What Rehab Was Like For Me - My Story of Alcoholism - Part 2 | #56

what's going on everybody welcome back to my channel so um this video is part two in this little mini series that i'm doing right now about my story with alcoholism uh my last video i believe is number 56 covered uh my youth my teens and twenties and the kind of drinker i was that eventually led me to when i went to rehab and then that's where this story is going to continue from but before i go down this story i have to address something here i just want y'all to know and if you haven't watched the video prior to this one go check it out and you'll get this reference i'm not holding a pen all right there's not gonna be any clicking for this video so i'm really sorry about that i didn't even realize i was doing it not until i started seeing comments i was like oh okay it makes sense because that's how i am when i'm nervous right uh i just happened to start the video with a pen in hand and then from that point forward it was autopilot and you know making these videos is not the easiest so that's probably why my pen clicking was in hyper mode and didn't even realize i was doing it so my apologies on that but see hands-free here so a quick recap like i said last video was about all my drinking and getting a dui still driving drunk after a dui going into probation because of that dui two weeks outside of being done with probation drinking and driving again and then eventually all comes to a head when i i go to a casino to see some friends play and there's a lot of stuff going on in my personal life too and i just end up getting wasted sleeping on a casino floor the next day i realize i'm not right i need help i call my therapist and then this is where this video will start now so um actually as i mentioned in this last video what i do is i meet my therapist and he just addresses the situation in front of him when he when he meets me and he just asks me what's going on um and he just i just lost it right i just had this total mental breakdown and i explained this in a little more detail in the last video at the end of the last video but here we are now my um my therapist is driving me to rehab and it was such a feeling of it was almost bliss and that's a an exaggeration but for the first time that day and quite honestly for the first time since the day before i felt a little at peace because i'm like i know i'm doing something i need to do and i'm kind of i'm running away like i'm going i'm disappearing no one else knows this is happening my mom doesn't know you know my daughter's mother doesn't know no one knows except for my therapist and his wife you know so but it was a sense of okay like i don't know what's ahead of me but what i do know is i'm out of here like i don't it doesn't matter what your job says doesn't matter what your boss thinks doesn't matter what anyone says i'm going into this place and they're locking the key you know you can't get to me no one can get to me i'm in a facility so i knew enough to feel the comfort in that with that said rehab is not fun it really isn't so the first thing that happens is intake and mind you i'm so hungover i feel miserable i'm instilling the same clothes i wore when i slept on the hotel room floor just feel awful and my therapist takes me to the front desk admits me does everything he needs to do and then he's like man call me when you come out like all right so then they put you in a waiting room the first thing they do is they take your shoelaces your belt any jewelry that you may have your wallet your keys i mean just they take everything your phone it's gone um and then you sit and wait and wait and just alone in a room just sitting there for ever at least that's how it was for me and then finally someone comes in and then they ask you a million questions and you're filling out all this stuff and and it's just a process to when they finally let you in in essence is what like it's not a jail but it kind of is like a jail where it's just one room it's like a tank like you would have in a jail and everyone's just sitting in there all the patients are just sitting in one room and and there's a second room attached to it um which is more for the room when they have like a guest speaker over or you're doing group therapy so there's like two rooms and then there's hallways all around it you know it's and then a door to the outside which takes you to the smoking area and that's all fenced in tall fences so you can go outside when they let you um and that's it so at this i mean i'm always i'm a shy person to begin with but now i'm getting pushed into a room full of strangers that are all let's let's just say everyone's there for help so personalities are pretty strong and and i'm just like i said i feel like crap and i don't want i want to be there but i'm just nervous and terrified and just uncomfortable um but so eventually you just sit in the room and then you're like hey what's your name i'm derek how you doing and you just start meeting the people um and everyone is missing their shoelaces and that's just funny so um so naively part going back to when i felt calm calm and comfort when i was heading to rehab naively i was like well this is gonna be good i'm just gonna be able to chill i'm gonna have a bed i'm just gonna be able to relax and get away from everything this is going to be great no it's not a summer camp it's not like i'm going into a hotel room you uh get a room with a roommate he's getting your own bed you can't go into that room until nine o'clock the doors are locked until nine it opens up and then you have an hour where you can go kind of you have a little bit of freedom in that hour where you can go from the the holding room the hang room down the hall to your room and back and to let you go out and smoke like that one moment of some kind of freedom and then 10 o'clock door's shut then you go to sleep and then six o'clock bam door is open lights on you've got like 30 minutes to get ready and you're out and the door is locked behind you and then you you don't have your room all day you just got to go hang out in this little hang area where you're not even allowed to have pens and pencils to draw with because you could use them as weapons so there's this uh uncomfortable feeling long days and then they they they just portion the day out with different kinds of therapies and one-on-one small group big group um and throughout all of that if you want to use the restroom you gotta ask you can't just