A Stable Force

After 15 months of abstinence, my life burst. It’s like I was a balloon filled with too much air until it couldn’t hold any more and it exploded.

It was 6:15 AM and I was in pain, trying to commit my food to my long-distance sponsor between winces and groans. She stopped me. “It sounds like you need to go to the hospital.” I told her about my plan to go to job one, then job two, and come home if I didn’t feel better. I didn’t want to call in sick again. I’d been up in agony all night but didn’t want my co-workers to think I was unreliable if I called in sick.. “It sounds like you need to go to the hospital,” she said again. She’s a retired nurse who calls it like it is. I hung up and crawled along my apartment floor, praying for help. In that moment, I felt directly connected to God. There have been many times in my recovery where it felt like I was just going through the motions, praying and saying empty words to my Higher Power without any feeling, but in this moment, all those prayers I spent on my knees kicked in. I felt a conscious connection. I took a cab to the emergency room.

During that painful period, my usual obsessions simply vanished. It was me and God. It’s good I went to the hospital. My appendix had ruptured. The medical staff removed it that night. The next morning, I understood that because of my sponsor’s clarity, my life was spared.

Leading up to the burst, I’d been working two extra jobs and carefully trying to cram everything into a meticulous schedule that included time for a new relationship, FA, family, and church. Still, I committed to work every FA tool every day, and I did. I was able to make it through the challenges and the joys of this time abstinently.

Early in recovery, I lamented to a long-timer that it just felt like I wake up, do FA, go to work, do FA, come home, do FA, go to bed and do the same thing over again. Is this what recovery is like? She said, “You’re building your foundation. Working your tools every day is like the roots of a tree growing deep into the soil, so when the storms come, your tree – your abstinence - will stand.” And, behold, over the past several months, the storms have come. Some were self-created and others were not. The stable, rhythmic force in my life has been FA, my Higher Power, and my abstinence.