I had a beautiful baby boy just out of nursing school and my husband wanted to leave me because he did not want a family. He went to work as a waiter at a male strip club and did not come home until 5:00 or 6:00am in the morning. I retaliated and became pregnant again and I was not sure if my husband was the father. I had an abortion without sorrow, guilt or regret. I did not believe that the fetus was a baby at that time. There was no God as far as I was concerned, so there was no sin. I did whatever I wanted to do and did not have any remorse.
I had my fallopian tubes tied to be sure that there were no more accidents. Besides, I wanted to be a doctor and I felt that I could never get to medical school with a lot of children. Doctors had real power, as far as I was concerned, over life and death and I wanted that kind of power and prestige. My husband was not supportive of that goal and I signed up for classers then withdrew several times. We loved and fought, drank and drugged our way through 15 years of marriage with several near divorces. Suddenly, I became thirsty for beer.
The summer was hot and I gardened every day. The neighbors would stop by in the afternoon and give me a cold beer. I came to think of cold beer as my reward for hard work. I could only drink about 4 beers when I started, but after a few months I was putting away at least a 12 pack every night. I took a job working 4 twelve hour shifts in a row on a weekend and then having 10 days off. This rotation went on every two weeks. My drinking increased to a case of 24 beers per day, starting in the morning and going all night long. I would get up and drink beer to stop my shaking, then I would throw up and I knew that I had to wait awhile and drink some more to stabilize myself.
I stayed drunk all the time, as I was healing from a spinal fusion operation. I had been skunk drunk when I checked into the hospital. My nursing career was over because I could not lift anymore and I did not want to work for insurance companies in isolation with tall stacks of files. My husband said that I did not have to work, so I just drank beer, which he brought me every day. I would sit outside and drink and look at the stars. After awhile, I started hallucinating and I could feel bugs crawling on me that were not there. I was having real DT’s (delirium tremens), and I realized that I would have to stop drinking. In my delusional state, I thought that the television and the radio had started talking to me personally in an interactive format. I tried to go without drinking for 5 or 6 days in a row, but every day something happened that made me drink. I finally figured out that I could not quit drinking. I felt trapped and unbelievably miserable.
One night while I was drinking and hallucinating, I cried out to Jesus Christ “Lord, if you are there please help me to stop drinking.” Within a week I was being forced to go to A.A. meetings through the State Board of Nursing, whom I had called to see about getting some help. A.A. told me that I was powerless over alcohol if I were an alcoholic, so I agreed that I was one. I was desperate to stop drinking and a nice young Christian girl came to help me navigate the A.A. program. A.A. was not a Christian program, it was a secular program, and I did not want her to give me any ‘holier than thou’ business. She was nice to me, but I remained delusional even though I had stopped drinking. So, I got myself a Navajo Indian sponsor. “There’s no better drunk than a drunken Indian”, I thought. She pretty much said the same thing as my nice, Christian sponsor, so I finally got a sponsor who had been a topless dancer. She found all my faults and mistakes just like the other two sponsors. I gave up and went solo for awhile.
I had solved the problem about the television and radio talking to me by turning them off. The A.A. book recommended seeing a doctor, if necessary, but I did not want any mental health care. I fell out with my A.A. group and stopped going to meetings. Besides, I did not have time to go since my husband and I had started a business. I had 8 years of continuous sobriety in A.A. I had been reading a lot of different religions and practicing some, including Wicca. I thought that my family was a Masonic family and that I was in line for the throne of England. My husband left me after 28 years of marriage and I decided that he was an imposter and not really my husband. The divorce drug on because I kept asking for postponements, but finally he was granted a divorce. That was 32 years of marriage down the drain.
I spent a lot of my time on the computer surfing the web and my interest was snagged by pornography sites. I thought that I must need a sexual excursion and that surfing those websites would rev me up for it. I was highly delusional in my thinking, I was not praying or giving my life to God on a daily basis and I become engrossed in Internet pornography to the point that that was all I did during my waking hours. This is a very serious addiction that affects all facets of society, even the ministry, and I became powerless over my addiction. All this just added to my delusions and thankfully, I never met with anyone that I met on pornography chat sites.
I became progressively more agitated as time went on. I decided that my mother was an imposter as well, and I finally went completely insane and broke the windows out of her house in an effort to chase away the imposter. That landed me in the county jail with a burglary charge, although I had not gone into the house. The court decided that I needed some mental health care, so they sent me to the State Mental Hospital. I babbled about my status and they gave me Haldol, a very strong psychiatric drug that makes your mouth hang open so that you drool occasionally. It took a whole year on Haldol before I woke up and realized that I was not the queen, and that my mother was not an imposter. When my mind cleared up I was in a maximum security hospital for criminally dangerous people. I was horrified, but the Haldol kept my emotions in check. They decided that I was ‘not manifestly dangerous’, so I was transferred to a minimum security State Hospital.