go to the bathroom so like you have to go find a nurse gonna use the restroom please and they're busy so you always get the eye roll like okay i'll let you go to the bathroom like really are you gonna eye roll with me i gotta go take a leak what are you talking about i'm sorry i gotta bother you i'm sorry at the time i'm a 35 year old man i haven't asked to go to the bathroom this is your rule not mine so can i please go to the bathroom and but it was always like we're bothering them just to go to the bathroom and let's face it a lot of these medications that they put you on which we'll get to sometimes those medications make you go number two you know so that's a whole other story but um so through this process now you start you meet with an actual doctor they give you more of an assessment and they're quick to they're they're quick to diagnose you with something and put you on medicine now there's some instances where it's like important if someone's coming in trying to kick heroin or have there been a and it's like an alcoholic in the sense where they're drinking a liter of whiskey every day for 20 years that's deadly if you just quit drinking like that after that kind of drinking you could die you could have a stroke seizures i mean it's not good so they have to put you on medicine in order for you to you know kick you know and and detox off of this stuff you need medical attention so there's some medicines out there that help you through that there's medicines out there that are used to wean you off of opiates or heroin or those types of drugs where it's like it's kind of like a synthetic version of heroin so they're kind of getting you high at first but it's designed so they slowly taper you down off of it so the you know the staff and the doctors are quick to try to figure out what's going on and get you medicated well in my case i didn't really have to detox you know i was hungover but i wasn't the drinker that was coming in drinking you know hard liquor every day for 10 years so i didn't really have any withdrawals i wasn't there for that which was good um [Music] because protocol is they wake you up throughout the whole night to take your blood pressure they just wake you up they put they pick your arm up they wrap the thing around it and you're like they wake you up in the middle of the night and then okay good and then they walk out two hours later they come in every two hours when you're on detox so they had to do it to me for i think it was two nights and then that was it i didn't have to do that anymore but my roommate had it for like a week so i was still getting woken up every two hours anyway um so this is where i through the assessments and just seeing the doctors and doing going through the process this is when i'm officially diagnosed in writing as bipolar 2. now i've kind of briefly mentioned it in the past but that's what they labeled me as which is you know bipolar highs and lows you know manic depression everyone has highs and lows but bipolar is to the extremes bipolar 2 is high low but tend to go lower than go high you know so i get my you get manic and you have mania but bipolar 2 is really for like you're more susceptible to the depression side of it which is fits me um and then it's like all right let's let's take some medicine here so at the time i was on i was on lexa pro which is an antidepressant um and uh lemichtel which is more for bipolar which is a mood stabilizer so what happens is i didn't know this at the time but antidepressants in the three times i've been on them would kind of amp me up and sometimes too much i get manic this is a common thing with with antidepressants for people so they were like all right well in order to kind of soften that will put you on a mood stabilizer so you the antidepressant is trying to push me up out of depression which is what it's designed to do but but it's taking me too high it's making me manics all right so now we'll take this other drug that will then squish it down and try to make you less manic you know and then not depressed so if you're if your mood is like this now just these two drugs it's like it's trying to crunch it down where your mood is just like this he said then now i'm in the hospital i continue to do those two things and then they give me lithium they put me on lithium now i used to always think lithium was like this whack-a-job you know medicine that is for stray jackets but no apparently it's like a widely used drug um i think it has a negative connotation when you hear lithium at least in my mind you think someone in a stray jacket right like it's that's medicine for the crazy people no a lot of people are on lithium and it does really good for a lot of people and it's a moot stabilizer now lithium and this other drug i said i was on lamiktal what they really are are anti-seizure medicines but through studies realize well it also works really good for mood stabilizing and people with bipolar so that's why they're used for that you know lithium is for anti-seizures that's what it's for but uh but for years now it's been used for mood stabilizing but now they're hitting me with that stuff and then lithium is a different kind of drug because it gets in your blood system takes a while to you know get into your system and then you don't want to just quit it you have to wean out of it because it's it's the way it metabolizes in your system's different i can't truly explain everything about it but so for the first week i was on it um it made me sick you know it didn't feel good i had to go to the bathroom a lot but that way um but now now with all this stuff i'm on like they just they make your mood like this you know you they don't give you much wiggle room on being depressed or manic happy or sad you kind of just blah they just you're watching the paint dry on the wall so so now we're doing all that and i was in i was in for about two weeks um and luckily at the time i had great insurance so they were definitely not quick to let me out because they knew that they had the insurance that they could pull from but it was it was it was needed you know by this time you know okay now everyone knows and then at the time my daughter's mom brought me some clothes so they're allowed to make phone calls and stuff so it's not totally like jail but man you can you can't do anything looking back on it makes sense because what they're doing is they're just trying to simplify and and strip you of as many responsibilities as possible you know they