Can I just Get a Zipper? - #Wattys2015

Narcotics

This is not the chapter where I tell you how great the drugs are. I mean sure they are sometimes great, but when you have had your belly sliced open from xiphoid to pubis, painkillers are only great in the kind of way that a stale cracker is when you haven't eaten in 5 days. It's not about enjoyment, it's about pure, hard need.

Painkillers make it impossible to really take advantage of all that great recovery time. Everyone thinks after a surgery you get to lay around doing all the things you normally don't have the time for--like read books, surf the web, and generally goof off. 

But it is not so!

Unfortunatly, painkillers have this way of making it hard to really focus your eyes--or at least my eyes, maybe they do different things to you. If I try to read a book, at best I give myself a headache, at worst I feel a kind of car-sick nausea. So don't queue up a pack of books or go to much trouble to keep your mobile devices and laptop handy, if surgery and painkillers are in your future. Try a True Blood marathon instead. You aren't going to be much use for anything besides watching TV and sleeping while you are on the drugs. 

When I was a kid they used to give me Demerol because they were worried about a morphine allergy. (And Whoa! Warning! Demerol can on rare occasion give you a wicked hallucination, so if you wake up thinking a dragon is coiled around your body...it's probably the Demerol.) These days they don't use Demerol so much anymore (something about brain damage....umm.... *checks brain*) but they still do at the cheap-ass hospitals.

After a while certain pain killers become oddly familiar. Whenever they give you anything IV, even saline, you can smell or taste it. I usually smell it in the back of my nose. And if you are really sensitive, you can actually start to recognize the stuff they are pumping into your IV.

I went to an ER a few years back at one of those cheap-ass hospitals. They gave me IV Demerol. I smelled it, and instantly recognized it. I felt that old familar feeling. I literally said out loud, "Ah Demerol, my old friend." Serioulsy. (I was in a LOT of pain.) It wasn't like an addiction, though it's probably the same process--just one that gets messed up in an addict--they chase the feeling instead of just welcoming it in times of need. 

Once you get off IV pain killers they give you different stuff for the pills. When I was a kid it was Tylenol 3's. Only problem with those is you have to take stool softeners. The codeine in T3's will bung you up bad. But now a days the drug of choice seems to be Oxycodone--and I need to tell you that drug is fucking awful!

I would rather feel all the pain, than feel Oxy's inside my head.

Worst painkiller ever made! I honestly don't understand how people can get hooked on it. On Oxy's I just feel like I am not quite inside my head. Like my brain is a square peg and my skull is a round hole.

The first time I ever had Oxy's, they way overdid it. The nurse was trying to be helpful. She had a serious chat with me before they took away my Pain Machine (the PCA, or "patient controlled analgesia" where you press a friendly button, listen to the musical chime--boooong--and melt back into your pillow as you smell that familiar smell of whatever drug is pumping thru your IV). The nurse told me she did not want my pain management to get mucked up by the switch from IV to pill. It takes some time to "build a theraputic level" and all that. I was freaked out.

I started imagining major pain. There was this surgical inscision practically the entire length of my torso. I was in a lot of pain, even with my pain machine. What was I gonna do if I fell below the "theraputic" level! 

Once the nurse had be sufficiently shitting myself, she made her offer. Her sweet honey-lips delivered my salvation. "Well I can give you one pill every six hours....or I can give you as much as two pills every four hours. I can even wake you up in the middle of the night to give them to you."

My reply: "GIMME! Please, for the love of all you hold Holy, give me the most you possibly can!"

And she did. She woke me in the middle of the night, right on the four hour mark, gave me my two pills, and I went back to sleep. In the morning, I woke up to my tray of breakfast. I was excited because I was finally allowed some solid food. I sat up. I uncovered a plate of the most delicious looking egg-colored lumps I had ever seen, and picked up the fork to dig in. Or, at least, I tried.

I just couldn't hold that fork. I put it in my hand, but my hand wouldn't do it's job. I called the nurse. She was not my friendly drug pushing night nurse, so it took her a moment to figure out, from my seriously slurring words, what was going on. Then she laughed. "I think your night nurse got you stoned," she said.

Maybe you have seen an episode of House where he pops Oxy's like candy, or you have heard that people use them recreationally. And maybe you think this is something that might be fun. But I need to tell you they are seriously not fun. I have three expired bottles of those damned pills (because you have to turn that stuff in to the cops to get rid of it, and I am two parts lazy and one part nervous of explaining to cops why I have 3 bottles of narcotics). As soon as I can stand it I always switch over to Advil, but they just keep pushing it on me!

I was in the ER another time, after I had some kind of occult liver inflammation (occult=they don't know WTF caused it.) My fever had broken and I was feeling better, but I had some mild tenderness in the liver area. Mild. The nurse told me the doc had left instructions that I could have Oxy's if I needed. NO WAY. I refused. Keep those buggers away from me. So I laid there in pain for two days. But I did manage to read a book. Then I got my period. And my pain quadrupled.

The next time the nurse came in I asked...or maybe I begged....could I  just have a couple of Advil?? 

Guess what...I could have as many frickin' Advil's as I wanted. The whole time!

Lesson learned: don't just take the pills they put in front of you. Know your body, know your pain, know what you need and what you don't, and be vocal about it. If you are in pain, definitely take something. You will heal faster and live longer, the less stress ou put on your body. But if your pain is only mild and they are offering you hardcore narcotics have a serious talk with your nurse about all the pain management options at your disposal. Chances are they have a lot of options tucked up their sleeves. It's your body and your recovery. You don't have to just take what they give you. Speak up and take control.