonderful thing. You know, you sign up for college classes. They send you a check, and then you drop half your classes. And I partied a lot. And believe it or not, I had hair at that point in time. And my primary objective was to assimilate back into American culture. And so my hair grew down to, like, yay. And I partied a lot. A lot. And Kathy and I met, and I'm giving some cliff note versions. We met,and we fell in lust, and we moved in together. and so our life began you're not the only one with a bad memory I'm going to say after a period of time we got married and now I'm going to fast forward a lot of years whatever happened in your house I'll wager probably happened at our house. A few dishes got broke, a few promises probably got met. A lot of dishonesty and certainly I was emotionally absent. Anytime I began to feel any kind of strong emotion about anything, I got drunk. I certainly distanced myself. I had two emotions I had rage and I had lust and that was it and anything in between I just couldn't recognize did not respond to it and I was extremely absent from my marriage again the effect I was looking for was I was managing my life with alcohol my consumption continued to get more and more and the times that I wasn't drinking was getting less and less and then when the pressure was on me too much then I would quit you know how that looks don't you there I proved to you two weeks I'm going to get a six pack I'm going to buy a case back to the races again the insanity in our life continued my Kathy went to Al-Anon I really I know this is a Baptist facility but there's no other way to say it that really pissed me off you did and I continued to drink for years and my drinking continued to progress down and down and there was this point where something began to happen to me and it happened as a direct result of Al-Anon Kathy not only started going to Al-Anon but she actually got involved with the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous she actually began to work the steps with others and the result of that was my dirty clothes laid pretty much right where I dropped them the checkbook no longer was being juggled and balanced I found myself a lot waking up on the floor I used to always wake up at a bed but now I find myself waking up in the floor my glass is kind of like you know floor burns sometimes and the clincher was that she was walking around the house happy she would do things like step over me and go about her business literally and I was scared God, I was scared and I went to my very first AA meeting and Ben was there. Ben was the first person I ever heard read how it works and Ben what he read was we were admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our wives were unmanageable. People in the room laughed. I did not laugh because I related. I understood what he was talking about. And so that was in 82. and I went back for another meeting and I didn't drink that day and the next day I went to a restaurant and I said I went back for another meeting and I got a big book because they say get a big look you know and I looked at that and said yep I got one of them it kind of went up here in the shelf and I did not get a sponsor and 30 days came up and I took that token, and 90 days came up. I took that token. Yada, yada, yada. I forgot to tell him when I was still smoking a lot of reefer, by the way. I didn't ask your opinion because I didn' t want it. I get really tired of hearing some things in Alcoholics Anonymous. I kept hearing the same things over and over and over. And And I'm a project manager. I used to build federally funded projects, large multi-million dollar road bridge projects. And I worked hard that day, you understand? And Joe keeps saying the same thing over and over. So I decided I don't need to go to the meeting tonight because I can just sit here and have this meeting like in my head because I know what they always say. and it didn't take long before you didn't really see me very much and guess what I found myself in Princeton, Indiana anyone here from Princeton? someone asked earlier about Ohio is anyone here form Princeton? okay, now I'll share with you I was in Princeton Indiana and I was staying at the Holiday I had a bridge project in southern Indiana and I was staying at the Holiday Inn and it was a horrible band I mean, the worst band I've ever heard in my life so I ordered a shot of whiskey so the band would be improved you understand and itwas controlled drinking right from the start and less than a week later I'm drinking over a fifth a day again and I swear to you I thought it was controlled drinking because I'm buying pints and half pints now I want to tell you about the effect that I was drinking for when I resumed drinking I picked up right where I left off right where I left off in the mornings I would drink a half pint to a pint of vodka and I would have to do that so I could shave I would have to do that so I could get up and be able to shower and get dressed and function and I couldn't always keep that down so I would drink I would follow it with Maalox great morning drink I'm committed you got to understand this I'm well I'm I'm I'm I'm committed to this drinking business and and and and then once I was able to do that then then I could begin to think I could begin to put sentences together. And then I'd go to work and sometimes I'd put in a whole four and a half, five hours maybe. And then I'd leave the job site and I'd be driving down that gravel road and I reach under that pickup truck and I pull out that pint of vodka and I go like it wasn't. Get in the motel room close the door take another quick shower come out crack that second one. And I'm drinking for the effect, and the effect is I want out. I just