they walk you they they wake you up they kick you out of the room um when it's breakfast time everyone line up like you're in middle school and you line up and you walk down the hallways in a single file line but they you eat when they tell you to eat and what you eat whatever they they have you go back you do it for lunch when you do it for dinner you know they line you up for your medicines you don't have to think about taking your medicine it's medicine time and you go on your line you walk up to the the door in the the little desk area and they give you a little cup here you go derek and they have a cup for me with what i need so and it's just a line you take your medicine you're good now you go back in the hang room and it's just they just strip you of any responsibility which i get while they're doing that they're just trying to stabilize people as much as possible and find the baseline you hear that all the time what's your baseline and so then they can work from there and be like okay your baseline is low and depressed so we'll fix that and if you're erratic it's hard to really diagnose what's up you got to find that baseline so they strip these responsibilities from you to make it just easier so you can just blah watch the wall you know and drool on yourself it's basically so so what happens is when they feel like you're ready to take that next step they discharge you um and then you you move into the inpatient program i'm sorry the outpatient program everything i just explained is inpatient and then you move into outpatient where you're still in the hospital like again thankfully i had a job that had short-term disability so not only did i have great insurance to cover all this stuff but i was still making my checks which is really exceptional so my company gave me 11 weeks short-term disability so now i'm two weeks into this thing i don't have to go back to work so now my outpatient is i got to go seven days a week to the a different building that's part of this whole campus seven days a week you go for an hour hour and a half uh and then do group therapy and processing where you you fill out a paperwork you feel fill out a worksheet every morning how you feel what's your mood one to ten suicidal thoughts thoughts of harming yourself and all the standard stuff and you gotta fill it out every time and then you just do exercises not like physical exercises you know therapy exercises in a group um and then you're good to go so you get to go home what's weird though is when you when you're inside an inpatient all it takes is a couple weeks and you get almost what i call institutionalized like i got used to being babied not babied in the sense of like oh derek you know everyone they don't give anyone sympathy but babied in the sense that they tell you when to line up for this they tell you when to line up for that you don't you make zero decisions so you kind of fall into that and then you start feeling like you're used to being told what to do it's just like all right where do i go next you forget to kind of how to think on your own i was only in there two weeks but when i left it felt weird it felt weird being on my own like driving down the street it was a long two weeks in there and i can't imagine what it's like for people that are in prison for years jail in prison for years and years and years and then they finally go out in the real world and they've been in jail for 10 years 15 years i can't imagine what that must feel like but i was also happy to get out too uh and then also it's like all right now you're now you're responsible not only for feeding yourself and you're responsible for taking your medication like you're supposed to take but now you're responsible to not do the drug anymore not for me drink anymore can't drink when you're impatient right makes sense so now you're it's you know now it's it's reality it's really what slaps you in the face so i but i took to um outpatient well it was cool i enjoyed it i really enjoyed going to it um but then after a few weeks of that you know i was starting to have i don't want to say complications but i wasn't in a good place i was too medicated i was still on those three drugs lexapro lamechtol and lithium and it was just too much and bipolar medicine can have side effects you gain weight you you can just not feel good he's just like oh i was just like not good but then my mental stability kind of started slipping away i was just not right i'm starting to get depressed again um and i look suicidal thoughts is pretty common for me but a lot of people you know um so i don't want to try to paint some some nasty picture here and try to over dramatize this at all but you know i had a bad night so the next day i filled up my paperwork a little worksheet and rated this and rated that and then the final thing is do you have any comments do you you know embellish on what feelings you have and i just wrote down last night i thought of this i won't go into detail but i i wrote down what i thought of the night before turned it in we all go to our classroom ten minutes later the director walks in she's like yes uh uh can i speak to derek please okay cool i go out there and she's like give me your keys please i was like oh what it's like we gotta walk you back into the hospital i'm like oh really they're like yeah yes you know based off the paperwork you know we have to i was like okay and you're just not expecting it because they and they there's literally just a walk from the outpatient to the inpatient so the director literally walked next to me as i'm in essence going back to jail and then again it's like no one knows it totally interrupts your life uh you only have you only have the clothes on your back and i'm fixing to lose my shoelaces again right um and it's like okay here we go and then the whole intake again all of that there just repeat the first story i told you bam did all that again so now i'm back on the inside right and what i should mention too is in a weird way you kind of like you you're with these people all day every day that you kind of make friends you don't but i mean these aren't people that you want to see outside um but you kind of you kind of get used to them and when i went back in the second time there was one person that was still there from the first time i was like what's up man and i forget his name but um so this time though i'm i'm i'm ready for business i'm like okay like i i felt like i needed to be in there so i wasn't totally upset