Being stuck in a wheelchair was indeed a blessing

It is hard to imagine him in a room full of people, introducing himself as, “Hi everybody, my name is Kirio and I am an alcoholic.” I don’t even know if there is such a program here, but if there was, it could benefit from someone as full of life as Kirio.

When I picked him up earlier, I was surprised to find him in a wheelchair, surprise which much have shown on my face. “Yeah, I know.” He said. “First time I saw myself in the mirror, seated on this baby right here,” he tapped the side of the chair, “Well, I was like ‘good luck getting tail now Old Kirio.’”

Then he threw his head back laughing, “Well, are you going to carry me in or do you plan on staring me down the entire day?”

So I got off the car and carried him in. Which is all the exercise I plan on having this month. I put his wheelchair in the back as he mentioned something about taxi services being in dire need of extending a helping hand to guys like him “who are married to the chair” and off we went to Naivasha.

“I think the best thing that ever happened to me was the accident that robbed me off the use of my legs,” he said. “I was smack in the middle of my third divorce. My wife was like, ‘OK dude. I know we said in health and in sickness, till death does her thing, but you can go to church and tell them I have changed my mind. I married a man, not a flipping brewery.’”

He talks about that time he showed up at his daughter’s poetry slam at Alliance. “I was so drunk, I couldn’t see straight. And then my little girl is up there on stage, doing her thing, she has this really emotional piece she had been working on for months, and people are so moved, snapping their fingers after every line, and I am so happy for her that I climb up on stage and hug her. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t also vomited on everybody at the front row.”

Rock bottom

So I ask him if that was his rock bottom. The thing that made him change and he laughs again. There is rock bottom for some, but for him, that didn’t even scratch the surface. “See that was embarrassing and humiliating for my daughter, but, you haven’t seen rock bottom until a hardcore bottle hitter takes your hand and shows it to you.”

There he was, his third marriage in little pieces around his feet and he was barely forty. He had been in and out of rehab several times before. “You see how the alcohol is affecting your kids. They have seen you fall so hard on the glass table and shattered it to pieces that the next time their mum buys something with glass in it, they cry, saying it’ll hurt daddy . They cover up the edges of tables and other sharp places with soft pads just so you don’t fall on them and hurt yourself. The first time I saw that, I knew I had to do something.”

So he went to rehab for a few months, came out and relapsed less than two months after that. “There are levels to rock bottom dude.” He hit rock bottom hit another rock bottom and before he knew it, he had sunk so low that the children who used to protect him now wanted nothing to do with him. Even then, he still wasn’t quite there yet.

“At first you drink because people drink, but then you like it more than others, so you drink more, and then you do it to focus and to not be anxious and to keep your hands from shaking, and then you drink to drink away the problems brought on by drinking in the first place and finally, you run out of excuses and admit to yourself that you drink because it’s what you do. You drink.”

Nobody was surprised when he slept while driving and woke up in the hospital. I woke up and I was like, “Is this hell?” And the nurse smiled and said, “Not exactly.”

“I’m sober now and my children don’t hate me anymore. I talk to people about alcoholism and drug addiction. I’m getting married to my forth wife come December so…” he smiles again. “That accident was the best thing that ever happened to me.”