The Simple Program for Complicated People – Katie P.

Thank you, Barbara. That was a wonderful rendition of my time in sobriety, although I think you shaded some of it a little bit. My name is Katie Parker, and I am an alcoholic. And I want to thank the committee for asking me to share tonight because 40 years of this company or this get-together is just awesome. I've been coming, I'd say, I think it's around 32 or 33 years to this, and it's such an honor to be asked to kick it off, as she put it. i used to live in west virginia before i moved to florida and we used to go to blackstone virginia for the same thing every april and every october and i looked so forward to those times to be with all of those people it was just like this wonderful people good times good memories it was fabulous. And when I moved to Florida, I missed that dreadfully because I was so used to going to see my friends that that's the only time I got to see them. And one time I went up to Pompano Beach to a big book study and I met Bernice Brown who was one of the forefathers or foremothers something that started this in Florida because they also missed Blackstone and all the memories and everything that we had of that. And she asked me, she said, have you ever heard of Lake Bird, Katie? And I said, no. And she said well it's a get together that we have every April and every October. Well, then my ears picked up, and I said, is that like black stone? And she said, it's exactly like blackstone. So I really felt I had come home at that point, and she invited me to come up. Well, it was fabulous, and it's very, very addictive. Once you come, you can't help but come again and again and again. It just gets in your blood, and you know that you're missing something if you have to miss and i think i only missed one time and that was in october i believe of not coming and i had gone over to england to visit my daughter but i don't think anything else would ever keep me away because it means so much to me and this is the only time i get to see some of you all too and it's i really look forward to seeing that especially Andy I am an alcoholic and I think I was an alcoholic from the first drink I took and my father was an alcohol and I saw all the deprivation that came from his habit I know that many times they came and shut off the gas because there wasn't enough money to pay the bills cut off the water you never knew what was going to be on or what wasn't gonna be off and he made good money but he spent it all on the booze and anything else he happened to find and I swore then I'll never drink I'll never drink and don't want to be like my father I will never drink well when I I was 11, I went to a family Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's, and they were all drinking wine. And different members of the family would say, Katie, did you have any wine? No. They gave me a little cheese glass full. You know, the cheese spreads used to come in. and instead of sipping it like everybody else you know i was just drank her down god it was wonderful and each member of the family that asked me if i'd had any wine i always said no and i didn't even know lying about your drinking was popular well the upshot of that was I passed out at the Thanksgiving dinner with my face in the mashed potatoes and my mother cried it all just carried on if she knew what was to come she'd have given me the gas pipe right then because I really led her for a merry chase i stayed on the wagon then i didn't have any more uh to drink until i got to high school and friday night was always a football game and everybody was underneath the bleachers who cared what was going on above the bleachERS and we were drinking somebody always managed to get some booze and i'm tall if you've never haven't noticed. And I always wanted to be that little blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader, five foot two, complete with the pom-poms. And miraculously, that happened. Every time I took a drink, that happen and it was wonderful it's marvelous well that kept on i did graduate from high school and managed to keep it under control a little bit then i went to business college and uh went to work for a carbide and carbon chemical corporation in south charleston west Virginia. And I was thrown with an older crowd, and they all drank after work. We all went and got beer or whatever, you know, and I was living the life of Riley. I thought, no wonder the old man drank. God, if it does this to you, who wouldn't? And I always wondered why it was so bad. Well, I managed to keep my job for five years and within that five years they kept giving me warnings. You know, Katie, you put a curb on your drinking because it's getting out of hand. Oh no, I just have two beers a night. Maybe two cases, but never just two beers. Why didn't we say three beers or four beers? It was always two, and I couldn't understand that. Anyhow, when I got this warning, you know, and I said we're just going to have to, you know, we can't keep on doing this. And I said I realize that, and I'll swear I'm going to AA, and I won't drink anymore. Well, the only thing I knew about AA was this beer joint that I frequented every night and there was a man that used to come in and he'd stand at the bar and have a Coke. I thought that was so strange. This man owned a restaurant right across the street and he had a whole icebox full of Cokes but he'd come over there and I asked somebody and they told me that and I said well why doesn't he drink over at his own place drink a coke over there he likes the atmosphere you know those slippery places that so many of us like to frequent well that stuck in my mind I had no idea what alcoholics arms meant so when I was getting all these warnings and everything that's when I told them I'm going to join AA and I'm gonna straighten up and fly right and do everything I'm supposed to do and I won't get fired well when I went home I told my mother I want to quit drinking mom and you go and find out about AA and I'll join my mother was a teetotaler or she wouldn't be able to find out. I was sure she couldn't find out anything about AA. So a few nights later, she told me, she said, Katie, don't go out tonight. There's a lady from AA who's going to come talk to you. I knew there wasn't a God. I just knew it. And when this lady walked in, I don't know what I expected to see. You know, some old crone, a bag lady maybe, or something like that. and in walked this lovely, lovely woman. She was about 60 years old and she had beautiful clothes and her hair, not a hair out of place I mean she was so regal and so she was everything I wanted to be and we sat down and we started talking and she was giving me some of her stories And I said, who does she think she's kidding? I bet she just had one too many Sherrys at her bridge party or something. I couldn't imagine her hugging the throne like I did every morning. I couldn'T imagine her falling down drunk like I DID quite frequently, especially when I was belly dancing. That's another story. So I listened to her, and she was telling me everything that I felt inside. And I thought, my mother told her what to say. She got in cahoots with her, and she told her everything that i had done, and that's the reason she was talking to me about it. She was making it up. well I promised to go to a meeting with her so we went to the meeting she came down and picked me up now we only have one meeting a week in Charleston and this was in 1946 there was only one meeting it was on Friday night and she took me to that and I looked around and I saw all these old people and I said oh my god I'll quit too when I'm that old well I predicted right I did quit and I am old but the funny part about it was I felt at home with those people even though the old guys in the raincoats and all that sort of thing with the brown paper bag they'd say I spilled more than you drank you can't be an alcoholic, you're not old enough I was 21 and I thought well these experts ought to know what they're talking about you know they're real alcoholics and that's exactly what I wanted to hear and I decided that I indeed wasn't an alcoholic that I was too young and they'd spilled more than I drank and maybe if they hadn't spilled so much, they'd have gotten here sooner. But I went out and started to see if I could really handle it and really be a lady and drink ladylike. Well, needless to say, you know the answer to that one because every time I drank, I ended up drunk with no intention. I would go, well I'll just have two drinks there's those two drinks again and I couldn't stop at the two well tomorrow I'll do it so I'd go ahead and get drunk I never drank what I didn't get drunk it was just and yet it took me so long to learn that when they said the first drink gets you drunk one drink never made me drunk but it set up the compulsion that I had to drink more but I didn't understand all of that then well they finally sent me over to another company I was in the payroll department and they sent me to run the payroll checks for this other company and the reason they sentme over there to work for this man is because he was in AA and he had 10 years sobriety I never heard of anybody having that much social media. I couldn't even get two days, let alone a year. A year. God, that seemed like a... And they said, no, no. It's not like that. You just do it one day at a time. You don't have to worry about anything else. Just today. Live today. And I thought, I couldn'T live today. I had so many things planned for the future. and I was living in yesterday telling myself that I was a bad person not a sick person I was bad because I did things that hurt people and after a while I think I stayed sober three months at a time but this man I went to work for he was a little Scotsman had the burr and everything and he was just about that high he was a cute little thing a little elf or something and he sat me down and he told me now Katie this is the last chance you're getting they sent you over here to me hoping that I could help you and he was so nice and he talked to me so sweetly I had a bottle in my purse because you know I couldn't go without it. I'd shake to death if I did. And I had the greatest desire to give him that bottle. And, you know, if I had given it to him and then come and told him that I really needed to drink, I think he would have given itto me just to keep me from shaking to death. But I wasn't quite that trusting. I kept it to myself. But I finally did wean myself off of it and I started going to meetings and everything and there was an engineer that worked for that company and he came down one day to talk to me. He says, hey, I think you know my sister. And I said, who? Scared to death. Maybe it was one of my drunken buddies or something. And he said, Peggy. Peggy Garrett. And I thought, oh my God, you're not her big brother from New York because I worked with this girl And for years she had been telling me about this wonderful, wonderful brother she had that lived up in New York. Well, I said, you're her brother? You're the white knight? And he says, yeah. I said well do you want to go get a cup of coffee? Because they had a cafeteria, you know. He was tall. He was like 6'3", blonde hair, blue eyes. and I immediately fell in lust I thought I'm going to get him so I was working on that and then Christmas came and that was my downfall I went to all my old friends parties and everything and I got looped And I got fired, and I thought, well, now I'm free. Now I can drink all I want to. I don't have to pay attention to anybody. My mother threw me out of the house, and I was completely alone and loving it. And I really was drinking every day. And not just to stay alive, but to get drunk, to get oblivion because I didn't want to face the world anymore. I just wanted to go to sleep and just vegetate, not do anything. I lived in this little hotel. It was a residential hotel, and my room was $15 a week. Well, I was getting unemployment. That was $20, and I had a savings account with the company that I worked for, and they gave me that, and I think I had about $600. And that was a lot of money back then. I thought, well, God, I'm going to stay drunk for a long time on this. Well, to make a long story short, I was drinking for about six weeks, and I never ate when I drank. And I'll have to tell you one thing about when I was working for this company. This was during World War II, and I had to be 21 to have a liquor cart. Liquor was rationed, just like meat and everything else was ration. But they did sell a lot of stuff that wasn't rationed. You know, the scotch and all the good stuff went overseas to the soldiers, they said. and I was drinking this old rot gut stuff but it didn't make any difference it all made me sick and it all gave me the same effect so why spend $15 for a bottle when you get one for $1.98 so that was my thinking my best thinking got me here but when when I was working there They also had, at the liquor store, it was a state-owned liquor store. You know, no beer, no nothing in the grocery stores. You had to buy everything from a liquor store so sometimes they'd put specials on and this one time they had apricot brandy. Oh, that sounded good. It must be sweet. It must go down good. you know and get you drunk too so I was drinking the apricot brandy and I'd go out at noon get a big swig you know and come back all of a sudden I noticed these fruit flies flying around just over me and I blow them away well of course the peach brandy went right up with it and just brought more, they're buddies everybody was coming to that party I'd say about 50 people in that office it was a huge room and everybody had a desk right beside each other and I was the only one that had the fruit flies that was very embarrassing to say the least i don't know how they got in there i never could figure that out because i was in an office an airtight office and those fruit flies found me it was oh god i had a lot of incidents like that another one was mint gin oh I loved mint gin oh it felt so good going down and my breath smelled good it smelled like mint and that was quite a story too but so I was running low on money and I didn't know what I was going to do and one day downtown I ran into this guy that used to work at the same company where I did. And he says, come on, Katie, let's go have a beer. I don't know why. Why didn't he say, let us go have a cup of coffee? But he knew me. And we had a beer and, you know, we started dating and dancing and romancing and all. I thought I'd found my soul mate. So we went down to Greenup, Kentucky and got married. I dated him two weeks and got married see my good thinking oh god well he couldn't stand it very long and that marriage lasted three months and he told me to leave and never darken his guest towels again and i said well you knew i drank when you married me why did you marry me i thought i could change you. Aren't those wonderful words? I thought I could change you. Well, so I went back to my little hotel and I got a job. I was making $33 a week. Can you imagine that? And I tried to stay sober. But, oh wait a minute, I'm getting ahead of myself. When I went back to that hotel, I thought, nobody loves me, nobody cares. My family didn't want me around any place. All my brothers and sisters and, you know, it was just, nobody loved me so I'll go out in the garden and eat worms. Only my worms was a bottle. And I drank and I drank, and I drank. I got so sick not eating and drinking and hating myself. I didn't want to live any longer. It was just too much trouble. I just wanted to go to sleep in peace. I had horrible DTs. I had a big old cat. He crawled up the bottom of the bedstead, these old iron bedsteads that they used to have, and called straight up my body, turned around three times on my chest, and just laid there and looked at me. Greenest eyes I ever saw. I can still see him and see that cat. And he didn't have legs, and his fur was all matted down with axle grease, you know, that old yellow grease that they grease trucks with and everything. how would you like to have that laying on your chest well that just about scared the bejesus out of me and I saw people in the room and there's no way they could have gotten there the curtains were talking to me and I had little bulldogs about two inches high all over the bed my father used to raise Boston Terriers and I loved them, I'd had a dog all my life and that little thing it would stand there and bark at me and I'd reach out to get it and it'd disappear oh that's a pretty good trick and I tried over and over and they always disappeared well by the time that I got down to rock bottom I was so sick that I knew I was going to die I hadn't eaten for weeks on end and the only thing I did was drink and I couldn't stop drinking and I could not get drunk I had reached that point where it didn't matter whatever I did I just could not get drunk so I was miserable very depressed very sick of myself and everything else. And I was so sick and shaken so bad, I had no more money, I had to go to the