It Might Get Messy

I believe the theory of opiates is that as long as you are taking them to control pain, the psychophysiological cascade that leads to addiction doesn’t trigger. People in pain really need relief. In a sense, there’s a buffer between superfluous intake, which leads to addiction, and effective application, which doesn’t. This is why self-medication is possible—people don’t generally use more morphine than they need. They use enough to control pain.


My pain is pretty much reduced to a raw, inflamed patch at the back of my throat. Rather like the irritated sore throat you get with autumn pollen allergies. Hardly the kind of thing needing constant infusion of morphine derivatives. So I tried to go cold turkey. When I stripped off my fentanyl patches a couple days ago, I didn’t replace them. In the evening, I took a few milligrams of oxycodone and didn’t worry about it. By middle of the next day, I realized I felt like hell. Tired, cranky, headachy. Incredibly weak. Like I’d lost a month’s progress in recovery.


Took me several hours to suspect the lack of morphine. I popped a couple patches back on experimentally—Voila! Cheerful, strong and energetic again. So ok, either my theory about addiction vs. pain is wrong or I’ve just been on it for enough months to override the supposed pain vs. addiction threshold.


I think I have just enough patches left to try to wean myself without going painfully cold turkey. We’ll see. 


Apart from adventures with pharmaceutical narcotics, I’m making some progress. Managing to eat reasonable sized bowls of oatmeal with blueberries, maple syrup, and yogurt for breakfast, although it takes a good hour to get the whole thing down. Not sure how that will work with my usual approach to breakfast, which is to take it to the office and eat while the computer boots up. Last night I cooked dinner for the first time in months, a big rice salad with red-cooked beef, roasted corn, avocado, assorted other vegetables, a garlicky vinaigrette and blue cheese on the side. Couldn’t eat any of it. My stomach capacity is rather low. One good meal a day seems like about it. This afternoon I’m munching on a hunk of toast smeared with liverwurst and whole grain mustard, this on top of the oatmeal breakfast. Maybe a breakthrough, huh? I’ll make some potato cakes with cheddar cheese for supper tonight. If I can eat a few mouthfuls, I’ll take it as a sign that I can maybe keep my weight up without injecting the U.N. emergency rations. 


My weight’s dipped perilously close to 190 lbs. I have to admit it sure feels good to be slim. A lot easier on the system than hauling around 276, which was my peak weight a few years ago when I got serious about losing. I worked it down to around 240 on my own. That was sufficient, with exercise (5k a day on the road or 45 minutes of laps in the pool) to keep my blood sugar down without medication. 


Still didn’t keep my blood pressure down. I would have thought that my new under 200 svelte figure would have functional blood pressure as a reward. But that may not be. I have to monitor closer, but when I did my last round with the doctors a few weeks ago, it was still borderline high. Maybe when I get back to exercise… . 


Next big tipping point comes week-after-next when I go back to the surgeon. He’ll scope me (i.e., stick a fat wand up into my nostril, curl it through my sinuses and down into my throat, where he’ll poke around my throat looking for inflammation) and probably set a date for a PET scan and then surgery. I’ll keep you up-to-the-minute!


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