Noelle Rath

We talk to Noelle Rath
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT (unedited):
We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand. 

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00:00:15

That's 20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all 

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00:00:21

Theater school. And you will too. Are we famous yet? 

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00:00:28

Hi, I haven't talked to you 10 years. Been 1000 years. How 

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00:00:35

They celebration? I mean, I know there wasn't a big celebration, but 

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00:00:39

It, it was great. It was a bit of a weekend though. Friday was great. I, yeah, I had a great day. We went out to dinner. We had a great Italian dinner and it was lovely and I got some nice presence and it was, it was great. And I, and I wrote a blog post about, 

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00:01:02

I just read it cause my friend left so good. I'm going to pimp it out today. 

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00:01:06

Oh, that's right. Your friend. Who's your friend that's there or was that 

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00:01:10

God gone? So that's something I want to run by you is like how to in our middle age to navigate friendships that I don't think she listens to this. So I don't, but that for me are very challenging and that's just the truth. So anyway, continue. Well, we'll talk about that. 

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00:01:29

Well, we'll get to that. Yeah. We'll get to that. So on Saturday I got the autopsy from my sister and she is no surprise. She died from alcohol intoxication. We already knew that or alcohol poisoning, but for some reason, my mom and I were both kind of fixated on like what her blood alcohol content was going to be. And I never really looked that much into it. You know, like I know 0.08 is the legal limit for driving, which I think ends up. Meaning like, even if you might even be in trouble, if you have one drink or two drinks 

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00:02:08

For most people's weight, but I don't. Right, 

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00:02:11

Right. Hers was 0.46. Yes. So I looked up on Wikipedia. Like there's actually a very handy little chart there that breaks down for you all the different levels and like what the impairments are and starting at 0.01. I mean, there's, there's observable differences, at least in terms of like, if you're hooked up to machines, I guess, and they're observing you, they may not be that noticeable to other people. But anyway, there's impairments that begin from drink one. 

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00:02:51

And by the time you get to 0.3 is complete blackout. And by the time you get to 0.4 it's onset of coma and respiratory failure, he was at 0.4, six. Yeah. And 0.5 is just death. Like no, no bones about it. If your alcohol is the blood in your alcoholic, if the alcohol in your blood gets to 0.5, you're definitely dead. So it was like surprisingly so upsetting. I don't mean it's surprising that I don't know what, what, I'm not totally sure what it was about that number that had me so rocked. 

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00:03:34

But I was talking to my mom and I was saying like, when I used to drink, when I was younger, I mean, I still drank. But like when I used to really drink for, for partying or whatever you wanna call it, if I got up to five drinks, I was definitely throwing up and I never measured my blood alcohol level. But I'm guessing it would have been, I mean, point, I don't know. I'm guessing it would have been up there. I don't know how you get, how you physically get don't you just start to throw up. And my mom said practice. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It's tolerance and my blood turn cold when she said that just the chill went up my spine, like, okay. 

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00:04:22

So she had to have been drinking a lot for a long time. She did not have she had the beginnings of cirrhosis, but it wasn't even like, yeah, because it took my dad 11 years to die from, from alcoholism and he had hepatitis. So it was like, it wasn't making a sense to me. It must be. I, I don't, I really don't know how to understand it. Aaron says th I mean, this is suicide. This is not, not that she was intending. It necessarily all those, she might've been, but he was saying like, you have to he's does this hand gesture, you have to be glug, glug, glug, ING, basically to, to get to that blood alcohol level is not an easy thing to do. 

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00:05:12

And so here's what I want to say about it. She was the fifth person of my family to die from alcohol toxicity. And, you know, there was a member of my family that knew she was struggling with it knew she had gone to rehab and she went to rehab. I didn't know any of this. Oh yeah. She went to rehab. Yeah. And th and actually, until I told this family member that we got the, you know, cause of death, that person was telling me that person was not telling me that she was in rehab. That person was telling me that she went away for work. 

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00:05:55

Like she's dead. What's, what's the secret that you're hiding. And this person also hid in her bedroom was a book, the big book of alcoholics anonymous. And this person put, hid that. And, and, and the way they were saying it was like, and of course, should I put that away because that's nobody's business. And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? First of all, I hope to God that her kids know that this is what she died from. 

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00:06:29

Not 

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One should know, 

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Oh one should know for so many reasons, if nothing else that, oh, this runs in our family and I should be really careful. 

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00:06:41

Exactly. 

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00:06:42

They don't. They might not know. I bet they don't know. 

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00:06:45

So this is the way that denial kills us, because we don't want to talk about what's really going on. And so, so, so that when somebody is suffering to the point that they want to drink that much, they assume that they're the only person who's suffering like that. They assume that there's no help. They assume that there's no hope for them. Which really, I mean, talking about this stuff only, ever in genders, hope in people, you know what I mean? Because you can't tame it until you name it. It's not the expression. Yeah. So like, how the fuck is anybody supposed to tame, you know, these sicknesses, these, unless they know what they are. 

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00:07:25

It's really, it's really unlike devastating to find out that like, you know, someone that you love. And even if you're, you know, whatever you're strange from them, it doesn't matter. It was suffering. That's the part I think right. Was suffering and felt alone. I mean, I think that's th...