hospital. I had nowhere liquor. And I was so frightened the way I felt that I asked God for help. Now, I was raised strict Catholic, and I knew there was a God, but I thought he had deserted me. I thought I had done so many things that he didn't want to have anything to do with me I knew that was a lost cause but coming back into AA many times in and out in and out over the years I heard about a God that was completely foreign to me you told me about a God that was kind and loving and wanting to help me no matter what I did he would forgive me and I couldn't believe that because I was raised with a vengeful God. I knew he was going to lower the bone on me sooner or later. And at that point, though, I believed in the God that you had told me about and I prayed to him and I asked him to please help me and I had the most wonderful feeling come over me I was peaceful I'd stop shaking and I knew that there was hope I was laying there contemplating that for I don't know how long but I heard a voice out in the hall and I thought maybe I was hallucinating again but this was a very distinctive voice it was like a whiskey baritone you know, how some women get that raspy, low voice. And I recognized it as one of the women that I had met in AA. And I called down at the desk and I said, do you have Regina Rogers? She's dead now. You don't know her anyhow. And in fact, everybody's dead that I knew when I came in. and I asked them if she was registered and he said yes she's right next door to you and I said would you please ring her room and she answered the phone and I told her who it was and I taught her what had happened to me and she said I'll be right over she left everything out in the hall where the bell man had put it and she came over and I was so glad to see her and I was able to talk to her. I told her everything that had happened to me that morning and how wonderful I felt and that I knew there was a God and I knew he loved me and I know he helped me. I didn't figure out how all that happened until later. You know, there were a lot of hotels in Charleston, West Virginia. Why did she pick that one? Why was she put on my floor right next to me see how god works he was working in my life and all i had to do was please help me and it was so wonderful and she told me she said okay you had a spiritual experience i said i don't know what it was but it sure was nice and she went down to the cafeteria and got some uh cream of mushroom soup I can't eat it from now. Oh, so bad. But it did the trick. It helped me with my well-being. And she got me dinner. That's the same thing. She stayed with me all day or part of the day. and the next morning she went down and she got me some eggs and stuff and I was too weak to go down myself I was just bandy legged you know how they all go a different way like about they do now but it's not because of the booze and eventually I got strong enough that I was able to go myself and we started going to meetings and everything. And this wonderful white knight that I had lusted after, he started coming and picking us up and taking us to meeting. And sometimes we'd go far away, 50 miles from home. And it was just so great to meet all these people and to have somebody, you know, that had been sober a whole year. I couldn't believe anybody could be sober a year. and pretty soon he stopped picking up Regina and just picked up me and all things are looking up and I tried every way in the world to get that man I tried every trick I knew and I said God that wasn't very nice you gave me sobriety and took away my sex appeal now what am I going to do well when he dropped me off at the hotel you know he'd give me a little brotherly kiss on the cheek and I turned real fast trying to get him on the mountain never made it he was faster than me and I thought what is this I just couldn't understand that well when I was sober a year can you imagine that a whole year he asked me to marry I said I didn't even think you liked me he said I loved you he said but your sobriety was more important than any desires he might have isn't that something I've never heard that before and I haven't heard it since one time was enough I guess anyhow we were married uh two months later and um we had three little girls not all once you know they were spaced apart but I was so happy I was never so happy in my life. I had good friends in AA. I was very active in AA it was a wonderful wonderful life and I had a good husband that loved me was a wonderful provider, a good father he was everything I had ever dreamed of and never thought I would get and that marriage lasted 11 years and he got cancer of the esophagus and back then they didn't have anything to fight cancer with, just radiation no chemo, nothing that would save his life like it does today and he passed away but then the troops of AA all gathered around that was the most wonderful feeling to know that all these people were there for me and that they were going to help me through this and that has happened every time that I have a bad thing to face you know either sickness or operations on my children and so forth. We had three little girls and they were four, six and seven when he passed away and I thought what am I going to do without him? How on earth can I raise these three children like that all by myself? Let's say I wasn't by myself. I had God And he was going to help me do this. Well, all of you mothers that feel real guilty because you drank when your children were small or big or whatever and you weren't a very good mother, take some of that guilt away from you because my children never saw me drink. They didn't even know what a drink was when they were that age. and I was able to make a home