I just finished my January Step 1 Meditation and I had a renewed experience with the concept of the nature of the disease, that it is Chronic, Progressive, and Fatal.
The deaths of a couple of members of our fellowship confirmed this for me. I dedicate this post to Dave and Jennifer.
"These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it"
Chronic - In medicine, a chronic disease is a disease that is long-lasting or recurrent. The term chronic describes the course of the disease, or its rate of onset and development. A chronic course is distinguished from a recurrent course; recurrent diseases relapse repeatedly, with periods of remission in between. As an adjective, chronic can refer to a persistent and lasting medical condition. Many chronic diseases require chronic care management for effective long-term treatment.
"We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones. Neither does there appear to be any kind of treatment which will make alcoholics of our kind like other men. We have tried every imaginable remedy. In some instances there has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse. Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing a making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn't done so yet."
Progressive - A progressive illness is an illness that gradually progresses and changes mode, generally to the worse. In contrast, non-progressive illnesses are relatively constant.
"We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals usually brief were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better."
Fatal - bringing death.
"The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death."
"Though a robust man at retirement, he went to pieces quickly and was dead within four years."
"Most of us have believed that if we remained sober for a long stretch, we could thereafter drink normally. But here is a man who at fifty-five years found he was just where he had left off at thirty. We have seen the truth demonstrated again and again: "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever. If we are planning to stop drinking , there must be no reservation of any kind, nor any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol."
