Remember when I thanked the Baby Jesus for hydrocodone? Joke was on me, because that drug turned on me shortly after that writing. I won’t color your day with all the details, but let’s just say that my constitution was not up to the jump from an occasional Motrin to The Hard Stuff. My desperate messages to the on-call doctor were met with, “Hrm… I’m not really comfortable prescribing you anything else. Try Tylenol.” I guess as long as he’s comfortable. Now, I understand exactly what his concern would be with giving a patient he doesn’t know something like a narcotic pain killer. But still, shouldn’t there be a list of people who, say, got their faces cut open that very day? And maybe those people could get a little slack from the suspicious late-night doctors. Apparently not in this case. And so I white-knuckled it through the night. Bad. Very bad.
The sun did finally rise and when I got my doctor’s nurse on the phone she, bless her, texted him in the middle of surgery to get permission to help me out. As someone who was on the table yesterday, I did not approve of this interruption. But as me, it certainly seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. Tylenol with codeine was procured and life became bearable again.
Also really interesting: I would have sworn to you that I didn’t feel much different on codeine other than the relief from the pain. Except for how I spent all day insisting I could hear Elliot crying, while mom and Damon told me “Not so.” So I guess I was totally normal except for the hallucinations.
Yesterday the splints came out. The less said about that the better. And now I’m cruising by on just a little Tylenol and extra rest. I think that means I can ring down the curtain on this fascinating story, at least until a few weeks or months go by and the intended benefits kick in. I plan to do some really skillful, varsity-level breathing.
jaysaint 