60% Liver Function and the Liter of Jager That Finished the Rest – Doug C.
About This Speaker Tape
Doug C. shares his story at a Saturday night Celebration meeting with about eight years of sobriety. Born with cerebral palsy, he wore a metal brace and leather boot on his right foot and grew up in the tiny town of Junior, West Virginia without a father — his dad, a raving alcoholic with seven wives, left when Doug was almost two. That abandonment became the central resentment of his life, and the hunger for acceptance that followed drove everything. At twelve or thirteen, he discovered that stealing beer for older kids made him cool, and his first taste of bourbon at fourteen launched a twenty-year love affair he knew from the start would consume him.
Doug's drinking escalated through high school moonshine in his locker, a suspension for vodka-scented vomit, and an arrest for crawling down Main Street — for which a sympathetic judge charged him fifteen dollars for being ugly in public. He married, had two children, and worked as a certified nursing assistant, but alcohol dismantled all of it. He drank himself out of his marriage and routinely showed up to the nursing home drunk, where a friend would cover for him and send him home.
His bottom came on his birthday, November 11, 2004. He cashed a Christmas Club check for over a thousand dollars plus his paycheck, sent his kids away with a lie, walked to the bar, bought the remaining forty-two tips on a board to win a Jagermeister gift set, then chugged the entire liter in twenty steps between his barstool and the front door. He woke up in his front yard with no memory of the night, called his mother, and for the first time admitted he could not stop on his own. She got him to a community health center, which led to twenty-two days of locked detox at Fairmont General — where doctors told him he had sixty percent liver function — followed by twenty-eight days of rehab.
At rehab a grizzled old-timer who looked like Santa Claus in cowboy boots told Doug he still had drinking left to do. Doug chose that man as his sponsor out of sheer defiance, and on the van ride to a halfway house they worked the first three steps together. Doug completed ninety meetings in sixty-seven days, moved into the halfway house, and began rebuilding. He speaks honestly about a thirteen-month drift from the program around year three, about walking away from pills a girlfriend offered him, and about the ongoing work sobriety demands. His message is blunt: it works, it is not easy, and he did it by doing what he was told.
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