I was done with alcohol
Other people wondered why I didn’t drink any alcohol after work. Whenever I drank alcohol I couldn’t sleep afterwards. I would then wander around during the night, and had to go to work the next morning. That was a real problem for me.
At one point things got so bad that I could only sleep if I was sitting upright. We bought beds with adjustable bed frames. This meant that I could sleep in a sitting position, because my stomach acid couldn’t move up my food pipe that way.
They then looked at my stomach using a camera. It turned out that the muscle between my stomach and food pipe wasn’t closing properly, and that I had gastro-esophageal reflux disease. The doctors advised me to have an operation called fundoplication. This involves lifting the stomach and folding part of it around the food pipe. Back then that was a big operation: they cut my belly open. Nowadays it’s done by keyhole surgery, with only a very small cut. And these days treatment with medication seems to be more common than surgery.