MW_Secret_files/Erotic Dreams.pdf - Medwords.com.au

PRACTICE TALES
Degradation
I had known Helen for over 20 years as a patient. Her husband was a successful
businessman, she had two delightful daughters and she lived in a magnificent home in
a desirable suburb. She had everything that she could possibly want, but she
destroyed it all slowly and surely over many years to become the most degraded
human being I have ever seen.
She was fine for months at a time, but then she would start drinking, and drinking
and drinking. She became aggressive, irresponsible and abusive.
She travelled the world with her husband on his business trips, but if she started a
binge, he had to abandon the trip and get her back to the security of her home until
the episode passed. On one trip when she started drinking in Moscow she was
arrested for shoplifting. A short stint (short only thanks to the payment of a large
bribe) in a Russian prison sobered her up faster than any private clinic.
Private clinics cost her family a fortune. She tried them all - expensive retreats,
intensive treatment as an inpatient, and regular sessions with Alcoholics Anonymous.
When she was good she was very very good, but when she was bad she was horrid.
Her children refused to see her and moved interstate. She lost all her friends,
became a loner and this only reinforced her poor self esteem and desire to drink more
to relieve her boredom and frustration.
Her normal binges lasted a week or two and eventually her husband was able to
control the situation, but a call from her long suffering husband one morning begging
for help had me at their home a few hours later.
I was told that Helen had been drinking for two months non-stop - a five litre cask
of wine every day, with no food. She was irrational and incontinent, but if the wine
was withheld she became violent and started convulsing with delirium tremens.
When I arrived at the large home I was taken to the guest quarters. I saw the most
degraded human being I have ever encountered.
Helen was naked, covered in weeping sores and faeces. She was lying on a faeces
and urine soaked bed, the carpet was similarly affected, and windows and wall plaster
had been smashed. The room had been stripped of all other furniture. She was
bedraggled and looked more like a cornered wild animal than a human. The smell was
overpowering.
Merely walking into the room my shoes squelched in the urine and faeces. She
threw faeces at me - fortunately missing - as an indication of her displeasure at
having her binge interrupted. There was no way in which I could reason with her, and
being left unattended, she would soon die from either alcohol poisoning, septicaemia
from her infected sores, or delirium tremens if her alcohol was ceased. She
desperately needed hospitalisation.
I hosed my shoes in the garden as I left.
92