Somehow I have been kind of giddy all day as if I had taken too much of my two daily doses of Morphine. I didn’t. Part of it is sheer enjoyment of spending a day with Mike Skubic. A fine personal assistant, Mike is also very in tune with my personal purposes. So in one day we have improved the design of our under-construction WPIT website, looked at fundraising plans, spent exhilarating time with Tom James working on the inclusive video game project, and also accomplished all sorts of typical daily stuff – eating, washing and so on.
Perhaps I am just tired! It’s been a full day and it’s not done yet and I have been “up” – not in bed – for a big part of it.
Then there is the Morphine. This week I started to take 2/3 of the doses permitted to me each day, but regularly whether or not I was feeling pain at the time. Practically this works out that I am taking 2 ml at 11:00am and 5:00pm. The reasoning behind the reduced overall dosage is to give my bowels a good chance to empty themselves in the morning, before I slow them down with the narcotic. The reasoning behind regular administration is to give myself a chance to lower the base amount of pain I feel day by day.
The concern remains – in Mike, in others, in myself. Am I, will I become addicted? The effects of the drug are minimal, yet at about the 5th hour I am counting down - when can I have the next dose or when can I lie down again!
I am swearing more, getting excited more, going from grumpy to happy and back more quickly. Is it the blogging that is releasing my social inhibitions?
This afternoon I picked up the misplaced prescription – Amitriptyline Hydrochloride. Its potential side effects include constipation, nausea, urinary retention and other worse stuff. I am terrified to take it.
I guess my point is: “When you are up to your ass in alligators it is hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp.” I want to be comfortable enough to fulfill my life. Apparently there is no treatable “cause” of my pain, so I must learn how to live with it. I do not want to shift my life goals to managing financial burdens and side effects. Yet the government funded allopathic pathway keeps throwing me into waiting lines and medication hell. To go outside this system promises more effective approaches but continuous and prohibitive costs as well.
The past few weeks or so my expensive, government funded, high quality hospital bed mattress began to develop wrinkles in the plastic cover. These wrinkles became more persistent and were developing into ridges. I cannot move my own body so these ridges are a risk not just of discomfort and pain, but also of skin breakdown and infection.
I called the distributor requesting immediate assistance and the person at the other end said it could be weeks before the problem could be rectified – but, she suggested, in the meantime why didn’t I remove the cover?
Now I have owned three or four hospital bed mattresses in my life time and slept on many more and never has one had a removable cover – until this one. So it never occurred to me to look for a zipper. It’s there! The wrinkled cover is now in a closet and I am sleeping on the best mattress you can imagine.
So, when it comes to me and my pain, is there a zipper?
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