Episode #1 (Season 10) - "Anniversary of Health Scare/Living with Chronic Pain"

Recovery Radio KMP 3000 Oaks Yes, you are listening to the recovery radio podcast on KMP 3. I am a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and I will be your host. You can email me at sarcasticbigbook@gmail, follow me on Instagram at sarcastic.aa.book, visit my websites recoveryradio KMP3.com, sarcasticbigbook.com, and to get the books you can go to Amazon, look up sarcastic big book just for yesterday. And as always I'm so glad you're here with me. I don't know if your day is just getting started. I don't know if it's just winding down. I don't know if it's somewhere right in the middle. I don't know. How would I know? But here we are. You and me and I am glad for that. And I am grateful. I have no desire to drink today. And I do have a piping hot cup of French Roes coffee from Trader Joe's mixed with some Don Francis goes hazelnut. It is absolutely delicious. Well, this is season 10 and it's kind of arbitrary because I think season one had like 200 something episodes and then somebody wrote to me and said you should have shorter seasons. It's hard to find episodes and I forget exactly what but I started to make different seasons and the number of episodes in each season is kind of different so I don't really know what it means but this is episode one season 10. I'm glad that you're here with me. Support for this podcast means so much. I mean you really have no idea how happy it makes me. Something I think about a lot. The fact that it's helping some people. Think about it a lot. So anyways, thank you. If you've ever written me, thank you. I appreciate it and even if you haven't, thank you for being here right now. So I grew up really kind of lucky health-wise I guess. I never was in the hospital ever until six years ago today. Six years ago today I had a stroke and very young to have a stroke and they didn't know why I had the stroke. My lungs were fine. My heart was fine. I couldn't find any reason why I would have had it and then they found this birth defect after doing a bunch of tests. They found a birth defect which is the reason that I had it and then I had a procedure where they fixed that and then I got a clean bill of health. I had a neurologist and a nutritionist and a cardiologist and all these people and gear went by. I got a clean bill of health and then I started having panic attacks. As soon as I had a clean bill of health and I wasn't going to the doctors all the time, I panicked and I started to have severe panic attacks and really really bad PTSD and went to therapy, changed my life. It was a really really challenging period of time and throughout it though I was showing up for my life. I was recording here. I was doing the workshop even though I had to get up sometimes and leave and let my friend take over as I was having severe panic attacks and therapy really helped me stop having them. That was six years ago tonight. I woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't talk. I was trying to talk but I just couldn't form words. It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. I remember my sobriety date was coming up so I remember I was in the hospital and there's everybody who came in who knew me. They would all say the same thing. They would be like, "Oh my god, you'll never believe what's written on your bed and I guess on pieces of masking tape all over my bed was my sobriety date." Which you know was coming up about a week and a half from now and it was just I guess trippy. Probably when they needed to change something or check something or something but I remember and I've shared about it on here. I remember you know being wheeled into the hospital just like in a movie and there's people panicking all over the place and hooking things up to you and asking questions and doing tests and I had never been in a hospital in my whole life. Never. And they're asking me questions and I couldn't answer, I couldn't speak, and I remember I was they said, "Do you know what time this happened?" and I didn't know what time so they couldn't give me the medicine. They can normally give a person in that state that would like basically ensure you know their life to be saved or something but they couldn't give it to you. They didn't know what time it happened because it was outside of that time then it could backfire and make things it could kill you. So all the doctors just kind of crossed their fingers and looked at me and I got wheeled into some hallway. I remember there was really bad lighting and I was just lying in this bed and I couldn't talk and I didn't know what's gonna happen to me. I didn't know and I do remember thinking, "Does everybody that I love know that I love them?" Like have I told everybody recently enough for them to know that I haven't changed my mind, that I still love them. We all go through changes all the time. I'm a different person today than I was yesterday or a week ago or a month ago but we take these you know mental pictures of people and kind of freeze them in time but everybody changes all the time. Everybody's always changing, changing their mind about things, reconsidering things, different places in their process, new realizations. I know if somebody doesn't say that they love me in a long time goes by, I don't know anymore. It's not like a given to me. My love language is language. Everybody's different but I love hearing it. Of course if you hear it, don't feel it then that's a whole other thing but I do love hearing it. So anyways I'm laying there in this bed and I'm thinking about this and like, "Does everybody I know, does everybody that I love know that I love them? Do they know?" And the answer was yes. Everybody that I loved, I believed knew that I loved them. I believed that I had been demonstrating and/or communicating that as much as I could to everybody that I really loved and I was filled with peace after that. I was filled with peace and I just thought I can't do better than that. I don't know, you know, I guess that's good. Then a few hours went by and they