Sunday, December 11, 2005
Pull Pull
Morning... well... noon really. Mornings are still a little rough, waking up after the pain pills have worn off. I've counted my remaining Darvocet pain pills. 13 left after I down my first one of the day. A little over two days worth if I take them every four hours, which I have like clockwork. I'm wondering if I should start to wean myself off of them and stretch them out, or just go cold turkey when they're out. I'm sure I'm not addicted, but at the rate my pain is improving on my right side I figure a day or two more supply wouldn't hurt. At the hospital I was actually scolded for not using my morphine drip enough, which as a patient you get to control with a button and a 10-minute time out. The morphine had given me a mild nausea the first day and I had been more worried about vomiting, which I had done once the first day after surgery. I was also worried about being able to pee without a catheter, which was also required the first day after surgery. Morphine was probably responsible for both side effects.Propoxyphene-n/acetaminop is what the bottle reads as the actual chemical name for my Darvocet. If I lay still, after the pills wear off, there isn't too much pain -- hardly any at all really. Just like the morphine in the hospital. But boy does it take the edge off when I move. So much so that it is rare for me to sleep more than a few minutes time past the four-hour mark, at which point I wake up and medicate. Sleep is a two or three stage event each night, sometimes drifting back to sleep quickly and easily, sometimes not so much. Today was a three stage affair with a few hours spent try to get back to sleep after waking up to take pain pills, and so with a late bed time on top of that, I'm getting a slow start on the day.
Today is Sunday, and I still plan on trying to go back to work for at least a short amount of time tomorrow. I think I'm handling my recovery pretty well after lung surgery, but progress is slow, and I'm impatient for all this discomfort to become a thing of the past. I suppose I could live with this amount of pain if I had to. Fortunately I know that relatively quickly I will be my old self again.
I now have a new perspective on life for people with disabilities or who might have to live constantly with pain that is in my case only a short term partner. I don't look forward to future days when age and infirmity might rob me of the ability to do things easily for myself. I can't help but think that this must have been what life was like for my dad the last 10-15 years of his life with crippling rheumatoid arthritis.
Enough morose thoughts for now, I have a day to get on with. Time to grab the rope I've tied to a closet handle and pull myself out of bed. Life is full of little adaptations, especially when dealing with adversity. Lord knows I saw my dad make enough of them himself as he surrendered to life in a wheelchair.
That's it lazy head, pull, pull, time to get on with your day -- your life.
