Alcohol is killing us... I was "scared straight" into sobriety

The purpose of this episode is to make you never want to drink again. So many of us reach a point in sobriety where we start wondering if we could drink again. But the real question isn’t whether we could -it’s why would we want to?

Cancer. Cirrhosis. Hepatitis… oh my. The truth is, there is nothing good that comes from alcohol consumption. Once I started learning about the real health risks, it scared me straight into sobriety. That knowledge became my rock bottom. I didn’t need another embarrassing night or bad decision -these facts did it for me. And the pain I was experiencing in my liver felt like a warning sign pointing toward a dark future if I didn’t make a change.

If this episode helps even one person quit drinking or stay sober, I’ll consider it a win.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I was essentially scared straight into sobriety. You know that show where the troubled teens go to prison and meet the prisoners, and they're basically so scared and intimidated by the prisoners that they get their act together and stop misbehaving. That was me with drinking. Although I didn't reach what a lot of people would consider a stereotypical rock bottom, like doing something horrible that I can't take back, or ending up in jail or the hospital, harming somebody else or myself, losing a relationship with a friend or family member. None of that horrific stuff stuff happened to me, luckily, but I was very well headed down that path if I continued the way I was. But the event that I consider my version of a rock bottom is when I started experiencing some pain in my upper right abdomen. And if you look up online, pain in your upper right abdomen, let's just say nothing good comes up, especially if you are a heavy drinker. So buckle up because today I am going to scare you straight. And whether you're still drinking and considering sobriety, or you are already sober and maybe occasionally deal with some temptations or thinking that you could have another drink, this episode is going to show you that you do not want to have another drink. I feel like we all quit drinking because of a lot deeper issues than like our health. Usually it's to better our lives financially, emotionally, to create stronger bonds with the people who mean a lot to us, like maintain a job, whatever your actual reasons are, those are why most people get sober. But as you stay sober longer and longer, you realize that there are so many negative effects to consuming alcohol that I'm like, I don't ever want to drink again. No, thank you. It's not that I can't drink again, it's that I don't want to. So even if you think somewhere on your sober journey, like, oh, I could probably have just one, that thought has crossed all of our minds, by the way. You don't even want to. There's literally no reason why you would want to consume alcohol when all of this stuff exists. And we're gonna go through a very scary list to scare you straight. So buckle up, let's get into it. Welcome to the Sober Scoop. This is a judgment-free zone where we talk about how to get sober and stay sober. You're not alone. I hope you feel seen. Putting alcohol is the best decision I've ever made. So, whenever I talk about the pain that I was having in my upper right abdomen, people are always like, oh, you know, the liver doesn't have any pain receptors, so that's not even possible. Let me just say that fatty liver, as we'll talk about soon, is one of the most common things to happen to heavy drinkers. It is reversible at an early phase, but basically your liver uh develops fat cells, it gets fatty and it gets larger and it starts pushing up against other organs in your body, and that is that dull discomfort that I was feeling in my upper right abdomen. So although the liver might not be the thing in pain, the liver is causing the discomfort in that area. And I feel like I do have to have a little disclaimer for this episode. I am not a medical professional, I don't have a medical degree of any sort. I am reading articles from the internet and pulling from my personal experience. But regardless of where this information is from or my credentials, I hope that this will scare you. That is the point of this video. Because even if these things are slightly possible, I am uninterested. So I'm sorry, this isn't gonna be the most uplifting episode. I have plenty of other episodes that are very uplifting on the Soberscoop. If you're watching on YouTube, this is a brand new channel, but my podcast has been around for a long time, actually almost a year today, which is really exciting. So if you want to listen to more episodes, they're available anywhere you get your podcasts, but the YouTube channel is brand new. So welcome if you're watching on YouTube. And if you'd like to watch this episode on YouTube with a video, hello, so we can see each other, um, then head over to the sober scoop on YouTube. Okay, with that said, let's get into all of the awful things that can happen when you consume alcohol. Here we go. Number one, fatty liver. This is the most common thing that happens to heavy drinkers. It says almost every heavy drinker develops a fatty liver first before all the other stuff starts to happen. And it can be reversible at an early stage, which is good. But reversible only happen happens if drinking completely stops. So if you actually want to heal the damage that you have done, you have to eliminate alcohol. You can't still be having one glass of wine instead of five. Like, you gotta stop