My drinking was so destructive that I needed a double transplant: a new liver and kidney. But the hospital denied me. The transplant committee deemed me to be at a high risk for drinking again. We don’t want to waste a liver and kidney on Justin. 

This meant I was stuck on dialysis in the hospital. Apart from my partner, who stood by me, I was alone––withering away in a hospital bed, just waiting and waiting for something to happen. It meant I had a lot of time to think and reflect on my life. How did I get here?

Alcohol completed me. It had total control. It became as important to my survival as food, water, and sleep. At first, I drank to feel calm. I couldn’t control my thoughts, so I used alcohol to turn down the volume on this relentless voice of anxiety and insecurity and harsh self-judgment. Just as my mind needed alcohol to quiet down, eventually my body needed alcohol to function. I couldn’t sleep through the night without it. I’d fall asleep and wake up at three or four in the morning, stagger downstairs to the kitchen, and drink just to feel okay and hopefully sleep through the rest of the night. I’d wake up in a daze and do it all over again. This played out over several years.

I didn’t intend for my drinking to turn out this way. I don’t think anybody thinks they’ll end up where I did, in a hospital with double organ failure. But it happened to me, and I learned that it happens more often than we think. Take the pandemic. It was chaos. People felt scared, stressed, and isolated. So they drank to cope. Those were the same reasons I drank. Binge drinking, deaths from drinking, emergency room visits for alcohol withdrawal––all of these things went way up during the pandemic. 

Opioids get a lot of attention, and rightfully so, but drinking in America is a serious public health problem. Alcohol is just more accepted and normalized, which means it flies under the radar as an everyday part of our culture. We toast at weddings. We drink to celebrate, to socialize, to feel joy and pleasure. Alcohol can loosen us up and help us connect. Our bodies and minds just say, “Yes!” to alcohol. It’s a very human thing to want to enjoy alcohol.

So, those of us who struggle with drinking tend to struggle quietly. That’s what makes it so insidious. It’s easy to blend in and hide a drinking problem, until it’s too late. It’s also easy to hide it from ourselves: Well, I’m not using meth or cocaine or fentanyl, so what’s the big deal? I’m not doing anything illegal, so there’s no issue. These rationalizations can harden over time and prevent people from seeking help. Addiction is addiction. Whether it’s drinking or cocaine or opioids, the pattern of thoughts and behaviors driving it are similar.

For me, the starting point was just talking about it. Lying in the hospital, thinking I only had weeks left to live, I finally began to say all the thoughts in my head out loud. I learned that the voice in my head, that anxious and judgy voice, was wildly inaccurate. I realized I had this filter on that distorted my thinking. I don’t think I would’ve learned that had I not started to say things out loud to another person. In this case it was my wife, and she helped me by just sitting next to me and listening.

It was really scary. I was most afraid of telling her how I felt because I feared her judgment the most. I worried about letting her down. That’s one of the tragedies of addiction, that we tend to hurt the people who we love the most. But she didn’t judge or tell me I was a bad person. She just listened. She recognized even before I did that there was no ill intent or maliciousness in my drinking. She didn’t make me feel more shame or guilt than I was already feeling. Because of her I opened up. She helped me see that underneath my addiction there was a lot of pain and suffering. I started to have some compassion for myself, and by talking with her I was finally honest with myself. In a way, her approach with me is quintessentially how a peer approaches a patient. 

The irony was, right as I was beginning to see change and believe in the future, my time was running out. The transplant committee denied me. The doctors told me I wasn’t going to make it through the weekend. I thought I was out of options. What happened next is so unbelievably strange. I remember the date: it was October, Friday the 13th. One of the liver doctors who had been treating me called his colleague in another state. My doctor went up to bat for me. He made a case for treating me and urged his colleague to put me on the transplant list at a different hospital. 

Someone saw something in me. I didn’t have months of sobriety under my belt, but they believed I could change. And their belief in me helped me believe in myself. By the end of that weekend, I was meeting the new team that was going to take me on. When I met them––and I’ll never forget this––the first thing they did was shake my hand. They treated me like a person who deserved their help. And I survived. I got the operation and it changed my life forever. That was seven years ago. 

But my story doesn’t end there. In a way, that was just the beginning. Looking back on my experience in the hospital, it was such a lonely place to be. During that whole time, there was no one to talk to who had experienced what I was going through. It was a lot of nurses, doctors, and case managers. Some of them had sympathy and empathy for me. But it was still clinical and impersonal. I think about how much different I would’ve felt if someone who’d been where I was had talked to me about it. 

My new life started with another irony. I started to work for the very same hospital that denied me a transplant. Whenever there was a patient with alcohol use disorder, whenever someone needed a transplant because of their drinking, I was called to their bedside. I was going to be the one person in the hospital who didn’t want or need anything from them. I wasn’t there to judge, assess, or evaluate them. I’d have no agenda. I’m not there to fix anything. Just be there with them and connect on a human level. 

I had gone through this life changing experience, this transformation, and I felt both a duty and responsibility to do something with it. I tell people: I’ll stand in the storm with you. I’ll give you cover if you want it. But I can’t stop the storm. The point is that we’re in this together.