Just woke up, what peace

Patients at Schick love their Sleepys. The feeling is hard to describe. I just woke up from mine, and I feel great.

So here I am, back at Schick for my second recap, my final treatment. It has been nearly two months since my first recap and tomorrow afternoon I'm all done.

I arrived this morning before 8:00 and then they got me settled in. There are two other patients recapping who were here during my 10-day, so it is good to hang out with them and talk. One of them lives far away so she opted to do both recaps during one four-day stay. She said that after a month or so thoughts of drinking began to increase then finally she did slip and have some wine, though she hasn't drank since and she said the experience stregthed her aversion. She wishes she'd come for a 30-day recap instead of waiting 90 days to do both.

The staff puts a great emphasis on the recaps, and apparently the numbers bear them out. Schick claims an 80% success rate, but that only includes those who did both recaps. For those who don't recap the success rate drops to 50%.

I haven't had a drink since coming here, but in the week or so leading up to my first recap I was starting to have more thoughts about alcohol. Wondering about drinking again some day, imagining if I'd be able to do it again, all with some sort of rationalization that maybe it wouldn't become a problem. I can't fully describe the thoughts I was having, but they were along those lines.

Oh did that first recap deal with those thoughts. Entirely. So for me that first recap came at a great time. Not that I was having cravings, but the thoughts were there. I don't have those thoughts anymore, I know that I can't drink and thankfully I don't want to. Now two months since my last treatment I'm sure this recap will bring even more reinforcement.

They really seem to know what they're doing here at Schick. If anyone reading this gets to come here, two things: 1. You're lucky and I'm proud of you. 2. Don't skip your recaps.


So here I am, still waking up from my Sleepy and the feeling is so pleasant. It is low-level pleasant, not any kind of climb-a-mountain-and-sing kind of pleasant. I just feel good. A nice reward, I suppose, for what will come tomorrow.