drinking. Okay, just to make it make sense, I'm gonna compare fatty liver to being overweight in general as a human being. So let's say, you know, you go to the doctor and you are beyond what you should be at your height. They say that you are overweight and you're you're not obese, okay? And you don't have type 2 diabetes yet, but your doctor says you're overweight, you might want to start exercising more and eating a little healthier. You can still get in good shape, you can still become healthy again. You're not totally lost here, okay? I feel like that is fatty liver. It's like you're okay right now, but it's developing into something pretty bad. And if you continue down that path, there's nothing good that's gonna come of it. You gotta reverse it now before it develops into other things. Like once you get type 2 diabetes, then you got type 2 diabetes, and you now need to take medication, you have to take just so many more measures than if you had just gotten in shape earlier. So that's like fatty liver. It's early, it's reversible, um, and most heavy drinkers develop it. I imagine that's what I was developing when I felt that dull pain in my upper right abdomen. So the next thing. Number two, alcoholic hepatitis. About one in three heavy drinkers develops inflammation of the liver. That is so scary. One in three. And the symptoms are jaundice, that's the yellowing of the skin and the eyes, fever, nausea, abdominal pain. Uh-oh. And it can surprise you suddenly. That's kind of how I felt with my abdominal pain, is I was kind of like, whoa, one day it was just there. And I remember I did sit-ups in my bed to see if the pain I was having was like on one of my obliques, like somewhere in my abdomen, maybe from an ab workout, but it was different. And I just knew that it was not ab soreness, it was something totally different. And that jaundice, the yellowing, it's like the fact that it can just come on randomly is so scary because it's not like you start seeing a little bit of it. It's like one day it's just there. And you do not want to get to that point. Alcoholic hepatitis is acute inflammation of the liver caused by alcohol. It can show up suddenly, even in people who didn't realize they were that bad of a drinker. That's what's so scary. And whenever you see those articles about like how much is considered unhealthy, it's so scary because it'll be like two drinks for women and three or more for men. And I'm like, two drinks? I would have two drinks before I had my coffee in the morning. Like, I was having 15 drinks, and that is so scary. I was so much worse than what they consider an unhealthy amount, and it's come out that there is no healthy amount of alcohol to consume. And when it comes to this one, alcohol hepatitis, yes, it can be reversible, but it can also uh end your life, unfortunately. It's crazy to think about like how many natural, supposedly natural deaths happen in the world that could have been alcohol induced and they just didn't look into it because of what's considered normal in our society. They say like two or more drinks is not healthy for women, and I'm like, how many people in America and beyond are drinking more than two drinks? And it's totally normal. Like when you go out with your friends and you have six, seven drinks, whatever, that's just totally, completely normal. And so if someone were to die naturally, supposedly, at 60 years old, like that's pretty young. But were they having six or seven drinks every night? Societally, that might be normal. But it is not healthy. You can have these awful things like hepatitis and fatty liver and cirrhosis, which we'll talk about next, that can kill you without there even being that many signs beforehand, which is so scary. Okay, the next awful thing you can develop is cirrhosis. 10 to 20% of heavy drinkers will develop cirrhosis, scar tissue that replaces healthy liver cells. So, in my um experience on social media, I I have a whole page on TikTok dedicated to sobriety and it's called the sober scoop. And when I receive messages from people about family members who have passed, it's always from cirrhosis. Cirrhosis is what is taking people really young. And this is the one that when I started reading about it, when I was having that pain in my upper right abdomen, it was the one where I was like, this is not worth it. I've got to get my act together because you can die from cirrhosis at 30 years old. People die very young from cirrhosis, and that is terrifying. And you have to get an ultrasound to see cirrhosis on the liver, and I never did that. I hope that my liver is okay. I think because my liver enzymes came back okay when I did the blood test, that um hopefully that means that I don't have cirrhosis. There wasn't anything like alarming in those blood test results, but yeah, you have to do an ultrasound to see cirrhosis. And how many people are doing that, you know, on a regular basis? You have to specifically ask for it, um, or you have to be talking to your doctor about your alcoholism or whatever for them to even run those tests. So I feel like there's so much undiagnosed cirrhosis that probably happens. And again, somebody dies at 55 years old or whatever, and you're like, wow, that's pretty young to to die, and you would never even know that it was cirrhosis of the liver because societally they were probably drinking a normal amount, but that's not normal, and it can kill you, which is so scary. And just for the cherry on top with cirrhosis, scarred liver equals malfunctioning liver. There's fluid buildup, there's bleeding