My name is Susan, I'm 48 years old, but I'm lucky that I made it to 40.

I've been sober for seven and a half years. My sobriety is the direct result of a near-death experience, which was the only thing that was intense enough to shake me out of my addiction to alcohol.

I started drinking at thirteen. I was a shy, chubby teenager who looked more like twenty-one, was a full year younger than most of the kids in my grade -- making me less emotionally mature in spite of my physical appearance. My father, whom I adored, was an alcoholic -- a policeman who drank to reduce the stress of his job and the stress of taking care of his mother in addition to his own family and the family of his younger brother, who'd died suddenly at the age of forty-two.

I started taking sips from Daddy's beer glass at a very young age. Back then, in the early sixties, it was "cute" when your kids asked for a sip of your drink. Cocktail parties were the norm in our very Irish neighborhood. Block parties at Christmastime featured fountains flowing with Manhattans instead of fruit punch. Small wonder, with all of this exposure to alcohol as a normal part of life, that I thought nothing of picking it up regularly after discovering that it made me feel good and loosened up my shyness.

I'm not going to go into all of the details of high school and early college years, the first apartment with the non-stop partying -- that's for another tome. Suffice it to say that by the time I reached the age of twenty-five I was drinking daily to excess. I was the quintessential functional alcoholic, though. Following in my father's footsteps, I never drank during working hours, but developed an ability to consume large quantities of wine or whatever else was available from the time I got home until the time I passed out. Then I'd get up, go to work, and start the whole process over again.

My wonderful husband was as much in denial as I was. He honestly thought that because I'm half Irish, I had a tolerance for booze that had to be genetically based. After all, I went to work (actually held down two very demanding jobs) and never got in trouble. I didn't drink and drive, I wasn't an ugly, nasty drunk. But, I could consume, toward the end of my drinking madness, a full four liter bottle of wine in an evening. That's a pretty astonishing amount of alcohol.

All of this ended with a slam, when I developed what I initially thought was stomach flu or food poisoning. What it actually was, however, was esophageal varicies, and the slow leak of blood into my stomach was making me violently ill. After a couple of days of projectile vomiting, the vericose vein ruptured and I started to bleed in earnest. The result of this was being rushed to the hospital by ambulance, doctors discovering that almost half my blood volume was gone, and had I kept bleeding at that rate, I would have been dead in an hour. The ruptured vein was repaired, I spent a week in ICU, hearing from every medical professional who crossed the door of my room that I could never drink again. "Wow," I thought..."now what do I do?"

Well, that was September of 1998. It's now March of 2006, and I haven't had a drink since. How did I do it? I did it by finding like-minded people who could give me tips, guidance and support in this journey of recovery. I did it by realizing that I had the inner strength that it took to do this -- that I was no more powerless over this addiction than I was powerless over deciding whether or not to dye my hair. This was about CHOICES, not powerlessness. I had made a choice to drink, no one had put a gun to my head. I had continued to choose to drink, knowing full well what the consequences of that choice might be. No one is completely sheltered from what the facts are. Most people understand when they're drinking too much. It's all out there for you to discover, in terms of the negative aspects. I chose to turn my head and look the other way when the facts were presenting themselves to me in a thousand different ways: shaking, feeling out of control, agonizing hangovers and a serious weight loss due to the inability to eat any longer. I closed my eyes to all of it, and it nearly --no, I nearly -- cost me my life.

Am I beating myself up over this? No. Do I take responsibility for it? Absolutely. That's a resounding "Yes." My entire recovery has centered around taking responsibility for my life and my actions. I am the only one who has control over whether or not I put that bottle to my lips. Like I said, choices. We all make them.

I didn't go the AA route because I couldn't buy into the powerlessness idea. I knew about SOS beforehand and utilized a lot of their tools in learning how to stay sober. But when it comes right down to it, I pick and choose what works for me and what doesn't. A long time ago, I came up with the idea of the "recovery buffet." (I really like food...). If you go to a buffet and you're presented with tables full of dishes to pick and choose from, chances are you're not going to like everything that's presented to you. You'll take what you really like, you may try something you haven't tried before, and if you don't like it, you won't take it again. You may leave some things behind altogether because they simply don't appeal at all. Recovery can be viewed in the same way. Don't take what you know you won't like, try something new, and if you don't like it, you don't have to try it again. The choice is yours.

Choice. This is a huge part of recovery for me. I always have a choice. For me, if I choose to drink, I know that I'll die. I'm not willing to do that, I'm not ready to go. I've been asked if, faced with a terminal illness, I'd choose to drink again. I think not. I like being sober. I like getting up in the morning and knowing what I said the night before, who I talked with on the phone, I like not feeling like I had a troop of Marines marching across my tongue all night. I like being in control of myself and my destiny. For me, sobriety is peace and freedom. And I'm not willing to give that up.