want out, I want the crazy thoughts to stop. And the thoughts went like this, they were like a lot of words, but they didn't make a whole lot of sense. They just rambled through my head. I shook badly. In order for me not to throw up the green bile with the little black seeds in it, I had to have a certain level of alcohol in me. The only normal way for me to live was for me to take another drink and when I didn't have that I was absolutely insane. That was the only way I knew how to live, that was the effect that I was looking for. All the way through the development of my alcoholism Through the advancement of it, I was drinking for effect. The effect changed. The effect I was looking for evolved, but it always was for the effect. I couldn't understand why Alcoholics Anonymous didn't work for me the first time. I use a lot of analogies bear with me you hear about the chocolate cake I know you people in Indianapolis have heard this about the guy who kept coming in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous he kept coming out he went to lots of meetings 90 meetings in 90 days he read his big book and then he'd get drunk and he'd come back and go to meetings and he just kept going around and called up his sponsor he says I don't understand this A few people tell me to go to 90 meetings in 90 days and make coffee and read the big book, and I keep getting drunk. I don't get it. Why is that? And a sponsor says, you've got a cookbook in the house. He says, yeah. He says go get it, so he brings the cookbook back to the phone. He says is there a recipe in there for chocolate cake? And he goes, yeah, and he says why don't you read that to me? And we all know sponsors are crazy, right? So with great reluctance, he reads the recipe. Preheat the oven to 450, grease the pan, cup of flour, yadda, yada, yap. And so he finishes reading it, and then the sponsor says, okay, why don't you read that to me one more time? The guy says, listen, I'm dying, and you got me reading a chocolate cake recipe to you? He says, trust me, just read it one more times. So he did it. I'd make the frosting. Let it cool before you put the frosting on. He finishes it, and then the sponsor says, okay, read that to me one more time. Of course, this guy's reading it real fast now because he wants to get through it real quick. And then the sponsors said after he finished, he says, now cut me a piece of cake. You can read that recipe till you're blue in the face. But if you actually want a piece of cake, you're going to have to do something. I don't know about you people, but I like chocolate and I like Chocolate Cake. Left to my own devices, I'll read it and say, yeah, that's a nice recipe, but I like a lot of sugar. So instead of putting a cup of sugar in, I'm going to put in three cups of sugar and I'm not real keen about vanilla, so I'm not going to really put that in and i'll put my i'll tweak it i'll tweak that recipe to suit my own what i think is my own needs and i may end up with something that looks like a cake but it's probably not going to taste like that cake and i was i was challenged that that that if i wanted the same cake that bill and bob had that i need to do what bill and Bob did that I need to follow the black ink on the white page and when I see a question mark that means I need to answer the question. And when I say I see hints like next we launched that's a hint. I went to my very first conference and there was a fellow named Frank Ann out of Chicago And we all know the out-of-town speakers are so wise. No one in your home group. By the way, my home group is a dignitary sympathy group. There's no dignitaries and there's no sympathy. It was a group conscience to call the group that. We meet on Tuesday nights, and I wanted to name the group the Monday Night Procrastinators Meeting. But that didn't go over real well, so it's a dignitary sympathy. I got a fetish, but that's another story. And now I'm having a senior moment. But I went to, I heard Frank, and Frank was talking about what is a real alcoholic. You might have been at that conference, doesn't he? You know, and Frank talked about what is a real alcoholic, and he stood in front of all, I don't know, there must have been 600 people in that room. And he stood up, and I'm sitting way in the back like newcomers do. And he said, well, what we're going to do is we're gonna make an alcoholic. So he had this imaginary test tube, and he asked the audience, he says, what's it take to make an alcoholist? but someone in the back yelled, Resentment. So he reached over like this and put that in. He says, What else? And someone else yelled, Fear. And he went like that. Self-centeredness. And the list went on and on. There was about seven or eight things that were called out. And then he paused and said, What's the one thing no one talked about? Nobody said alcohol. And I had one of those V8 moments, you know. he went on to say here we have this test tube full of stuff and we shake it up and it's in our lives and we don't know what to do with it and we put a little alcohol in there to shave it off to smooth it out to make it okay and that works except that quantity doesn't work anymore then we put more in a little more. And then often what happens is a spouse or an employer or a judge or somebody will help you pull some of that alcohol out and we may feel better for a while. I think Jill talked about the difference between relief and solution. You pull the alcohol out and what happens is that as we start sleeping better and we heal a little bit better people pat you on the back, you're doing so good you look good but we don't ever do anything with the test tube of stuff and that was me resentment do you people have resentments? I don't know I want you to