veins in the esophagus, brain function impairment. Cirrhosis doesn't just make you sick, it's irreversible once it's advanced. That's another thing that was so scary to me is I was like, I have got to quit while I'm still blessed enough to maybe reverse the damage that I have done. Because how scary would it be to get to the point where there's no turning back? I mean, the liver is an amazing thing where it can heal itself and you can reverse a lot of the damage that you've done to it, but it reaches a certain point where you cannot anymore. You cannot reverse it. And please quit before you get to that irreversible place. We don't want to get there. That's again like that sense of rock bottom. I think the sober community or the drinking community almost makes it seem like you have to reach some life-altering, horrific rock bottom to quit. But what a blessing it is to quit before you reach that rock bottom. Before you lose a family member or harm somebody or end up in the hospital or any of that stuff, and before you get to an irreversible place with your liver, like cirrhosis. So, alcohol is a class one carcinogen, which is the same category as cigarettes and asbestos. Why isn't that talked about more? Why are cigarettes so bad and alcohol is just fine? I think a lot of people would answer that question with alcohol is needed to just get through this life. And I I used to think that way too. I used to wake up every single day and think, how will I actually make it through today if I don't start drinking? Like I have to drink just to exist. That's kind of the place I was at in life where every day was just awful. If you want to hear more about that, you can listen to my other episodes about being in a relationship with a narcissist. I was at a place where I couldn't imagine living or existing without alcohol in my system just to get through it. So I think that's how most people would answer that question is like people almost need alcohol. Well, I'm here to tell you that when you quit and you do the healing and you start developing a life that you don't need to drink to get through, life gets so much better. And that alcohol that you've kind of been using as your medicine and your coping mechanism, you won't actually need it because you start to heal and develop a life that you are happy to be living. Okay, that was a bit of a tangent. Alcohol as a carcinogen, yes. So it's a class one carcinogen, same as cigarettes, same as asbestos. Why isn't that more talked about? And sorry to drop the big C, but it is something that needs to be talked about. About 5% of all cancers in the US are linked to alcohol. Even light drinking increases cancer risk. There's no safe level when it comes to cancer. And you ever think about like how people get so unlucky with cancer? Like your uncle who didn't smoke got lung cancer. That is just unfair, right? Like sometimes cancer is so unfair. So what kind of helped me was I was thinking, why would I put something in my body that actively increases your risk of cancer? It's almost like it does an injustice for all the people who are affected by cancer to no fault of their own. You know what I mean? Who get blood cancer when they're eight years old and just these awful things that happen. And then we consume alcohol willingly, knowing that it causes cancer. And we consume it anyway. It's sad, and I hate that I was doing that to myself. This is one of those reasons where I'm I'm like, I just don't need to drink ever again. Even if I feel that I could, why would I want to? And it's obviously not a direct correlation. It's not like if you drink, you're gonna get cancer. No, but drinking increases your risk. And I do not want to increase my risk when cancer is already so prevalent in our society and so many people are affected by it. Well, I would say through no fault of our own, but I'm sure like some truly are no fault of our own, and some are due to the chemicals that are in our foods and uh the chemicals that are in our serving or our um mixing spoons, that we're using our pots and pans. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation about how many chemicals we're just exposed to on the daily in what we eat, in what we cook with, in what we breathe, things like that. But I'll save that for another day. But with all of that craziness said, I'm not gonna be the one who is actively consuming something that, you know, we know causes cancer. No, not gonna happen. Uh, we already have so many cancer-causing things hidden in our lives. I don't want to drink something that just blatantly is a contributor to cancer. Let's talk about the different types of cancer that alcohol can cause, because my mind instantly went to liver cancer. Like, surely that has to be the main one, but it's actually not true. Number one is mouth and throat cancer. Um, heavy drinkers have a five times higher risk than light drinkers, but light drinkers still have a chance. Next one is esophagus cancer. Heavy drinkers have a five times risk, light drinkers still have a risk. And liver cancer. It says light drinkers don't have as much of a risk, but heavy drinkers have two times the risk. Even one drink per day raises lifetime cancer risk. A choice you make daily adds up over decades. I think that's what's so crazy too, is we just consider it like, oh, it's just like a wine with dinner. But it could be you who is like the unfortunate one who develops this cancer. Not everybody will, not every heavy drinker is going to develop a cancer or cirrhosis or hepatitis or whatever. It's not going to be every heavy