Day 10 Takeaways

My 11 days (10 + 1 detox day) at Schick Shadel hospital have been a wonderful experience.

The people at Shick Shadel hospital do a great job helping us through our stay. The nursing staff is incredibly caring. The counselors really want to help us learn more about ourselves and our addictions so we can succeed in our recovery. Even the cooks go out of their way to make us feel welcome and support us.

It is really remarkable how well the patients bond together to promote each other's recovery and treatment. While Schick is great and wonderful and staff work hard, like any complex system it can't be perfect. Incoming patients are left with many questions as they start treatment, even after orientation. Rules and procedures can change at a moment's notice, so what you're told upstairs may not still be true by the time you walk downstairs. But one thing solves it all, the patients.

The patients who have been here a while embrace the new ones and fill in the gaps. From the best advice for how to prepare for a Duffy to how to get your Rehabilitation Interview read-back, the collective experience of those in scrubs is invaluable.

And we all help each other succeed. We share stories in group about our lives, addictions, successes and failures. We swap jokes and stories on the smoking deck, uplifting each other with caring support. We candidly discuss shit and puke. We laugh about shit and puke. We have to. Of course the new patients, just out of detox and on their first days into the program wonder what they're in for as they hear us swapping tales of mad rushes to the toilet and Butterflies. They're scared. But us "old timers" are more than happy to take them under our wing to educate and encourage them, as was done for us.

We all want ourselves to succeed. We also want everyone else to succeed.

Of course not everyone makes it. In my time here two patients weren't able to fully handle the program and did drugs in their rooms. Sadly both of them were already here after relapses anyway. For all of us relapse is just one drink away and we will have to keep guard against it. But Thank God Shick Shadle has not just counseled us on how to avoid our temptations, we have also had our cravings taken away.

I simply don't want to drink. At all.