Doctors and Drunks

Medical update:

1. my TB test was positive
2. there are more blood tests for Hep A and B, i should get the results by Tuesday?3. i am being tested for more parasite

I am scared and angry and frustrated. I am not sure what to do with all this. In the end, its possible that I won't have anything and all of it could've been a stupid test. I am worried about money and how this is all going to pan out with work and rent and bills.

I also had a really rough night at church. I am going to copy and paste from some e-mails we've already written:

Nick, a guy we work with on Thursday night, was sitting alone at first, 4 pews from the front in the middle, worshiping just like the rest of us. He then moved over to sit with us for a few minutes, then got up and moved to the front pew (only three away from where we were sitting), stumbling a bit on his way, and sat down next to Melissa (from the praise band) and started talking/crying to her. 2 men from the church went up front and sat next to him. This was right before the scripture was about to be read. (As a side, the guy who leads the praise band got up on stage, surprisingly to the woman about to read scripture, and said we were going to sing another song... not in usual fashion to the evening schedule...) The two men escorted Nick out of the sanctuary through the front stairs. That is where Scott and I sat in the lobby talking to Nick. but it was like talking to a brick wall. We tried contacting some detox places but did not have much luck as Nick had been banned from a few of them. We hung out with Nick in the Ockenga Lobby for the duration of the sermon upstairs, and got to the point where we could not do anything more for him. He mentioned he had an AA meeting at 7pm on K or Kay Street. It was 5:30pm at this point and we had to give some tough love and move him outside and encourage him to go to the AA meeting and start doing things to help himself out. We had sat there for about 45 minutes or so chatting and trying to encourage him but he was so intoxicated that he just kept repeating the same things over and over and was not absorbing or listening to anything we had to say.

It was really hard too see someone go through this awful situation. It was so heartbreaking to see someone not recognize people they have known for months. It was sad to hear someone so desperate to change and be better for his children and then wanting to go right over to the liquor store and spend the only 6 dollars he has on booze instead of the food he desprately craves. It was so hard to see someone want to change and feel there was no other option but to get drunker. It's totally something i don't get, but would like to because i feel like it would help.

It's so frustrating to not have an idea of what to do. Not to know how to shake someone and say, "you're slowly killing yourself if you keep doing things". How do you make them see that they can stop and need to stop if they want to survive?