Featured Image Credit: Kennedy Media
Warning: This article contains discussion of alcoholism which some readers may find distressing.
Heavy drinking can be a problem that steadily builds and suddenly becomes an overwhelming issue that impacts your daily life before you know it.
That’s the reality Sean Holland has spoken about after years battling alcoholism, which he says began when he was 18 as he tried to calm anxiety and panic disorder. By 21, he was dealing with alcohol shakes at work, and things only escalated from there.
He says there was a point where he couldn’t even face the morning without getting something in his system first, describing how he’d down half a pint of vodka or ‘two to three beers’ before he ‘could even function’. However, it soon got more extreme from there.
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He explained: “From 24, I was going through about six bottles of wine a day, [as] beer didn't do anything for me anymore”.
By his mid-20s, he says wine stopped doing the job too, and he started relying on spirits just to keep withdrawal at bay. Holland said: “By March last year, I was drinking two to three litres of straight vodka a day.”
The physical impact, though, was impossible to ignore. Sean ended up in hospital after suffering a seizure, and doctors discovered a long list of serious issues, including liver hepatitis, an inflamed spleen, psoriasis of the liver, kidney damage, and pancreatitis.
During his hospital stay, he says his body began to show the damage in a terrifying way. He revealed: “I was yellow all over from head to toe, my organs were shutting down on me.” It was so noticeable that Holland was repeatedly looked at and called Simpsons characters, but ‘laughed it off’, since he’d ‘hit rock bottom so hard’ that he didn’t care anymore.
Yellowing like that is usually linked to jaundice, which can happen when a damaged or inflamed liver can’t process bilirubin properly, allowing it to build up in the blood and discolour the skin and eyes.
Sean says it wasn’t just a brief episode, either, saying: “I was yellow for a good three months. It took about three months until my eyes were back to a normal colour.”
Alongside the physical collapse, he has also spoken about reaching a dark point mentally and, now that he’s sober, has been wanting his story to act as a warning that help exists, even when it doesn’t feel that way.
If you want to discuss any issues relating to alcohol in confidence, you can contact Drinkline on 0300 123 1110 (9am–8pm weekdays and 11am–4pm weekends). If you’ve been affected by suicidal thoughts and need someone to talk to, you can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, any time, or visit their website at https://harmless.org.uk.
