The Brave Babes Battle Bus - On Their Way To............... Amarillo?

[Mouseface]

.............. sorry, ran out of ideas tonight!

Hello, tis me, Mouse and I have a very abusive relationship with alcohol, vodka in particular.

Welcome to the Battle Bus, full of totally Brave Babes all on their own personal journey to sobriety. Some are there, some are still on their way and some aren't quite ready yet but stay on the Bus for a good old natter

Wherever you are in your quest to get back control of your drinking, we've all been there too so you're not alone, not by a long shot.

Come take a seat and say hello.

If you'd like to know the history behind this amazing journey, you can follow the links back HERE

See you soon x

Haha that vid made me laugh mia! I myself have a 17 week old lab who is yet to discover the joys of rolling in smelly stuff. He needs a walk today and looking at the weather I don't want to!

I am firmly in the sidecar this weekend, I bought a bottle of white yesterday with the intention of making it last both weekend nights....it didn't!

I am not buying any more today, I have some cans of lager that will have to suffice, then I am going to try to abstain from Sunday through to Thursday. We'll see.

Have a nice Saturday all x

Went out last night. started with a soft drink but then had half a bottle of red with dinner and 4 bacardis after .. no more than anyone else but more than i had planned on having.. I'm out tonight again.. considering taking the car .. swithering ..

Hi proud thanks for asking. I'm alright s'pose. Still fed up with myself for drinking on Thursday, still a bit shaken up by all the rage I've been feeling this week. Drank about three quarters of a bottle over the whole evening last night, so didn't get hammered, but it wasn't the model of happy restraint that last weekend was. Woke up drenched in sweat during the night, which I haven,t done since I stopped drinking. This could be due to the fact that I'd had a dream that waitrose went bust but is more likely to be due to the booze, methinks.

i think I'm having the backlash I predicted I'd have when I realised that not drinking didn't magically transform me into a different person. Also I halved my AD dose about ten days ago because I was this new shiny person so possibly that's why it's all gone slightly pear-shaped.

How are you?

Glad you liked it Ginger She's a ball of neurotic fluffy foolery. 17 weeks is a gorgeous age - still all puppy-fat and needle teeth! Have you got a dog-in-a-bag bag for drying off after walks? They're quite splendid.
here

hi proud - thanks. yes it is a fine line between support and enabling sometimes that we have to walk. things can get a bit out of balance on that scale but tend to come back to centre itms ime.

mia - loved your dog vid - gave me a good chuckle

still can't face bathing the dog - it is her one downside - she loves rolling in things: dead things, fox poo, silage, anything. vile but she loves it. and she has a real honing device for dead things - she'd make a fab cadaver dog.

mia could be ad cessation syndrome you're experiencing (can get it from a rapid cutting down as well as stopping) - vivid dreams, sweats, mood all over the place, can also get some weird physical symptoms like electric shocks going through you. halving them because of a brief happy spell probably wasn't the wisest but i've been there believe me can you put them back up a bit but maybe not all the way back to where they were? tbh i'd just call it a lesson learned if i was you and put them back to where they were. you don't need to do everything at once you know and why make things harder for yourself?

Nooooo! He would absolutely hate that! Poor doggy!

at your Waitrose dream! You are a woman after my own heart.

I am good-ish - drinking wise, I'm great. I feel so fundamentally different about it, it's hard to explain.

But I am really struggling with the dh drinking thing which we've spoken about before. He is not where I am with the whole thing. I can't really expect him to be, but I wish he was. Last night he sank a bottle and a half of wine, I didn't have any and didn't want one. But I went to bed early to avoid nagging at him to stop - his slurring and wine breath was getting on my tits!!

He has got better - well in Mr Proud world he has got better. He thinks if he's 'only' drinking two or three nights a week then he's being 'good'. I hate the euphemism 'good' too. It's so twee and so minimising. I feel like saying 'Tell that to your liver - that drinking 50 units a week is being 'good''.

Hmmm I seem to be rather angry!

And it's honestly not about my own 'loss'. It's about wondering if I will have to live in perpetual annoyance...

SAF - aahhh yes 'enabling' that's the word!

Can't join in with all your dog stories because I am petrified of dogs I am a cat person meself.

that dog bag has just made me pee myself laughing. practical but possibly one of the most ridiculous things i've seen in a while

Morning all

Saf could you make it that one thing that you 'force' yourself to do today, like you said before?

Spider - not me - I am & ever have been a Libertarian - I first read that as librarian

Hello and welcome to new babes, returning babes, old babes with new names .

We have a full bus load today, who's driving and where are we going?

< sits patiently waiting for Silver or Isinde to start the engine >

Proud that must be so difficult for you. I'm not sure how I would cope and it's so sad to see that he's not ready to help himself. I suppose he will continue no matter what you say (as would a lot of us if we didn't want to hear it). Maybe just get on and show by example how much better it is to wake early and refreshed and get lots done. He will watch you transform before his very eyes and hopefully decide to join you .

You are doing great, keep at it x

Fairenuff - thanks. Yes he is aware of my fundamental shift and is supportive of it - he's not (as I thought he might) encouraging me to have a drink when he is. He is taking my feelings seriously, just not applying them to his own drinking. But as I said, he has made changes and is not drinking during the week and that is something. Like other issues in a marriage, I am trying to view it as a cross to bear. Something that is what it is and I have to just suck it up - and yes lead by example.

How are you anyway?