understand the kind of alcoholic I am early in our relationship Kathy and I went horseback riding I don't like horses I know I'm standing in the middle of horse country but the fact is I don' t particularly like horses and Kathy wanted to go horseback ridding so we went to this stable and I asked for the oldest slowest horse that they had and they gave me this old slow horse and we leave the barn and we go about 50-100 feet down and this horse takes off at a canter I think it's called a canterm And for the next mile, my anatomy is getting crushed in the saddle. And I'm livid, needless to say. I can't get this darn thing to stop. And it comes to a creek. I think, I'm glad you like this, Marge. The horse comes to a creek and it stops to get a drink of water and I get off this horse. and I'm walking around the woods looking for a big stick because I want to do this horse what it did to me. And I couldn't find one that would really do the job and Kathy finally caught up and she saw my state of mind and didn't say a word and finally I said, the heck with it, sort of. And I walked away as far as I know that horse is still standing there in that creek. now I want to share with you how I could just really work with that resentment for years and into sobriety whenever I would go to the grocery store to buy dog food that's right I'd read dog food labels looking for horse meat and I'd take that I'd have a dog I'd throw it in the bowl and then when I throw that bowl down on the table in my head I'm thinking, take that you son of a That's a resentment. I told that story in the lobby of the Music City Roundup down in Nashville. And the person I was sitting around looked at me, and they didn't laugh. They looked at my face and said, that'll get you drunk. That'll get your drunk. Man, it did. And you know what? They were right. I happened to be in a workshop. That's the thing we do up in Indianapolis. Real quick side note, That's where a bunch of us get together. We make a commitment to each other that we're going to work the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. We sit down, we read what the big book says. We only use the big books. We read what The Big Book says about the first step. We all answer the questions. We share with each other our experience. We do the firststep together, and then collectively we go on to the second step. And that's what we do. We do it frequently and often, as a matter of fact. Anyway, so I was in this workshop, and I went back, and I happened to, what a coincidence, happened to be at four-step. And I, like P as footnote in the four-stepped, oh, by the way, here's this resentment. It also showed up in my fear inventory too, by The Way. And of course, I shared it when I did my fifth step and I'm happy to report to you that I haven't had a need or a compulsion to read a dog food label since. I encourage you that when you're engaged in this process look at the totality of who you are, not just your drinking. Time moves on and I want to talk a little bit about amends. My sponsor, A lot of you people know my sponsor, Gary B. And Gary's 40 years sober now. After I asked him to be my sponsor... he and his wife, Julie... made a decision that they really wanted to finish up their amends. And they sold their house. to come up with the equity out of it to finish their amends. Had I known that Gary Brown was going to do something like that, I would not have asked him to be my sponsor. Can you imagine going to someone like that and trying to get a little slack cut to you on amends? Not going to happen. Not goingto happen. he shared with me a process on making amends one of the instructions he gave me was never ever say you're sorry he says everybody on the planet knows you're a sorry son of a I don't want to hear that he says it's about collecting, taking care of and correcting the wrongs and taking responsibility for your actions and he gave me a process and the process was that of course try to do it in person if at all possible and make that amends and sit down and tell the person the harm that you've caused them and then after I do that then ask them the question is there anything else that I've done that I'm not aware that I've harmed you and then my job is to listen I don't know about you but I did some blackout drinking there's harm out there that I have no idea that I caused there's plenty that I am aware of but there's others out there that and then it's and then my job is to listen not inject the out butts don't you understand but to listen and then after that on the table. Now everything's on the tabel. Everything I can possibly know about this particular relationship is on the tablet. And then he told me to ask them the question, do you need to tell me how this has affected you? That's a tough question to ask. And then my job is to listen. And then the last thing after that's done is to say, what is it I need to do to make this right how do i square the books and then to take that action i first thought amends was about well i i damaged i did this amount of damage to your property and i believe i owe you five hundred dollars and so i'm going to come to you and tell you how i've harmed you and then i'm gonna tell you what i'm to do and then we're going to dictate to you how I'm going to do it. Sounds an awful lot like managing my life, but that's how I initially approached it. I found that I got to be a lot freer as a result of this process. There's all kinds of higher powers, by the way. There's one higher power that helped me figure out what my amends was and he was a judge. The judge helped me figure that out. He told me I could pay $500 a month, which I did for 19 years. And I'm happy to report that that amends now is taken care of. There's an amends