i was like okay i know why i'm in here but now i'm gonna i'm gonna do it right here not that i didn't try the first time but i'm like i do not want to come back here ever again so let's try harder uh and and did my best to do go through the programs again and all the different assessments and different group therapies and and uh i kept my head down more just like i don't want to get involved with any drama in here i'm focused i'm not coming back to this place ever again uh so the second time i was in it was shorter it was just a little over a week and then i'm like see you later i'm out of there and then i went back into the outpatient program and then back into the classes and but what happened was when i went in the second time i when i got to the doctor i'm like look we gotta cut some of this medication out because that was part of the problem i was like i'm on these three things no more like we gotta fix this we gotta do something about i i it's too much um which is another reason why they often will put someone back inside because some of the really stronger cases the the bigger cases one little tweak of medicine can really flip someone out like it can really just mess with their the chemicals making and they can get really manic really depressed you start messing with psych meds um it can really change your behavior make make it you know sporadic you know crazy behavior so they want to monitor it i wasn't in that place but this is the place to do it if they're going to really tweak your medicines then it's the good place to be in case you get some kind of reaction from my case it was i wasn't replacing or adding i was cutting it's like not literally cutting but oh i'm done with this this medicine here so they i guess the compromise was well i'm on an antidepressant and two moon stabilizers so let's just do one move stabilizer and they took the little nickel off still on lithium so um but it did help it did help i felt that it was almost like i was compressed like i had no mood but because i was so lifeless and so just baselined it made me depressed even though i'm not supposed to be feeling depression hard to explain but so i get out of there back into outpatient and uh finally finished it up it was 11 weeks total and and by this time you know i feel good um i'm kind of ready to go back to work i don't want to this is now where we're going to start breaking into you know episode 3 if you will the final episode of the series like a little netflix limited series um because the next part of the story is is interesting because i make some big decisions for my life straight out of rehab here i'm going back to work at the warehouse that i was working at that uh where i got the forklift accident again if you haven't watched the first part of this story check out uh video 56 where i give this whole background story on what happened there at my job which led to all this so i'm going to leave it there so the moral of this story is um rehab is is necessary um for a lot of people but there's two there's two components i don't want to simplify it that much but in my mind in my experience you go to rehab for the therapy and to you know get diagnosed you get on some medication and you get assessed and all that but also rehab is there for people that are sick that are trying to detox and and come off of drugs and alcohol i saw some people in there that were sick what happens is people go in and then once they get through that and they get through all the detoxing everything they start feeling better again they want to get out of there they don't they couldn't care less about therapy um they're just there to feel better and then sadly when they leave then you know they that not everyone but there's a percentage of people that then just relapse and immediately or within weeks of leaving um but but it's it's crucial for the ones that really truly want to kick it or for the medical part of it if you are doing hard drugs all day every day or drinking alcohol all day every day for years you need medical attention in order to kick it i mean you can go cold turkey but man you're gonna be sick you know um but there's more to it than that there's more to it than just detox you need to then start working on the reasons the deep psychological reasons as to what got you to that place and that's why the therapy is so important about it that's the most important part of it that like out of the 11 weeks i was there i detoxed for a day you know like and and other patients that are people that i met in there that were detoxing off more serious stuff i mean they're feeling fine after four or five days maybe a week but then they're there for you know seven weeks that's a lot of therapy that's the big part of it that's the biggest part of it so um it worked for me it did well for me i never want to do it again and i think that was one of the motivators for me is like i can't i can't screw this one up i was blessed to have a job that gave me killer insurance to pay for all this stuff i had short-term disability so i didn't lose a penny i was getting checks directly deposited to my bank every friday just like i was at work um and was just handed this massive amount of therapy and and knowledge on how to cope and when i walked away from all that i was like i don't want to throw all of that hard work away and feeling grateful for the opportunity i had where a lot of people can't afford that or you know they walk out of a situation like that and totally in debt because they didn't have insurance there was a lot of a lot of you know i had a lot of benefits that other people don't have at the time so plus there was so many other things that kept me from going back to drinking which we're going to get to in the next video so um as you can see my hands have been moving around like that i hope that doesn't annoy people it's not clicking but you know doing these kinds of videos is a little a little different a little more personal so i have nervous ticks let's just say that so um look thanks for hanging out for this video i know these are longer but it's a lot to talk about here so um i hope y'all have a good night and um i'll have the part three of this here in a couple days and then uh we'll move on to something else but until then have a great great night y'all thank you

Channel: Derrick Michaud

Views: 13,804

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Id: XR1gonROJi0

Length: 33min 24sec (2004 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022