Switch and bait

Posted in: Injury Time

Yesterday started off rough but finished well. After the three hits of morphine in the afternoon, the Wimbledon posse, Nik, Eva, and my mum all coming by yesterday I was completely painfree from 9pm on all the way through the morning. Woo-hoo! The nightcap of a cup of horlicks and a temazepam helped too... This morning, awestruck and pathetically grateful I'd got through all this mangling with only a half day of pain I was wheeled down to xray cheerfully listening to tunes and feeling fab.

The lateral, axial, and joint xrays showed a whole lot of screws and a mesh of metal to hold the heel (calcaneus) together. Who knows, but it looked OK to me. Back upstairs, 11am, chatting with mum, with only a couple of random muscle spasms as warning it felt like someone rammed a hot soldering iron into my heel. My fifteen painfree hours came to an abrupt end and after the nursey drug form filling I had to sink back into a dull indistinct drug haze malaise the rest of the afternoon.

Really, there is nothing fun about being on morphine or any of the hospital analgesics. In exchange for not involuntarily twisting about in your mattress and randomly clawing at things you are mostly robbed of sensation, motivation, pathos, hunger, satiety. Best thing to do is vaguely sleep through it and hope that it's kept at bay long enough for the next round.

The other crappy thing about painkillers is there's no strong sense of feedback on the healing. At least last night without the dosing (I don't take it unless I absolutely have to) and without the pain there's a sense of it getting fixed. Also when you move into a bad position there's immediate feedback--turn over, ouch, tweak position, ahhh, fine. When you're constantly ripped on painkillers you don't know what's going on; your nerve-endings could be caught in a blowtorch, or you could have twisted something, or subjected it to continuous pressure, or, ... and you just wouldn't know.

So I hope that's the last ever write on this. Sorry to folks who've been by and I've been totally out of it, I promise to be better next time :-)

Posted by Paul Makepeace at June 2, 2005 21:37 | TrackBack