that I want to share with you that involved my brother which was quite an eye-opener for me. My brother and I didn't particularly get along. You may find that hard to believe. Although sometimes we got along. Here's a sidebar. My brother and I used to do a lot of drinking together. We had a lot of fun. I remember once I told Kathy I was going to meet him for lunch. We were going to meet him for lunch and get a sandwich. I went and met him, and we had a beer. And then on the third or fourth beer, we started talking about the virtues of Coors Beer. This is a 76, I think it was. Coors Bear wasn't sold at that point east of the Mississippi. You know, the virtues are Coors Beers, you know, mountain water and all that. He said, let's go get a Coors beer. So we got in his truck and we decided we'd go to St. Louis to get some Coors bear. We got there and they didn't sell it there. So we thought, well, we'll just keep driving west until we find it. And we found it in Kansas City, Kansas. We walked into the liquor store and they had a big display of Coors beer. And I said, yeah, you can sell it. He goes, yeah. He says, how much do you want? And we said all of it. So we bought $600 at Coors Beer. Twenty-five hours later when I got back home, Kathy was a little upset with me. but I mean that's the kind of things that my brother and I did when we were drinking but we also got into fights and he always won by the way I was in this particular workshop and I was remembering some harm that I had caused him back when I was 16 years old and I avoided looking at that because I knew he had caused me more harm than I had ever caused him you know when he hits you in the face a few times, you don't want to approach him. And the harm that I caused him when I was 16 was I borrowed his car. It was a big Pontiac Grand Prix, beautiful machine. Borrowed it for a date and I put a big crease in the passenger door. And when I returned the car, I parked it across from his apartment so he would see the driver's door and then he would go to work and at some point in time in the future he'd discover the crease and I'd just leave innocent. And that's what I did. well as a result of this workshop I needed to take responsibility and I hadn't talked to him in seven years even though he lived here in town and I met him at a restaurant they had glass all the way around it was a steak and shake and I did that for a reason because I wasn't sure of his response and I proceeded to tell him the harm that I caused to him and I went through the process that I talked about and he said there wasn't anything else and I hadn't anything on the paper I thought it was pretty much a done deal I reached in my pocket and I put the money on the table I showed up with a lot of money the numbers seemed fair and equitable and the big book talks about the fact that we will be amazed how within an hour things will melt and relationships will begin to end that literally happened and I thought it was pretty well a done deal and then something amazing happened at that very moment and what was amazing was that I found out that wasn't the amend at all the reality of the amend was I took him to be a fool I thought I was better than he was I thought I could get by I thought I was smarter than he was. And that's the harm that I caused him. It had nothing to do with his car door, not really. I never would have known that until I began the process of the amend. And the guy that I kicked off on my leg, how do I make an amends to him? The man who, not the man, several men in a workshop I was in at the time, i had you know i hadn't told anyone about that and they they and i said the man's dead how do you how do you how you make amends and the guy said well you need to write this guy a letter and in the letter tell him what was going on at the time what your confusion and the chaos but most importantly in this letter tell me what you're doing today Tell him what you're trying to do with your life today. I just wanted to get well. I really wasn't out seeking God. I just wanted to getting well. And so that's what I tried to discount. I said, well, how can I write him a letter? I don't know his name. They said, but get a photograph of the Vietnam Wall and pick a name. So that's what I did. And I wrote the letter and I was waiting for something miraculous to happen, and nothing happened. I just did the action. I followed direction. It was about a year later I was on the telephone answering service, and I got this call from some veteran who was drunk calling from a pay phone who wasn't looking to join Alcoholics Anonymous. He was just looking for a place to sleep that night. And I called around, and I found a halfway house that had a bed. And then I called up another friend of mine, and I said, can you pick this guy up? He said, so-and-so intersection, and take him over there. Then he did. And then the guy who I sent on the 12th step, he came back and said, I just thought you'd want to know that this guy, he didn't say he was going to quit drinking. He didn't says he was gonna join Alcoholics Anonymous. He just kept saying he couldn't believe that somebody cared, that he was going to sleep under sheets, under a roof, and that somebody cared. And then I thought back to that letter because that's one of the things that I wrote, that wanted to care again. And this physical sense of warmth came over me. And it took a long time for me to have that feeling. I thought, wow, that one's done. I was in another workshop years later and I was with Mike Mike L and Mike is also a Vietnam vet and we were talking toward the conclusion of that workshop that maybe someday we'll go to the wall and I wasn't sure I was afraid to go to The Wall because I was afraid of what was going to happen