for them and to raise them with the AA principles and they all grew up to be beautiful people except two of them became drug addicts and alcoholics. One daughter, the oldest daughter she never did make it to AA they knew where the answer was and she kept trying And for 20 years she tried to get this program, but she just couldn't persevere. And she died of cancer, plus the drugs, plus the booze. She had nothing, nothing to fight it with. And she died on my 49th AA anniversary and I thought she did that so I wouldn't forget the day she died and Kathy said to me when I told her that when it came up here one day or yeah up here and she said oh isn't that wonderful Katie now you both have the same sobriety date. Made a whole different picture out of it, you know? Then I felt good, and I was glad she died on my AA anniversary. And I know she's looking down here and said, ha, gotcha, Mom. Really, she's with her daddy, and that's where she always wanted to be. and the youngest daughter she was a heroin addict and she moved out to California because it was much more prevalent than in West Virginia believe me there was moonshine in West Virginian King Corn and Cotton Picker and all those good brands but it all gave me the same result so it doesn't make any difference what you drink or how much you drink. It depends on what it does to you. And it made me a person I didn't want to be, and it took me to places I didn'T want to go. And I had a hard time forgiving myself for all those transgressions that I had made and tried to live the best life I could and helping others and doing everything that I can to continue doing that. And that's what makes this program so great is people helping other people. It's just like when we hug each other, oh, it just feels so good because you know that person knows exactly how you feel, exactly what's going through your mind, and they hit it on the head every time. my time in AA has been marvelous I moved down to Fort Lauderdale in 1964 two years after my husband passed away because I kept expecting him to walk in the door every time the phone rang I thought it would be him on the phone I had to move, I couldn't live in that house any longer it was just so overpowering and when I moved to Florida I'd never pulled a trailer in my life I put all my meager things that I had to have I ran out my house furnished so I just took bed linens and things like that and the kids clothes and two bulldogs, two Boston Terriers three little kids me pulling the trailer in a Dodge Dart can you imagine? you know they say alcoholics are smart but that didn't sound very smart to me but it got me there i got there all in one piece all safe and sound and the kids loved it here it was november and they were wearing shorts they thought it was wonderful they could go barefooted all year and it was uh it was a happy time for me because I had no memories of anything in Fort Lauderdale it was open field clean sheet and I got it immediately right away I got into the groups there and I met many many wonderful people and I also met another man and he wooed the kids you know he knew that was the way to mom's heart yes he was he was wonderful to him he really was it was just like they were his own and he was a good provider but he was an alcoholic and sometimes he stayed sober for long periods of times and then he would go off and he never wanted the kids to seem like that didn't want them to to know that he was drinking And he'd stay in the bedroom all the time and just drink and pass out. He was searching for oblivion, too. And it was hard because he had injured the esophagus so much from throwing up and everything else. And he had varices of the esrophagus? Yeah. and if he drank very much that would start to bleed and I'd have to rush him to the hospital and the last time he did that the doctor told him you'll never make it again and that scared him so they used to pack him in ice to try to make the blood congeal and all this sort of everything it was terrible and I told him I said Lange you can't do this because I can't stand it so when he died he had nine years sobriety which was the longest time he had had but when we were living in Fort Lauderdale and after you know the Mariel boat lift and all of that it got so crowded and so busy that we wanted to move. So he had part of his insurance, he had all the automobile insurance, but he needed the rest of his license in order to write all kinds of insurance. So we moved up here to, not up here, no, over in Melbourne. We moved to Melbourne and there was a Friday night and I wanted to go to a meeting. So we went to a speaker meeting at O'Galley and here were all the people that I knew from Lake Bird and they all came up, oh Katie, Katie, what are you doing up here? What's happening? And I said, we bought a house, we're going to move up here. Well, he was dumbfounded. He said, where did you know all these people? And I said, well, these are my AA friends. He stayed sober on the first step. And the first step, he says, if you don't get that one, you can forget the rest. And he was right. But the rest of the steps teach us how to live. And we started a business. He did get his insurance license and we were going to open an insurance agency and he looked in the phone book and there were 10,000 insurance companies in Melbourne and surrounding vicinity so when he was going to school though they had talked about bail bonds because that comes under you know when you get a DUI and you get bailed out of jail that's what he wanted to do he said there's only one in the whole county Brevard County had one bail bondsman so they grandfathered him in and we opened up an office I was teaching school but he was