High Sobriety (36 page)

I'M INVITED TO
a friend's Christmas cocktail party. It's a house party, but quite a special event: all-you-can-drink beer, wine, and champers, plus a different cocktail served on the hour every hour, with accompanying canapés cooked by an apprentice chef from one of Melbourne's most famous fine-dining restaurants. I'm a bit bummed that I can't enjoy the cocktails, but our hostess mari-claire kindly offers to have her resident mixologist whip me up matching mocktails. At least I'll look like I'm drinking the same exotic concoctions as the other guests.

When we arrive late on Sunday afternoon, everyone is dressed up and looks fabulous. It's a great atmosphere. The other guests start off with beers and champagne, while I go with water.

The first cocktail is served. It's a peach Bellini. Mari-Claire tells me my non-alcoholic equivalent is on its way and heads back into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she proudly hand-delivers my drink. I'm so used to being the odd one out that there's something quite thrilling about being given a champagne coupe, frothy-pink and sparkling, like all the others. I admire it for a couple of seconds, and take a swig. As it hits the back of my throat, there's a sharpness that I recognise instantly. In that split-second, something snaps. I feel a surge in my brain like electricity rushing through a powerline. It's alcohol.

Thoughts and emotions tumble over one another in my head. Suddenly, I'm consumed with the possibility of getting drunk. Who would know? I'm certain it's alcohol, but I tell myself that maybe it's just a bitter-tasting mixer, such as tonic. Better take another sip. I get another surge of electricity. I can see myself knocking back beers and partying into the next morning. The buzz is exhilarating.

Then, I realise what's just happened. Less than two weeks to go, and I've failed. Can I really say I went a year without alcohol after this? Tears well as I turn to Loretta and hand her my glass. ‘Taste that. Is it alcohol?' I watch her as she tastes and nods. I'm devastated. She puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me that it's okay, it was two sips and it doesn't count. I didn't know it was alcohol. Mari-Claire is hugely apologetic. This was no sabotage — it was a genuine stuff-up. She makes me a new one, and this time the champagne is replaced with soda water, as per the original plan.

For the next hour, I battle a voice in my head that says, ‘Fuck it. You might as well get drunk.' I prevail and enjoy the rest of my night sober, trying not to dwell on the mishap. As a consolation prize, I smoke a few of the joints being passed around, knowing that this is a bad idea but doing it anyway. Then I smoke a few more.

I get chatting to a girl I vaguely recognise, but have never formally met. People are limbo-dancing on concrete in the driveway. The ground is getting wet and slippery as rain cascades over the side of the tin roof, covering the makeshift dance floor. I tell the girl that someone's going to end up on their back. She replies, ‘It'll be nothing compared to the fall you took last year.' I have no idea what she's talking about. She tells me that at one of these Christmas parties last year, I was dancing on a kitchen floor slippery with beer when my legs went from under me and I flew into the air, landing on my back with such an impact that there were real concerns I might have broken something. That's how she recognised me. I'm
that
girl. ‘The noise when you hit the floor was unbelievable. We were amazed you just got back up and kept dancing,' she says, smiling. I laugh, nodding to my water bottle and remarking on how different things are this year. Quietly, I'm troubled that my brain has erased all memory of this event. Landing flat on my back on a cold, hard dance floor is exactly what I did on my 25th birthday, ten years ago. Now seems a good time to leave.

Only when I get in my car to drive home do I realise how stoned I am. It's lashing down rain. I'm doing about 40 kilometres in an 80-kilometre zone, gripping the steering wheel like a 90-year-old grandmother. When I reach an intersection I don't recognise, I take a wrong turn and end up doing laps in a McDonald's car park, unable to find the exit. I feel like I'm trapped in an Escher painting. My brain starts to eat itself. How the fuck do I get out of this car park?

After several more laps and a string of expletives, I finally find the road home. My heart is pounding. I'm an idiot for driving in this state. How horribly ironic it would be to go nearly a whole year without drinking, only to be arrested for driving while stoned ten days before the finish line. When I pull into my car park, relief floods my muscles and leaves me limp. I kiss the steering wheel and, despite more than three decades of devout atheism, cross myself.