meaning my emotions and he said yeah well if we ever get a chance we'll do that and of course two weeks later Kathy comes home from work and her employers are going to send her to Washington D.C. to attend the conference, and it's a free ride. And so here I am. I'm either, you know what honesty is, say what you mean and do what you say. So we went. And what I was afraid was going to happen at the wall did happen. I saw that, and I just lost it. and I went back to the wall the next day ended up there's a directory there look up the names and the names are on the wall chronologically so if a gunship went down everybody on that helicopter their names are together it's just chronological and that particular incident that was the craziest for me was during the month of May of 1969 involved Hill 937 and when I looked up that particular month there were four panels of names for that one month. It was a really chaotic time so I went, I just felt I needed to know this guy's name so I went to the panels and I read all the names because now I know that I've read his name. And that just seemed like another footnote. I went back to the wall a third time. And I went back, it was a Sunday morning and there was one other guy it was raining and cold and it was just mirror-like surface because it was wet. When I got to the far end and I'm walking down the pathway and suddenly this emotion of rage hit me again and I thought to myself nobody cared nobody cared then nobody gives a damn about these guys you know all that luggage that goes with the Vietnam veterans and right at that moment I hear this commotion. I look over my shoulder, and here comes a school bus of kids who've gotten off, little girls that are about eight or nine years old, and a couple of nuns. And each of these children are carrying a rose, and they come down the aisle, come down to the pathway to the apex there, and they all gather around, and this nun proceeds to lead these children in a prayer for all these people whose names are on the wall. and I see what's beginning to happen and of course I just shuffle up and I stand in behind them and I participate in the prayer and then at the end these children scatter all around the memorial some put the rose down right away and get out of there some others go over and they see a name and they start to put it in front of that panel and then they see another name and they pick it up and they couldn't make up their mind which one to give it to. Some of these children started crying. These children weren't even alive at the time. Once again, I find out that I'm wrong, that people do care. You people are a tremendous demonstration of that in my life over and over and over again. In the program it talks about our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and to the people around us. Engaging in this process, engaging Making the amends has so been terribly, it's pivotal. Just absolutely pivotal to my life. Things have been changing for me a lot in the last 15 months too. 15 months ago I was diagnosed with heart failure. Now that's good news, bad news. The bad news is it's progressive and I'm at stage three. The good news is I now have documented proof to the guys that I sponsor that I do have a heart. They took me into surgery, and they've done some mojo. They put this computer in my chest with three different leads that go to my heart, and it monitors and does all kinds of things and when I came out of one of the surgical procedures I came up and I'm coming out of the anesthesia and you know what the first thing I saw was? There's a guy in my home group named Tom B who's got a big full beard. His face is about this far from mine and he's leaning over When my father died 11 years ago from an abdominal aneurysm, and he was hauled out of the living room of the house, and he lived 20-odd hours. After we came back, after he passed away, and we came to the house during that 20-hour period, my parents' house was broken into. Apparently someone saw the ambulance and hauled him away, and then they knew the house was empty, and they hid it, and they robbed it. And that was a tough day. And I called my sponsor when I got back home and told him, back to their house and told them what had happened. Before the evening was out, two guys from my home group showed up at the house on their own. They showed up with, they stopped at the hardware store, bought new locks, they came into the house, they changed all the locks. When it came time for the showing and the actual funeral, Steve F., one of the guys in my home group, he showed up at my parents' house and sat in the car outside the house just to make sure no one was going to mess with that house again. I hope your home group is a little bit like mine. so here i am now with uh with this diagnosis and and um and i and i began another journey you know for a long time i thought how could my life be unmanageable early in sobriety how can my life being manageable when when i manage you know 20 million dollars worth of contract And, of course, I got to look at the fact, am I my job? Am I my checkbook? All those usual things. And I thought I had come to terms with it pretty closely. But when my defibrillator went off the first time, which is a real fun experience, I was still trying to work. And at that point, I went from full-time to part-time work. And then I did that for several months, and then it went off again, and now I'm no longer working. I'm on a disability, and things are continuing to progress. And so now I had to go through this grieving process again of loss, of loss I thought I knew my identity was not my job but until you actually are no longer engaged in that task it's kind of theoretical what am I going to do? I get a phone call from a guy