You can put an end to boozy days

Dear Readers: There are good reasons why I don't publish names of people who write me about their relationship problems. It's too personal, no one else's business, they just want advice.

But today, a 53-year-old man named Kenny Johnston wants everyone who can benefit from his story, to know that it's real. His wife also agreed to his going public.

Johnston is a fitness trainer who had a large, devoted clientele, and was formerly a musician who once spent three years in Los Angeles with his band.

Yet, after six years of tragic events — his parents' severe illnesses and deaths within three months of each other, and his wife's complicated breast cancer — he succumbed to a level of alcoholism that had him hanging out in parks drunk all day, staggering on the streets to return home, pretending he'd been at work.

I wrote about him anonymously last year, after those crushing difficulties and his wife's insistence that he get sober or they'd end up apart.

She'd read a book by Alan Carr, whose stop-smoking method had worked for her. So, she gave him another Carr book: The Easy Way to Control Alcohol.

Johnston was doubtful. He'd been to five weeks of alcohol rehab but quit. He'd seen an addiction therapist, a psychiatrist and a psychologist and was unchanged. He didn't connect with Alcoholics Anonymous.

But he knew he might die as an alcoholic. He shuffled when walking, feared he'd have a heart attack, had suicidal thoughts.

What got him to read Carr's book? The back page, which said one could stop easily and regain control of their life. That resonated with him, rather than a group approach. This past June 21 marked Johnston's entire year without having a single drink. “I don't even want it,” he says.

According to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, pandemic changes in alcohol use were associated with age, income, living situation, anxiety, and feeling lonely or depressed. Johnston ticked several of those boxes. Now, I'm writing of his sobriety to encourage others who need a positive example.

Read Ellie Monday to Saturday.