Gout started at 23 and I am now 34.

So the funny thing about GOUT is that people actually blame you for it. Then you become ashamed of it like it's all your fault. Which I guess it can be when you eat the great tasting stuff. What kind of hell is this, whatever tastes good will punish you with the pain of gout? Great, that's a life looking forward to. So in my 20's, I made above average income compared to my friends and I had a wasteful decade eating in the most expensive restaurants and drinking the most expensive wines and scotch. My first GOUT attacks weren't even in my foot. It would be soreness in my spine and sometimes a pinched nerve in my upper shoulder which would stiffen my neck, where it would be hard for me to look downward, so I would walk around like a stiff neck. Sometimes, the pain would be so bad I couldn't get out of bed and just stayed there all day, and called into work sick. I knew it had something to do with drinking but never thought it was gout, so I moderated my wines a little bit. After a week or two things would get back to normal. This would come back maybe 3-4 times a year. Then when I was 31 it started to really get bad. I would have 5-6 gout attacks per year, again all after nights of drinking. I then turned into a vegetarian started following all the advice I found on the internet. I even took some medication subscribed by my doctor, but those drugs made me crazy, literally. I actually know how it may feel to be an insane person. I had an "insane" attack after work one day on these gout drugs, and when I was driving home I was hallucinating. It was so bad I left a voice message to my loved ones that if I didn't make it I loved them. So I had to stop those drugs.
For the last 2 years I have been watching what I drank and ate, and if the alcohol would start to make me feel sore again I would drench my system with water, especially at night. Maybe even 4 water bottles per night, waking myself up. I would be doing crazy stuff, like pissing in the empty water bottles, so I can analyze the colour and quantity of my urine. If the urine was deep yellow, I would down another bottle, and hopefully the next round the colour would get closer to white. I started to feel like Howard Hughes, who was also known to urinate in bottles. I guess I started urinating in bottles because it was either too painful to get up to go to the washroom, or I was urinating so much that I didn't want to lose too much sleep, as it is convenient to just let it rip in a bottle then to run out and do it like normal humans. : ) Anyway I sound crazy to all of you, but I am actually a normal looking professional, separated marriage with 2 kids and making above average income. So I am just sharing this, as there really isn't no one else I can tell this stuff too as it is just disgusting.