Inpatient takes on new meaning –
May 15, 2020 – “You don’t know what’s in a tea bag until you put it in hot water,” says Popa-Erwin, who says many of her clients are working to kick their bad habits during quarantine. “For the first time in a long time, people are [looking] inward.” After receiving 16 stitches, Parra still partied the next day. “It was just a cycle that progressively got worse,” he says. Sometimes he’d wake up to videos on social media showing him “acting ridiculously obnoxious, slurring words [with my] eyes barely open.”
By the beginning of 2020, Parra was drinking “at least” an entire fifth of liquor every weekend, and in January, he lost his job as a mailman after his supervisor smelled whiskey on his breath. He had taken a few shots at a party before going to work.
“I was drinking so excessively . . . I didn’t really look at it as something I shouldn’t have done,” he says.