named Corey the guy that I'm working with who's still working on baking his first cake by the way he says I'm in trouble will you go through the work with me I said if you can get to my house. Well, you can do it. We can do it. So Corey comes to my house on Thursdays. Wasn't too long after that I got a call from a guy named Jim. Jim's sober a number of years and he's extremely unhappy. I said, I don't know if we go through the work together maybe your life will get better. He comes to our house on Mondays. I get phone calls every day now I get visitors who come by my house for visitors to visit every day and we sit on the patio and we talk about second and third step a lot I'm happy to report since I'm no longer really in the workplace that my amends list is a lot shorter it's amazing when I don't leave the house and it's just me and the cat how little harm I can do so instead of employing my time in that process now I now have lots of opportunity for step 11 and whole new horizons are opening up to me You know how doctors are. You were talking about, what, 18-year-old doctors? Boy, do I relate to that. Of course, I'm in a heart failure clinic, and I see these people fairly frequently. And they're a team. I don't have a doctor. I have a team there with me. and, you know, one of them is saying things like, you know with what's happening now the medicines you're on and so forth my blood pressure now is like 80 over 40 they want to keep it real low so I've got to be real careful when I stand up do those kind of things because the world goes and they say we really think that you ought to be considering not driving anymore and my initial response to these kind of things are and it's crazy, I know it's crazy, how am I going to get back, how Am I going control this situation I'll give you one of the plans that I came up with on my own when I go in and see the clinic they put this wand, literally over my chest and through the power of electronics they download this computer that's implanted in it that tracks it memorizes everything that every chamber does and then after they do that then they hit a few buttons and they accelerate my heart rate real fast and then they hit a couple more buttons and they take it real slow and then they recalibrate it, trying to make it to the optimum performance until the next time around. And I'm sitting here thinking, well, what's the end going to look like? Is it going to be shortness of breath? Is it a slow suffocation? Do you ever do any projection? Oh my God, this doesn't sound good at all. So here's my plan. I'm going to go in. they're going to download the data and then during the process of recalibration they turn it off and calibrate it and when they turn it off my plan is I'm going to get up out of the chair and walk out because I'd rather have this thing just have sudden cardiac death than have this thing drug out not real sane is it I thought that this thing was, it really upset me, because now this device is really going to dictate. And the assumption is that I had control over my heart to begin with, and I don't. Just a new understanding of powerlessness. so I have these guys in my life now there's a fellow gentleman back here is it David David I met David yesterday and I just love David David came up and was sharing with us me and Kathy about what he does now and what's going on in his life, and I think you said you were two years sober, as I recall. And he showed me a photograph of what he looked like when he first came into the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. Wow! What a difference! There's a fellow, Sam, that I work with who right after all this went down in my heart, you know, I was just so into Jim. Sam, this fellow Sam came up to me who was a street person, street background. And he did not look very good. And he asked me to sponsor him. And I didn't really want to do that. You know the difference between willingness and wanting? Differentiating between the true and the false. Sometimes I think that willingness is what I want to be. What I want you to do has nothing to do with it. You know what Sam does for me? He calls me every day. You know What Sam does? He does things like he calls up and says, Jim, this is Sam. As if I didn't know. I said, yeah, Sam. He says, I just want you to know I didn' t drink today. How about you? I said Yeah, I didn''t drink either, Sam I said Sam, how are you doing on that amends list you put together? he said well I'm happy to report that I got that amends list that we put together up to this point in time that I've got it done and guess what I'm going to do now I said what's that Sam he says now I can go buy myself a set of dentures it's amazing what you people do for me it helps me to understand my priorities it helpsme to understand that by cleaning the wreckage away that I can in fact begin to have an improved relationship with my wife and I can't in fact have a relationship with a power greater than myself that I can, in fact, begin to truly understand when the big book says that God doesn't make the terms too hard and that the way for me to begin the process is to take a look at what these spiritual terms mean to me and not enter into them from a position of prejudice. I took that literally. I opened up a dictionary and started looking up words that I thought I knew the meaning of, spiritual words like prayer, God and I began to look at those words and see what the meanings were all of this all these actions have resulted in a cake that's currently in the oven it's going to be really interesting to see what happens when this deal is done. But I encourage you to crack open the big book, take a look at the recipe, give it a shot. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.