drinker, and some heavy drinkers are gonna live to be 101 years old and just totally healthy and fine. But the few who are selected, sadly, to develop these cancers, it could be us, it could be you, it could be me, and I want to do whatever I can to minimize that risk when it's just such a known risk at this point. So this is interesting. Apparently, the reason that it causes cancer is when your liver breaks down alcohol, it produces acetyl acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde. A toxin that damages DNA and prevents repair. Damaged DNA equals mutations equals cancer potential. Like welding sparks hitting dry wood, every spark increases the chance of a fire. Every drink increases the chance of cancer. Alright, here's some hard statistics for you, and this is one that's really quite crazy to me. It says that about five 5.3% of all deaths, all deaths, are related to alcohol consumption. That's a large portion when you think about all the different ways that you can go, including old age or anything else. 5% is because of alcohol. It doesn't have a good impact on our health. I mean, that's for sure. And cirrhosis, it says, took 56,000 lives in 2023, which we all know that cirrhosis is heavily caused by alcohol almost always. This isn't some far-off disease. There are people dying now because of drinking. And all these scary health issues are truly terrifying, and something that I never want to experience, and I hope that you all never have to experience. But what may be even scarier is if alcohol does not take your life, you have to keep living, but alcohol does take your memory, and you develop dementia and mental disorders because of alcohol consumption. That is so scary. And here's an interesting stat for you on that. Regardless of how much you drank alcohol, if you have ever lost consciousness due to alcohol, you had a two times increased risk of future dementia. So if you've blacked out and lost consciousness from alcohol, your dementia risk increases significantly. Drinking more than 14 drinks a week may harm cognition. Let's hear about this one. In a study of older adults followed for about six years, people with mild cognitive impairment who drank more than 14 drinks per week showed much faster cognitive decline and higher dementia risk than those drinking less than one drink a week. Unfortunately, as of right now, at least in the research that I personally have done, there's not a ton of direct links from alcohol to dementia, which I think is crazy because I bet it just hasn't been studied as much. That's just my opinion. When we talk about memory, for example, my memory was so bad when I was drinking. Short term, long term, I used to sit on the edge of my seat and like listen to my boyfriend telling me stories about our relationship because I couldn't remember what we did, and he would tell them and I would experience them like he's reading me a book or something. Like I couldn't even remember what we did, and he's telling me these romantic stories of us, and I'm like, oh my gosh, like I was there too. And I would forget that they happened, I would forget the details. It was so embarrassing. And having that type of memory impact just makes me think that in the long run, that must be doing horrible things for our brain. And I love following that one doctor on TikTok who always talks about this stuff and how bad alcohol and um gardening, if you know what I'm saying, are for the brain. And those are two substances that I feel like people don't talk about that much as far as their. Impact on our brains. And even if it's not talked about that much, even if it's not researched that much, I cannot imagine that consuming high amounts of alcohol has a positive impact on your memory and your cognitive function into old age. Like that's the whole point of alcohol, right? It impairs your thinking, it makes you feel a little woo-hoo, like a little loosey-goosey. It changes who you are, it changes your brain chemistry. Literally. Do you think that's good to be doing every day for a long period of time? No. I think it harms us way more than we even know as a society. Okay, so I scrolled down a little further, and there is stuff about memory, actually, beyond just dementia. Excessive drinking shrinks brain areas involved in memory and thinking. Long-term heavy use can cause Wernicors syndrome. Ugh, sorry, butchered that. Sometimes called wet brain, which produces severe memory loss, confusion, and permanent cognitive dysfunction. Some alcohol-induced brain damage is irreversible. Other aspects may partially improve with prolonged sobriety and treatment. The brain stuff scares me so much. So much. Like, I don't know, maybe I'm on a weird side of TikTok or something, but I follow people who like care for their elderly dementia parents and things like that. And it's so scary to see like the person that you loved and you knew so deeply and looked up to revert back to almost childlike tendencies and not be able to care for themselves. And to think, again, it's kind of like the cancer thing, to think that we're consuming something that actively might contribute to that because it's such a sad, horrible disease that affects people totally unexpectedly. Like we don't know 100% what causes dementia, but we know what doesn't help it, and that is alcohol. And probably the gardening thing, too. Um, but I don't know much about that because I don't do that. It says people with chronic alcohol use disorders have roughly a three times increased risk for all types of dementia compared with the general