Lying in bed, I'm exhausted, but I can't sleep. That sip of alcohol stays with me. I'm worried about the way I reacted when the champagne passed my lips — that surge of electricity. It felt so wrong, and yet so right.

TWO DAYS LATER,
I turn up to a scheduled appointment with Jon Currie to discuss the results of my brain scans and to take more tests. I arrive at his Fitzroy addiction clinic, fittingly housed in an old building that used to be a pub and still has the name, Devonshire Arms Hotel, inscribed in stone above the door.

He shows me into his office. On his computer screen is a bluish image of my brain, taken from above, on a black background. It's very weird to see my scalp exposed like that, my brain sitting behind what looks like two white golf balls, but are actually my eyes. In another image, my profile is visible — my nose, lips, and chin — just as in a photograph, except that I've been sliced in half, I have no hair, and you can see my spinal cord running up to my brain. He points to the grey matter of my brain and says that we're looking for shrinkage in these areas. He's also looking for damage in the white tracts that run between the grey matter like fat, wiggly worms. These are the cables that transfer information. I'm staring at the screen, but I have no idea what's bad and what's good. Is it damaged or not?

After an insufferably long silence, he says quietly, ‘This looks like a normal, happy brain.' For the first time, Jon's telling me something that doesn't make me feel nauseated. ‘The good thing is you've emerged from your 12 months with a normal, healthy brain. What we don't know is whether it was a normal, healthy brain 12 months ago.'

I'm so relieved. He tells me there's evidence to show that some structural damage in white matter caused by drinking can improve over time, if you catch it early. It would have been fascinating to know if my brain was in a state of disrepair at the start of the year and my break from booze has healed it. We can only speculate on whether half a lifetime of binge drinking had taken its toll. But I remember how heavy my head felt on those Saturday mornings at work, when my Friday-night partying made everything so slow and laborious. It felt as if my brain wasn't functioning properly. I don't need definitive evidence that it was damaged to know that I don't want to feel that way again.

Jon tells me it's great that there's no obvious large-scale damage or shrinkage in my brain. But these MRI scans only look at structural damage; how well my brain actually functions is another story altogether. Now, I have to sit a battery of neurocognitive tests, which will go some way to finding out whether more subtle damage has occurred. I spend an hour in front of a laptop computer with one of his research assistants, doing tests that literally make my brain hurt. They're touch-screen exercises designed to test memory, attention, cognitive flexibility, and planning and problem-solving skills.

The first test is fairly simple. Two boxes containing a number of circles flash up, and I have to click on the box with the smallest circle. On this, I score above-average, with results that are better than 80 to 95 per cent of people in my age group (24 to 39), meaning that my capacity for sustained attention is good. In a more challenging exercise, I have to watch numbers scrolling quickly and continuously. I must click a button when I recognise three pre-determined sequences: 2, 4, 6; 4, 6, 8; and 3, 5, 7. On this, I also score highly. In a test of my immediate memory I'm below average, with results better than only 15 to 20 per cent of the population. This doesn't surprise me at all. But the one that gives me the most difficulty involves replicating a pattern of three coloured circles in the least number of moves, abiding by rules that limit the way the circles can be moved. I successfully complete five out of a possible 13 in the allotted time, giving me a score that is well below average, better than only 5 per cent of the population.

When I ask Jon what these test results show, he says that it may indicate deficits in my memory and my planning skills. ‘You struggled quite a bit with those tests, which was interesting. Here's a high-IQ person, and although you would not make a diagnosis off that one test, it does suggest you have some trouble with those forward-planning, high-level things. It means multi-tasking, making rapid parallel decisions, and also, in a sense, learning from your mistakes. So it's making complex decisions from complex information, and you may struggle with that.' This may explain my woeful sense of direction, complete inability to read a map, and tendency to pursue the same loser guys who always disappoint me.

