March First-Remembering my first real prescription pain killers

Monday March 1, 2010 starts at 4 AM, now we go back to work for a while. Sleep was a little tough but a few hours were captured. Today we met with another Ologist, this one the chemical guy. Now the next step is a biopsy of the lymph nodes that are not looking good in the scan. If they are cancerous then surgery is likely off the table and clinical trials on. Who knows, now with 3 Ologists and 3 different takes. But as the day passed I resigned to the idea. Why after all should I go through major surgery and not be cured? After all, I could be a research project. I pondered about the pain. Already a persistent back ache lurks nightly, always just at the edge. When it flares it is like sitting in the wrong way for way too many hours. Take a pill. Vance might not find it manly, after all why would you have yourself numbed for a tooth filling? If the dentist hits a nerve the numbing ain’t worth a damn he would say. Not I. I will take the drugs. I learned this with the TUR surgery. For the first time in my life, at age 58 and almost 11 months I carefully repositioned myself on my hospital bed and offered my hind quarter for the insertion of the magic black torpedo, swathed in KY jelly, loaded with opium and driven through my back door on the end of a gentle nurses finger until I could have no more or I would be seeking out dens to hang out in. The impact was immediate nearly, and suddenly I could feel everything, except for that general area below the navel and above the knees. Lasting only 2 hours and administered every 4, I certainly looked forward to the application and always beeped on the scheduled 4 based on the last dose. Nor was I shy to call for morphine shots through the IV at every allowed interval until I could have no more. Again, I was assured that it really hurt and the pain killers where justified. Sure seemed real to me. And by all accounts a TUR is a minor and regular process. A radical cystectomy is a major. I just like the idea of not doing it if it won’t fix it. Plus my first really in pain and dependent hospital stay was not all peaches and cream, in spite of the ten plus thousand dollar bill. The nurses made me suffer. I kept my own notes on the pain management which was supposed to be so important.