population. Alcohol-related brain damage is especially common in early onset dementia. Nearly 40% of early cases in one large study were linked to alcohol-related causes. So if you are somebody who is experiencing early onset dementia, like from a younger age, it's probably due to alcohol. So if you want to talk scientifically why alcohol damages the brain, I'm just gonna rattle off a few things that happen. There's neurotoxicity. Alcohol acts as a toxin that kills neurons and damages brain tissue. Brain volume loss. Chronic drinking can shrink gray and white matter, the hardware of memory decision making and cognition. Vitamin B1 deficiency. Alcohol interferes with absorption of nutrients, critical for brain function, directly contributing to that Wernickel-Korsakoff syndrome. And lastly, indirect vascular effects. High blood pressure and stroke risk from heavy alcohol use also damage brain blood flow, contributing to vascular dementia. That's another thing we didn't even mention is the stroke, heart attack, obesity, things that can happen because of alcohol, diabetes. Did I already say that? There are so many things that can be caused by how by alcohol. Are strokes always caused by alcohol? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But can alcohol contribute to a stroke? Absolutely yes. And I think that is the mindset we have to kind of wrap our ourselves around is that do we want to be consuming something that might cause those things? I don't. There's already a risk that you might just get unlucky and it happens to you. So why would you do something that directly increases your risk? And throwback to the beginning of this episode when I said that I was scared straight. When I was having this pain in my upper right abdomen and I'm reading all of this stuff, I just thought to myself, I can't this can't be me. This can't be my story. I can't live to be 45, like just having gotten married and had a couple kids, and then die when my kids are young and leave them motherless. I thought that I wanted to travel and I wanted to start businesses and I wanted to be a grandparent eventually and like an active one. I just I wanted to give myself the chance to live. And when I read all this stuff, I just thought, I've got to stop. It was my wake-up call. And I think about one month after that, I quit for good because I did not want to put myself at risk of all these horrible things that can happen because of alcohol. And I'm really sorry that this was so intense, but our most downloaded episode to date is the episode titled, I'll make you never want to drink again. And so I wanted to do kind of a secondary spin-off episode with some information about other things that we didn't talk about in that other episode. But if you want more information, you can go to that episode as well. If this is a topic you enjoy learning about, I enjoy learning about it because it almost like validates my reasoning. It like reminds me what I'm doing here because I've been sober for a long enough time where I'm like, I have no desire to drink, like to get through my life. I'm not gonna, I don't have a desire to drink at parties or drink alone. Like those things that I used to struggle with, I don't struggle with those anymore. Like I'm good, I'm stable in my sobriety, which sometimes makes those thoughts creep in, like, could I drink one day? Do could I have a healthy relationship with alcohol one day? But when I hear stuff like this and all the insane impacts that alcohol can have on our health, I'm like, why would I want to ever drink again? It's not that I can't ever drink again. It's why, why would I want to? I do not want to drink again. And when you get to that place of I don't even want to drink, then that's pretty empowering. And it makes you feel really good about what you're doing. And to close out this episode, I'm gonna briefly talk about ego, okay? Having an ego that's way out of whack is not good, obviously. You don't want to get a big head, you don't want to think that you're better than other people. But something else that helps me besides all of these facts around health is like just feeling so empowered that you are making good decisions for your health and your future and the people around you. And so when you're out at a party or something and you see other people drinking, it's not that you're looking down on them. That's great. That everyone gets to do their own thing, you know? So they're doing their thing and you're doing yours. And yours is looking out for your health, and you should feel so empowered looking around and knowing that all these people are like putting themselves potentially at risk, and you're not even gonna take that chance. You should feel good about yourself. And the reason I'm saying this is because we can often feel really ostracized for being the ones not drinking, but you should not feel ostracized, you should be empowered, you should feel empowered because of all these things that we mentioned in this episode today. You are helping your chances of not developing any of these crazy things that can happen to us in this world. No amount of alcohol is healthy. So, with that said, thank you for tuning in. And I'm sorry that this was such an intense episode, but like I said, it was our most popular episode to date. So I thought that I should do another one, and it is how I got sober. Being scared straight is how I finally quit drinking. So if this helps you do that or it helps you stay sober, then that is a win. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you for the next one. Bye.