Reply #13: Oh yeah, the nurses nicknamed him "Lazarus"

[Bouncy Ball]

because they felt he rose from the dead. The doctor took me out in the hall to tell me his blood alcohol level and I couldn't even process a number that high at first. The doctor said "I've seen corpses with BAL's lower than that. I don't know how he's alive."

By the way, the doctor was really disgusted with my stepdad throughout and I can't say I blame him. At one point, he started mumbling to himself (the doctor) about little kids with cancer who didn't do a thing to deserve it and here's this guy trying to kill himself with alcohol.

They had to sew up his toe, it was cut pretty badly. He actually felt it. They strapped him down and my stepfather kept looking at me and slurring "Tell that doctor he's an asshole!" It was so freaking embarrassing. Then he kept demanding the nurses kiss him.

He went to Copak after that. It's a hardcore detox center in Mississippi, called the Betty Ford of the South. He was there for three months, inpatient. After insurance, it was $60,000 and his elderly dad paid it. Then he transitioned to a halfway house, then an apartment with a roommate further along in the program. He talked the roommate into drinking again and soon he was kicked out of the program altogether.

He's been in various detox programs a total of 17 times. Fallen off the wagon every single time. He's been jailed for DWI, public intoxication, resisting arrest, and one more serious sentence for assaulting a police officer and a woman at the strip club he was at.

What's really sad is what he once was. When I first met him I was five and he was an amazing man. He had written this incredible dissertation having something to do with theoretical mathematics and had been offered a teaching position at Stanford. But he met my mom on a blind date. She was 24, blond, green eyes, petite, absolutely drop dead gorgeous and charming. And mentally unbalanced, but he didn't know that at first. He had been a very sheltered person all his life and fell so hard for her, he gave up the teaching offer to stay and work for his dad's company here. She just saw him as a meal ticket. She encouraged him to drink, he was an overnight dad to two, and hated his job. She got worse and worse and I'm sure I don't need to go on. He probably already had addictive tendencies, but I'm saddened to think what his life could have been like.

Anyway, he's almost 60 now and a shell of a person. His liver, believe it or not, has been amazingly resilient, but the alcohol has severely affected his mind. He is barely functioning. They divorced in 1999 and then remarried each other the very next year, but now they are separated again.