Hitting rock bottom
Reporter reflects on past as she embraces future.
He said he would make sure I’d never work in Baltimore again. My first inclination was to laugh when I heard what the producer said. As if local Baltimore TV was ever a goal of mine. I had far bigger dreams. So what if I kept sabotaging them?
Doing a live TV segment in a drunken blackout was only the latest example. There were plenty of others dating to when I started drinking the summer before ninth grade. For me, fortunately, dashing my dreams of an on-air television and print journalism career became my “bottom.” It surprised even me that I would drink all of Super Bowl Sunday, stopping only to sleep an hour before a
6 a.m. TV spot the next day, Jan. 27,
1992. And that’s even though I had been drinking two bottles of wine a night since college.
There were life- and career-threatening car crashes. There was a violent first marriage that seemed drawn from the footage of the movie “Barfly.” And he certainly wasn’t the only ill-considered romantic relationship.
Until I started researching the dramatically increasing deaths due to alcohol, I thought society’s drinking problem had changed along with my own. After all, people seemed far more focused on working out and eating healthy, and there is so much more attention on drunken driving. Plus, the opioid epidemic is getting all the attention now, even though it’s all the same disease — addiction. Having to alternate liquor stores and justify bulk wine purchases seemed so last decade.
Was I ever wrong.
A family history
Like me, my paternal grandfather quit drinking at age 32. Grandfather O’Donnell, a bar owner who died before I was born, told my dad he got tired of throwing up everyday.
My late mother would complain about my father’s drinking, which during their nearly 30-year marriage never included drinking alone at home. Those were the guys who had the problems, he’d say. But going to happy hour at 3 p.m. and coming home at 3 a.m. seemed a questionable high road.
Mom could hardly say she wasn’t warned. On her first date with my father, Dad and his close friend — who worked at a liquor store — each brought a case of beer. For themselves.
Dad quit drinking after his heart condition prompted his cardiologist to limit him to two beers. “What’s the point?” he asked.
My last drink came a couple years later, but long after the warning signs.
When I was 16, I missed a sharp turn while drunk and careened into the former mayor’s mailbox, totaling my mother’s beloved new white Ford Mustang II. A year later, I did Kamikaze (vodka, lime juice and Triple Sec) and Snake Bite (Yukon Jack and Rose’s lime juice) shots at the bar I worked at and then wrapped the front end of our old Dodge around a telephone pole.
I showed up to college orientation at University of Maryland with sutures closing the giant gash in my chin. As the fire marshal’s daughter, I didn’t get arrested after either crash. It was a different time, before MADD — or Uber.
My fateful TV appearance was the second time I appeared on this station’s early morning TV show to talk about cars, which I had been covering since the late 1980s. I even totaled a BMW I was reviewing the year before I quit drinking. This time, the police didn’t know or care who my father was. They stuck me briefly in a D.C. jail cell, and a judge later restricted my license. I still hadn’t sunk low enough to stop drinking altogether.
By the time I mistakenly urged budget and safety-conscious viewers to consider the long-dead Chevrolet Corvair — rather than Chevy Corsica — in 1992, friends and family were increasingly, but only quietly, concerned about my drinking. Fortunately, one called my doctor while I tried to sleep off my epic post-Super Bowl hangover.
Save your loved one
I’ve spent weeks talking to the friends and family members of people who quite literally drank themselves to death. Two lived — and died — near me, leaving teenage children behind.
Several also had the genes and none of the necessary grit when the going got really tough later in life. If balancing school or a job and a social life seems hard when you’re young and single, try being a new mother and airline reporter after 9/11 with aging parents battling heart disease. That’s the kind of perfect storm that would have sent me back to the bottle if I hadn’t already quit.
Like Amy Durham, who nearly died due to alcohol in 2012, I was ashamed. I was guzzling white wine at home and struggling to hide the shakes that preceded the next day’s Chardonnay and the broken blood vessels on my face.
Katie Bertling says that whenever she and her family talked to sister Sara Myers about her drinking, “she would get defensive, so we tended to leave it alone thinking it was better to preserve our relationship than push her away.” Myers, like me, drank progressively more from high school through college and various jobs in bars. She died in January at the age I was when I quit, 32.
Durham had the same disease I had, and also wants to shatter the stigma.
It’s behind me now, as it could soon be for you or loved ones. If you see the signs, disregard the discomfort that comes from bringing up this uncomfortable topic. You just might save a life.