This Much Is True by Tina Chaulk

Author:Tina Chaulk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC000000
Publisher: Breakwater Books Ltd
Published: 2006-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

My training at Hope House consisted of two supervised shifts where I was the third person on a two person shift. My two colleagues worked, like me, as Detoxification Attendants or DAs, a fancy title for puke cleaner-upper and general abuse taker. At least that’s what it seemed like at first. Later on, I realized the help DAs could provide and respected the people who gave so much to others.

I was never so nervous as during that first shift. I probably never had it quite so bad as that shift either, or so it seemed. Baptism by fire, my colleagues explained and I was bathed in flames at the end of those first 12 hours.

Day one started quiet enough: reading dry operations manuals, learning the right way to complete the mound of paperwork required for each new admission and signing confidentiality agreements and other job related materials. Bland words explained a myriad of policies, none of which, I would later learn, could match the unbelievably complex scenarios that could play out during a shift. The manual didn’t tell me what to do when someone wraps their hands around your neck and starts to squeeze or how to deal with a nearly dead man in the shower. None of my training informed me how to react the hundreds of times someone would ask me to suck his cock or go fuck myself. Nothing I read that day told me how to act when blood oozed out from under a door so that you slid in it when you tried to get to the bleeder.

That first day, I got to the heart and soul of the detox at noon, just in time for the start of lunch. The pulse of Hope House could be found in what the brochures called, “the Sobering Area” and what the DAs, and most of the clients, called, “the Pit.” Clients had to stay there a minimum of 12 hours so we could make sure they were completely sober, and relatively healthy, before they went into the residence. Alcohol withdrawal is a dangerous beast and seeing how badly a person was shaking in 12 hours helped us assess if he should go to the residence or stay in the Pit. Twelve hours was not always a great guideline as the worst withdrawal symptoms–the hallucinations and life-threatening delirium tremens, or DTs–came after about three days. Still, it was the best we could do and, by and large, it worked out pretty well.

At that time, Hope House only helped addicted men (they started to admit women in 1989) and all of our clients were coming off alcohol. The fact is that most of them were using the place to get a few good meals, a warm bed and a few days of rest for their booze-battered bodies so they could go right back at it again.

At noon, there were three people in the Pit. “This is our Sobering Area,” Carl, my supervisor explained, proudly. “We have eight beds here.

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