AshLeean Rafalli Ben

I'm a thirty-something working mum, two kids, full-time job, and I drink a bottle of Pinot Grigio every night. I have done since lockdown. I'm not an alcoholic and I'm not going to any meeting — but I am awake at 3:33am every single night with my heart pounding and I have had enough. I'm forty-three and I am turning into someone I do not recognise in the bathroom mirror. The first glass goes in at 5pm while I'm cooking pasta for the kids. By 8pm I'm onto the second bottle and pretending the first one was my husband's, which it wasn't because he's working late. My face is puffy in the mornings. My weekends are written off by 9pm Friday. I cancelled a hen do last summer because I knew I couldn't manage three days of measured drinking. I went to my GP and she asked me how many units a week. I lied. She told me to try cutting down by 25%. The whole conversation took six minutes. Nobody in this country is going to help you unless you call yourself something you're not. I have tried everything. Annie Grace's book. Dry January twice. The Try Dry app. The Sunnyside app. Alcohol-free wine, which made me drink more. CBT for six sessions. Kudzu capsules from Holland and Barrett that I took religiously for a month and felt absolutely nothing from. Then a school-gate friend told me something that shifted everything for me. She said: your liver has been a bouncer at the door for the last four years. Every supplement you've ever swallowed to help with the drinking — the milk thistle, the kudzu, the magnesium — has been broken down by your liver before it ever reached the receptors that needed it. That's not your fault. That's anatomy. She said the same plant — kudzu, used by doctors in China since around 600 AD to settle heavy drinking — works completely differently when it goes in through the skin instead of through the gut. A research team at a university in [country] found that transdermal delivery sidesteps up to 80% of first-pass metabolism loss. A 2005 trial at a research institute in [country] showed kudzu cut consumption nearly in half in adults who drink most nights — in a single session, without willpower. She'd been wearing a patch for four months. Her sister had given it to her. The patch is called Frimod and you wear it on your shoulder for 24 hours. She didn't tell me what was going to happen on Day 7. She said you have to find that out for yourself. If your GP gave you the talk and moved on. If you've spent a small fortune on capsules that did nothing. If you're awake at 3am every night. Sarah Mitchell wrote about this in an article. Her own story, in her own words, twenty-five years of it. The moment on Day 7 when her daughter looked up at her at breakfast — and what her daughter said — is the part that catches you in the kitchen and makes you cry. Reading her story was the first time I felt understood. Read it. It's the first thing I've read that explained why nothing else worked for me. https://www.zynvista.com/UK/gray-area-drinking