Today, I am suffering with my second day of a hangover and I am definitely feeling the alcohol blues!  I know its self-inflicted and I shouldn’t expect sympathy, but I didn’t intend to end up feeling this way!

On Saturday I had a girls night out to mark the occasion of my leaving do.  You see, me, hubby and the kids are moving to the country in a few weeks time and to celebrate/commiserate my departure I decided to invite my local ladies to come have a glass of something with me.  The danger of this is that a lot of us ladies are Mum’s, who not able to have much of a social life any longer, so tend to unleash hell when we are allowed out to play.

From what started as a few cocktails in the first bar, soon moved onto Rose Tequila shots in the second bar! From my initial plan of sipping a few glasses of vino whilst sitting down and chatting with the gals, ended up with us arms around each other screeching along to the resident band.

This is all fine and dandy.  It does us good to let our hair down and enjoy ourselves every now and then but we always forget about the morning after.  The moment you wake up not quite remembering how you got home, you piece together the night before with the aid of debit card receipts from the bar you ended up in once the cash ran out. You struggle to lift your head from the pillow, realising you are still wearing the top from the night before and your bedroom floor resembles a French noir film with clothes strewn from bathroom to bed, not from passion but from drunken undressing.

For me, my hangover starts in the middle of the night, my dreams are filled with images of people handing me tiny teacups of water that I can never quite reach to my mouth.  From this, I will wake up with an insatiable thirst as if my mouth is full of sand but I still haven’t quite got the energy to reach out to grab the bottle of water beside my bed. My sleep after this is seriously staggered, a term I like to call Winesomnia, when the dehydration and lack of body salts or whatever it is that makes you feel as if you have had your organs removed, will cause you to lay awake feeling completely exhausted.

When I finally drag myself out of my deranged slumber, I find that I’m walking like Mrs Overall, not able to straighten my back, my head is pounding and the nausea is kicking in.  I decide to use the shower as a recovery tool but find myself slumped in the corner almost rocking as if I’m a victim in a thriller having just witnessed a murder.  Post shower, I find myself applying moisturiser about 5 times, to which it instantly disappears as my skin is crying out for dehydration alongside my liver and kidneys.

As the thought of even sipping water makes me feel like I want to hurl, I chastise myself for overindulging the night before. Why couldn’t I switch to soft drinks at the second bar, why did I have to drink shots, what the heck was in those cocktails? I send out my very sympathetic hubby for my not very healthy hangover cure of can of coke and salted crisps. I think it’s the sugar, caffeine and salt that is appealing and I feel that it is my only hope now between me functioning as a normal human being or my children thinking I have been possessed by some alien being with crazy hair (haven’t quite got the nerve up to brush it yet!).

The coke and crisps help a tad. It means I can now talk in two-syllable answers and my shuffle has become a little more upright but beyond having a movie afternoon, I feel like I have the mothering skills of Mrs Hannigan. In fact, I can still only whisper the contents of what I drank the night before as the memory is still turning me green.

As the evening draws near and I finally have to stop wearing my sunglasses in the house, I have an insatiable need to eat stodge.  I am scavenging in my kitchen cupboards for high calorie carbs, I am desperate for melted cheese or chips or a combination of both. At last tea is starting to taste less like vodka and there are glimpses of the old me returning.  As the kids head to bed with promises that ‘Mummy will be better tomorrow’, I am hit hard with the alcohol blues, the last and most dreaded part of my hangover when my mind is racing with feelings of woe. This is the time I need to hit the sack and remember that next time there is an offer of a night out that I will be the sensible one.

So here are my new rules for surviving a hangover: