Some Are Sicker Than Others Read Online Free PDF

paused for a moment to regain his composure, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
    “So what happened? How does a sweet kid from a supportive family go from being a straight-A student and a star athlete in high school, to a crazed, drunken, suicidal waste of a human being? How does someone with every opportunity to be successful in life suddenly decide to just chuck it all away?”
    “Well,” he said, as if he was sighing, in one long, continuous breath, “if I knew the answer to that, I probably wouldn’t be up here. I’d probably be at some convention in Geneva, Switzerland accepting the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Medicine.”
    The room swelled with a sigh of laughter, as if they were relieved he didn’t storm off the stage. Monty relaxed and began to laugh with them, rubbing his hands, and shaking his head.
    “The truth is, I don’t know why I did the things I did—why I gave up on life, gave up on my ambitions, gave up on my family, gave up on myself—why I couldn’t just stop after a few sips of bourbon or a couple shots of whiskey and just go to bed—why I had to drink glass after glass and bottle after bottle until I was so drunk, I couldn’t even make it from the couch to the bathroom without passing out in a puddle of my own piss. I mean, it obviously didn’t feel good, right? I didn’t really enjoy drinking by myself in some dark, university apartment trying to work up the courage to put a bullet in my brain. So, why’d I do it? Why did I keep going for that bottle, when I knew full well with every fiber of my being that if I didn’t stop and get some help, I was going to end up dead?”
    “Well, that’s exactly what I was going to figure out. Me, Monty Miller; a clinically depressed, twenty-three year old alcoholic, with not even a second of sobriety or the physical ability to even get out of bed and pee. I was going to figure out what has eluded thousands of doctors all throughout the medical community for the better part of the last century. I was going to deduce the reason for the insanity—I was going to find a way to beat this thing. The only problem was, I was so fucked up from all those years of drinking that I couldn’t even hold the fucking steering wheel still let alone think with a straight head. But, I was determined, you know? I was determined to drink like a normal person—to live my life as a functional alcoholic. You see, I wasn’t ready to stop. I wasn’t ready to be sober. I could outsmart this stupid, little so-called disease. I had the brain, the knowledge, and the determination to do it. I graduated first in my class out of a total of fifty, in one of the toughest chemical engineering programs in the entire South. There wasn’t a problem I couldn’t solve, a riddle I couldn’t unravel, and if anyone was going to figure out the solution to addiction, it was going to be me.”
    “So, I decided to do what any good research student would do—I’d take a trip down to the local library and check out every single book there was on the topic of addiction. Everything from self-help books and psychological case studies, to detailed pharmacological reports and articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. But, I couldn’t go to just any library. Oh no. I had to go to the absolute best one around, which, as you all know, is on the CU campus out in Boulder, nearly forty-five minutes from my apartment in downtown. I remember that day very clearly. It was a little over a year ago, during the week of that terrible blizzard, the one that shut down the city for two whole days. Do you all remember which one I’m talking about?”
    Monty paused and watched as the heads in the room all nodded; the bobble-head dolls gyrating up and down. He picked up his cup and took another sip of water then cleared his throat and eased it back down.
    “All the roads were closed in and out of Denver and there was absolutely no way I was going to get to Boulder in my car. So, I laced up