He asks me about my short-term memory. I tell him it's poor, to the point that if I didn't use shorthand or a tape recorder I'd struggle to remember many details of an interview an hour after I've conducted it. I can read a book and quickly forget the plotlines or characters, even if I loved it. He says that the brain's prefrontal cortex is responsible for short-term memory, and it's common to see people who have been binge drinking from an early age with subtle impairment in this area. The prefrontal cortex also controls inhibition — again, commonly impaired in chronic binge-drinkers. I tell him about my short temper, my infamous truth-telling sessions, and my unfortunate habit of blurting out my unfiltered opinions. This habit has not ceased since I stopped drinking.

‘Looking at these results and your history, you'd have to ask yourself, how much of that is slightly impaired impulse control, or difficulty in putting the brakes on things?' he says. ‘It may just be personality, so you can't necessarily say you drank and therefore you have this, but it might be that you would have been slightly better at this, slightly better at that, slightly less off the handle. But with that history of binge drinking, you may have locked those pathways into always craving more alcohol.'

Given my history of depression and anxiety, which may or may not have been triggered by early binge drinking, Jon says that returning to a pattern of regular heavy drinking would be inadvisable. ‘There's no doubt that, post-drinking, you do get quite major surges of depression in the period where you don't drink. We've just done a study looking at people who didn't drink at all versus people who drank [at] low, medium, and high levels — which is two drinks a day, six drinks a day, and ten drinks a day. We looked at what their brains looked like when they were drinking, and what they looked like after one day of not drinking. Even those with low levels of drinking had changes in the chemical structure of the brain, and they had withdrawal patterns one day after stopping. In other words, their excitatory system and inhibitory systems were not normal. So just the regular exposure can mean that you are struggling with a brain that isn't functioning completely normally.'

My real worry is what just happened at the weekend: two sips of champagne that led to a sudden desire to get drunk. One of my friends told me that I was reading too much into it, and I was just excited at the novelty after so long without alcohol. I suspect that Jon will have a different take on it. He does. ‘Isn't it fascinating that it's still there? A year later, almost to the day, and you still could have happily got really drunk. These pathways are still significantly locked in. That's a very salutary experience you've just had. It shows that this sensory-memory pathway for drinking is well and truly set up in your brain. It's a conditioned reflex, and you felt excitement, the reward — that's exactly what gamblers feel. It suggests there's a moderate propensity to go on and get in trouble; it's certainly indicative of increased risk. If you're getting that degree of interest in your brain, then that suggests that it would be a warning sign. You may be one of these people who quickly clicks back into it.'

I tell him about getting stoned at the party. It was the first time since Easter, when I had a few puffs and felt dreadful, that I'd smoked a joint. He says that resorting to it as a consolation for not letting myself get pissed may be my pleasure-seeking brain's attempt to substitute one substance for another.

So where do I go from here? The results of these tests aren't as definitive as I'd have liked. I almost feel as if I need to start drinking again to know if I can drink moderately. He says that if I do, I should do it with a ‘life jacket': someone who can monitor my drinking in a dispassionate way; not a friend who might tell me what I want to hear, but someone impartial. This is what he does with many patients who return to controlled drinking. They keep a diary of their consumption, and every two months they visit him to discuss their progress. ‘If you're reasonably accurate about the record of what you're doing, then you'll get a guide as to whether it seems to be spiralling out of control. That's something that otherwise you might kid yourself and not be truthful about, and then find in a year or so you've gone very quickly backwards. If that happens, I would think you'd need to seriously think about not drinking.'

At home that night, I find this hard to process. When I started this ride, there was no doubt in my mind that I'd go back to drinking when the year was up. Now, I'm not sure. The test results were inconclusive, but the suggestion that some of my shortcomings might not be innate personality traits but self-inflicted scars is enough to make me pause to consider what drinking is really worth. It's clear that the older I get, the less I am able to cope with these massive weekend binges. If I go back to the same pattern, what will my brain function be like ten years from now? Then again, I'm so much more conscious of my moods, my emotions, and my reasons for drinking that I'd like to think I could drink in a mindful way, and not let alcohol dictate how my night ends up.