The worst Hangover

Think of the worst hangover you have ever had. You wake up with your head pounding, it hurts to open your eyes, your mouth feels dry and parched, you smell of sweat, your body feels like a damp rag, you alternately shiver and feel hot and you know you need to throw up. As you turn your head on the pillow the nausea sweeps over you and you feel you are going to be sick, but you don’t have the strength to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. You lay like this for what seems like ages, tossing your head from one side to the other, desperately hoping the desire to be sick will go away - It doesn’t. Then, you finally courage up the effort to go and be sick in the toilet. The vomit burns your throat and now you feel like fainting and the shivering gets worse. You crawl back to bed, cover yourself in the duvet and wish the pounding headache would stop. But you know it won’t stop for ages because you have been though all of this many times before, and last time, just like the other times, you vowed it would never happen again.

Now as you lay there feeling sorry for yourself you try to recall what happened the night before and you can remember snippets of what went on but by no means everything. Suddenly you are gripped with fear that you did or said something terrible. You sweat with the stress and worry. Will it matter? Was it job threatening? Wasn’t there something important you were supposed to do today? Is there someone you should apologise to?

‘I hate being like this’ you say to yourself. ‘I want my life to change.’ ‘I wish it was yesterday and I hadn’t had a drink.’
You are on the verge of making that momentous decision to quit alcohol forever. But this is perhaps the hardest part of all. How are you going to cope? Surely you can have just a few drinks and be more sensible next time, after all you really like the taste of wine even though the thought of having some now is repulsive. Your head continues to ache, and you feel too ill to argue with yourself. Better to try and sleep and let another day slip by, wasted and lost forever.

This is when my book ‘One Less for the Road’ can really help, or perhaps even better the audio version so you can lay in bed and listen to me talk you through my being in your exact same situation and what made me realise that I could face life without another glass of wine.