What Is Rock Bottom?

Jails, institutions and death. That’s what we’re told awaits us if we relapse. Hearing another alcoholic or addict “tell their story” in a meeting can be incredibly powerful. Many of us hear the consequences we have yet to experience...the “yets” that are still out there if we pick up again.

As I write this, I’m sitting at the hospital bedside of a bright and beautiful girl who had put together several months of sobriety, but decided to “hang out” with a “friend” who was “kind of sober”. That friend had cocaine. That cocaine was injected. That girl nearly died.

Her name is Lexi. This is day 6. She was admitted to the ICU with toxic cocaine levels and in danger of cardiac arrest. She also had rhabdomyolysis, a condition brought on by cocaine abuse in which muscle tissue breaks down and attacks the kidneys, causing renal failure. Oh, and she’d been badly beaten, in fact she initially ended up in the hospital because of her physical injuries. It wasn’t until they began to examine her that the true picture began to unfold.

And it’s still unfolding. Very very slowly. She still doesn’t know who beat her or what happened that night. She woke up from a blackout in a pool of blood and didn’t know where she was, but she somehow had the presence of mind to call me. I’m her recovery coach. Or at least I used to be. She dismissed me when she felt she “had it under control”. Or maybe she dismissed me because she decided she was going to use again. Whatever the reason, all the progress we’d made came grinding to a halt. Honesty and accountability went out the window. “People, places and things” reared their ugly heads.

And here she is. She’s stabilized now, and the next step is getting her into a treatment center. It won’t be her first. (The “kind of sober” friend was someone she met in rehab.) And it might not be her last. It takes a lot of work to get clean and sober, but the essential work starts when you go back to real life, to the world that was once too painful to experience without the aid of a substance. It’s critical to have a support network. A therapist, a 12-step sponsor, a recovery coach and sober friends can all help build a solid foundation for a healthy and meaningful life.

Lexi has such incredible potential. She’s a brilliant artist, a wizard with words and a natural beauty. People are drawn to her nurturing spirit, spontaneous wit and magnetic energy.

But she couldn’t stay clean on her own. The good news is that when she relapsed, she called me. The bad news? That she’d stopped calling me.

It breaks my heart to see her this way. But maybe...just maybe...this is as low as she’ll go.

All addicts eventually stop using. Some just choose to do it while they’re still alive.