I was diagnosed with kidney disease. I still haven’t fully come to terms with it yet. To be honest, at first it didn’t seem to worry me much. That changed after a doctor bluntly told me I’d never be able to enjoy a beer again, or that the consequences could even be fatal. That’s another painful truth I have to accept… the idea that I’ll never be able to drink again. Ever. That thought frightens me. At the same time, this news has become the hard wake‑up call I needed to stop drinking and breaking promises to myself. I simply can’t go down that path again. I haven’t let it overwhelm me with constant stress; instead I focus on what I can control: watching what I eat, drinking plenty of water every day, and doing my best to stay healthy. The rest, I trust, is in God’s hands.

What bothers me is that, apart from the one doctor who broke the news to me, no one else has discussed it with me. No one at all! That silence makes me wonder whether the doctor who delivered the news might even have been a hallucination. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but I was experiencing a substantial bout of delirium tremens for a couple of nights while I was in hospital, and I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. That hospital stay was the most terrifying ordeal I have ever endured — and believe me, I’ve been hospitalised more than twenty times. I could recount all of my other hellish experiences, but I already wrote a blog about this. Click here to read