gave me every test you could think of. I think I had a pap smear. I'm just kidding. I started to regain my ability to talk and then I was talking pretty good and then I was talking really good and I was in the hospital thinking, you know, why I'd never really had a problem before. I always thought I had problems. But when you almost die, you're thinking you're gonna die, have your near-death experience, it does change you a lot. You know, I remember when I was 30 years old and I was watching September 11th happen in my neighborhood and I remember thinking that there was no, I've never had a problem until this minute. There's never been a problem in my life until this minute. This is like actual problem. And then when I almost died, it was like, okay, this is a, I never had a problem before, but it did change me a lot. Some people have been writing to me about chronic pain. I just wanted to say something about that. When I was drinking, I was in the mountains somewhere, some cabin. God knows how I got there or why I was there, but and I fell down like 25 stairs. I slid on snow, straight down, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, all the way down and really messed up my spine. Never got it repaired, never got it looked at and caused me many, many years of trouble later once I sobered up. And I had spent a lot of time in my life in agony, physical agony as a result of my back pain, just agony. Stayed sober. Never took more than ibuprofen. And something called a Tens Machine ended up saving me, physical therapy ended up saving me. I saw all kinds of doctors, some of them recommended surgery. I was a smoker at the time, someone more like, do not get the surgery or idiot. You're smoking and it's kind of, you know, they just talk me out of it. But anyways, physical therapy, stretching, physical therapy, really stretching. And the Tens Machine really saved me, but there was a lot of time that went by in my life where I was in tremendous physical pain. And I've been trying to think of a way to describe how I've gone through that. I don't know, maybe you're listening and you're going through that or somebody who knows going through that. And I guess, I mean, I just want to, I just want to say that I went through that for all those long periods of time at times. The same way I just have gone through everything. I'm just looking for God, trying to be admitting for us, trying to be a light in the world. Just because I was in excruciating pain didn't mean that I should all of a sudden be a dick. I remember one of the times I was feeling so good. I was feeling so good. I was living in Manhattan. I was feeling so good and I was gonna, I went down to the central office and I volunteered to man the phones. You know, I was so excited I came back and I reached for a yogurt in my refrigerator and my back went out and I couldn't move. I couldn't move for, when I couldn't move. I mean, people say they can't move a lot, but I literally could not move for a long time. That was back in the day when, you know, they couldn't just forward, there was no cell phones happening. So I was so excited to be able to start doing that and then I couldn't do that and then, fortunately, I was already past the point where I was like reading into everything. What is God trying to tell me? I don't think God was trying to tell me anything. I think I have a really bad back and sometimes it goes out. But, I don't know, I wish I had some fancy way of describing how I've gone through things, but it's just all the stuff I talk about on here, gone through everything that I've gone through exactly by the same tools and principles that I talk about on here all the time. I have a really simple understanding of what alcoholism is according to the big book and the application of the solution of the big book started working a million times better once I adopted the big books definition of what the problem is. Big books definition of the problem, there's no alcoholic thinking whatsoever that does not involve thinking about alcohol. There's no such thing. None. As alcoholics, we like to, you know, sleep in and we like to, we like to do this, we like to do that. Big book's really, really beautiful, really, really simple, and I do talk about it a lot on here. If you're interested, people write to me about this. I have, you know, what the big book says. What does the big book say? Parts one through whatever on here. I go all the way through it in detail. But, you know, that understanding has changed how I apply it all and what I apply in my life is all the things I talk to you about to the best of my ability. That's how I get through health scares. That's how I've gotten through tragedies. That's how I've gotten through chronic pain. That's how I've gotten through all kinds of things. It's just the same. It's not a separate solution. It's jumping rope. What does God want me to do right now? Playing with house money. This is all free. Free time. That we've been given as sober alcoholics. So... Hi Nina! Maureen, Mark, Chelsea, Dave, Amanda, Tom, Katie, love you so much. And if AB needs to hear it, everything is okay. And I'm gonna go model. My back's good now. I'm like a beast. Which is funny because that's the modeling that I'm doing. It's for a company called Beast. It is a... I don't want to say it's just Perrier, but it is. It's just bubbly water, but it's called Beast. It's German I think. But... I'm gonna go model that. I hold this bottle of sparkly water and I'm wearing... How do I describe this? It's a robe, but it's much shorter than a robe. Like a lot shorter. It also starts way, way further down the body than the shoulders. And it's mostly seen through. Dude, what am I talking about? What am I talking about? I don't even know. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna remodel my website and our websites. So I'll have an announcement about that very soon. Anyways, I do not know why my life was saved, but I am gonna go try to live life that was worth saving and I hope you'll do the same. Good night. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)