going to do this all by himself and then on Sunday I would go in and do the books and make the reports and so forth and send everything off, pay the bills, do whatever and I kept thinking oh god what kind of a business is this you're going to be dealing with all those criminals those drunks and those wife beaters so but by this time I'd had enough of him you know being around the house all the time I wouldn't care if he robbed banks you know just get out of the house so I got to know the people that you deal with and it's the people it's their wives it's they're mothers their sisters their living boyfriend whoever and 99% of the people in jail are there because of booze or drugs well i thought you know and we really got pretty busy so he uh i quit my teaching job and and started doing the office work and everything and he said i think you better get your license because if anything happens to me i'll be up creek without a paddle i said that's a good idea so i got my bail bond license and I had captive audiences they'd bring the prisoner into the bail bond room you know and I'd fill all the papers out and while I was doing it oh I see you got DUI yeah I said do you have any trouble with alcohol oh no no problem tell me something did you ever get arrested when you were sober well no you know and the wife beater's up there the wife would come in I want to bond him out why these people weren't thinking so he can come home and beat you up again then I had one little old lady she had one son her pride and joy and he was a drunk and a drug addict and I kept getting him out of jail so finally this happened I don't know how many times and I said why do you keep on doing this see I was cutting my own throat but I couldn't be quiet I said as long as you continue bailing him out and taking care of him he's never going to change and I said I'll get him out this time on one condition that you tell the judge you want him remanded to broken glass that was a halfway house in Melbourne and she said can I do that I said sure so she did and they remand him to broken glass and he got sober and the last I heard I've been out of the business now for about four or five years but the last i heard he was still sober and she never did come in again until about six weeks or no six months and i said oh don't tell me he's in jail again and she said no i just wanted to call and tell you i just want to come in and tell you that he's been sober he's the son I always wanted he doesn't drink he goes to his meetings he even makes the coffee and he cleans up afterward and I said that's wonderful that's one oh it gives me such a wonderful feeling to think that I could bring the message to him and it took another guy he was he was in for a parole violation or something. And I asked him, you know, you have trouble with alcohol? No, no, no trouble with alcohol. How about drugs? No. No. I didn't handle them. And he wanted to get out in the worst way. And I said, do you have any money? And he said, no. And I said... I noticed that he was a painter on his application. And I asked him, and I said do you do wallpaper too? And he says yes, I hang wallpaper. And I say I'll let you out if you'll wallpaper three of my rooms. Oh yes, I'd love to. so he couldn't drive and his girlfriend brought him over one morning and he wallpapered three of my bedrooms and all the time he was lawpapering I was quoting a big book I was doing step 1 through 12 and he listened and I told him some of my story and I said it's the only thing that works you're going to die if you don't and then I saw him I didn't recognize him because he was all dressed up but at a gratitude dinner and he came up to me and he said do you remember me and I said no, I'd remember someone that looked like you and he says I'm so and so I wallpapered your three bedrooms and I've been sober for four years. Isn't that wonderful? Oh, it gives me goose pimples just to think about it. So that went on and I was so thankful that God put me there so that I could talk to people like that and give them some hope and let them know there was a way out and it's so simple. Simple program for complicated people. I still do a lot of meetings. I go to three meetings a week, and someone asked me sometimes, Katie, why do you go to all those meetings all the time? You've been sober so long. This September, I'll celebrate 56 years of sobriety. Thank you. and um god puts me where i'm supposed to be he puts me where i'll have the most good and he has run my life for the past 56 years and he will continue running it as long I live and he shows me in so many ways what I'm supposed to do how I'm supposed to act and what I give to others and I take those steps very seriously and I go over and over and to step meetings because somebody knew it's going to say something that I need to hear you know why do you go to to meetings? I go to meetings so I can see what happens to people that don't go to meetings. And it's not a pretty sight. I never want to be that person again that I was until God touched me. And through his love and all of your help, I've had a fantastic life. It's just been, I couldn't have planned a better life if I had sat down and spelled it out word by word you know because he keeps giving me these surprises it's just like Christmas he'll give me a nice surprise and I'll recognize it thanks JC it's it's wonderful not to have to worry about the future because I know he's gonna give me the means to live any way I want to and did not have to worry about what's coming or what isn't coming he's always taken care of me since that day I lay in that bed and asked for help and I know he's going to continue to take care of my god bless you Thank you.