I'm good thanks Proud

Got to go shopping for a wedding outfit later this morning (just waiting for dd to get up). I have two weeks more to stick to my diet and then going to enjoy the wedding and eat what I like .

Mouse I meant to say - 7lbs wowee that's good going . You must be able to feel a difference already.

sunlit how are you doing today? I've been thinking about everything you told us yesterday, and wondering if it has helped to get some of it out in the open, or whether confronting it has put you in a worse place?

I agree there is a fine line between listening and enabling. The fact this is a bus for people with alcohol problems surely means you will sometimes get people on this bus who are drinking though?

I was drinking last night, but I wasn't behaving like it was a night at the pub was I?

My apologies for posting. I will not be posting again.

Yes amazing weight loss, Mouse.

I also need to lose weight for (another) wedding - well two actually (am so old now, it's no longer my friends getting married, it's my 'little cousins' or people on second marriages).

I do like shopping for a wedding outfit - as long as some things fit!

saf glad I've given you two dog-based giggles this morning. The bag is even funnier when your dog is in it, because if they try to walk in it, they fall straight over. When we stick the cocker in her bag to go in the car at the end of the walk, passersby do tend to stop and point and laugh comment.

My ADs... yes maybe I was being a bit premature there. The thing is, I always have to increase my dose in the winter (40mg od citalopram) and can usually drop it down to 20mg od in the summer. This spring I hadn't been feeling any better overall, so when I did, I thought 'Ooh great I can drop my dose down'. Being on 40mg gives me this flickering eye thing which results in me unconsciously clenching my teeth all the time, (god I sound like a fucking nutcase ) so it was a relief to reduce the dose because that's improved a lot. I maybe should have spent longer on 30mg od, (I just did a few days on 30 then dropped to 20) and I should go back up to 30mg for a couple of weeks. I'm so bloody impatient, that's my problem amongst my many other flaws Thanks for the advice saf.

some weird physical symptoms like electric shocks going through you

Ah... the brain shivers!

Sorry X posted - most people on this thread do or have been drinking while coming on here, Curious, so you are absolutely right, it's not a 'sober thread'. It's a support thread. Don't stop posting.

I got the brain shivers on venlafaxine when I came off it - not nice - 30mg sounds sensible for a wee while though.... (muppet advice disclaimer applies..)

Curious I am going round in circles trying to respond to you because what I want to say does not come out right in type

So I'll just say stick around for a bit longer? Come and chat with us again because everyone is welcome, every opinion is valid, every feeling expressed is genuine and we are all just here to help each other and ourselves x

Got a song in my head now, 'When we collide we come together . . '

Can't remember the rest of it

Proud there's nowt so boring as being sober around a pissed person (or straight around a stoned person, etc etc). I can understand your irritation at watching your DH get progressively more pissed over the evening. It's bloody hard though, isn't it, because you can't expect him to be instantly in sync with your new attitude. I'm in the same position with DP; he's supportive of what I'm doing but there's no way he'd stop drinking. He has cut down a lot though, since I started all this.

Hopefully your good example will inspire him.

Yep, that's all I can do. I don't find it boring. I find it frustrating - it's so unnecessary to have 2/3 more glasses after the point of being perfectly relaxed or merry. But, well, if everyone could stop at that point, this thread would be obsolete.

Fairenuff - you are quoting from a Matt Cardle song

Morning all :)

Welcome to all the newbies! Gosh, it's so busy here at the moment. I'm afraid I'm struggling to remember who's who and keep up with everything, but it's good to see so many people supporting each other and confronting their problems. It is so good to know I'm not alone in my battles with the booze. Hope everyone's feeling OK this morning. Curious, keep posting please :)

Mia, your dog is adorable! That bag is hilarious :o

Sunny, big high five for you for going to the doctor's. That was a brave and wise thing to do. Onwards and upwards :o

Hopefully, fab news regarding the ECG. This could be the start of the rest of your life. Let us know how you're getting on.

Mouse, 7lbs!! Wow! . I sooo need to kick-start my diet. I just can't stop eating . If I'm not drinking, I just feel like I NEED to eat. And eat, and eat, and eat. Pure gluttony. If I could just lose a couple of pounds I think I'd really get back on track again with the diet and weight-loss. I just can't find the motivation. Are you hungry? How are you doing it? It's Atkins isn't it? Is there a veggie version I wonder? . Well done anyway. Good news about the morphine.

Well I drank last night. I have cut down hugely over recent months so I'm not going to beat myself up about it (not right now anyway). But, blimey, it affected my sleep last night. I was up in the night for a couple of hours, just kind of sweating and worrying . The more time I spend without the daily drinking, the more I realise how much it affects my physical and mental health. Yet sometimes I just can't resist it :(

God this weather is so depressing. Grey, cold and damp. Roll on summer!

Have good days everyone.

pixwix that stuff was poison to me; really really didn't agree with me at all, yet the Dr just kept increasing the dose. It didn't help at all, I'm sure, that I was drinking quite a lot at the time (gin and whisky), but the GP did know this. That's the only time in my life when suicidal 'ideation' crossed the line from just 'not wanting to keep waking up like this' to actually making plans. Eventually I was on quite a high dose of it, and was manic - not sleeping, really unstable. In the space of a few months, I ended my marriage, met DD's dad, had a tumultuous, passionate but disastrous relationship with him, and ended up pregnant with DD! Thankfully I was already weaning myself off the venlafaxine so I was on a low dose when I got pregnant, as I'd realised how fucked up my state of mind was. I stopped completely when I realised I was pregnant, and had the horrible brain shivers for ages!