The choices

When Steve left the hospital yesterday, he was instructed to go to the second floor pharmacy and pick up medications that the doctor had ordered. Wait, let me back up for a minute. The day he arrived, he explained to the staff that he could go without alcohol for two days. On the third day, he told them, it would begin to get bad. On the first and second days he was given librium, two capsules per day. On the third day, by his account, he was given eight. Not surprisingly, there were no DT's beyond some very minor confusion and a slight tremor which could have also been from the liver dysfuntion. He was awake as late as ten o'clock that night, I know this because he called me that night, for the first time in three years. He asked if I had an old pair of pants that he could wear home.

I mentioned before that Steve lost his TennCare when the cuts came and according to him, it's his fault he isn't covered. He was told that he would need to reapply on a certain date, if he wanted his coverage to be reinstated.

It was during that week that it rained six days, he said. I'd been staying under the bridge and when the time came to go downtown, I was sick and wet and I was gonna' have to have to go up on the bridge and make bus fare, I just decided I couldn't do it so it was my own fault.

At the moment, he is enrolled in Bridges to Care. Thankfully, that covered the cost of his medication and presumably, the three and a half days of hospital care. When he got to the pharmacy though (after being handed a piece of paper that instructed him to stop drinking and smoking, cut back on his salt intake, and weigh himself regularly) there was not prescription for librium or any other type of sedative. There is a rationale behind this of course. Librium can be sold on the street for example, or blatantly misused. Regardless, at that very moment, he knew he had two choices. Delirium Tremens. No Delirium Tremens.

There had been three choices, one of them ideal. The Campus for Human Development. When Steve's social worker (at the hospital) failed to arrange this option, someone else did it for her. If she had walked in the room that morning and said, we've arranged for you to stay at CHD and you can only leave if you go there, he would have done it. Perhaps it would have been a failed attempt but I know he would have gone under those circumstances. Steve chose not to go there on his own because in his mind, he has always associated it with the Rescue Mission and other, similar places. There was little time to educate him about the vast differences between the two and besides that, when it came time for him to *hobble out of the hospital, he'd been twelve hours without a librium, ninety hours without a drink. The choice was clear.

(*Note: When his last visit ended, a month ago, someone put Steve in a wheel chair and rolled him all the way to the bus stop. I suspect it might have happened this time if it weren't for the fact he had a photographer tagging along. As he shuffled down the hall leaving though, I noticed an unusual number of people stopped what they were doing and watched him go. I wondered silently, if I was the only one who wanted to scream. He quietly expressed his thanks to a couple of the nurses and made a point of telling me how well they'd treated him over the last few days.)