Wow

The pain man­age­ment doc gave me a break­through pain med for the first time, because of the new diag­no­sis. It’s more morphine—just an instant-release ver­sion, this time. Sam got it filled for me yesterday.

I did­n’t expect a huge dif­fer­ence, hon­est­ly. It’s the same thing I’ve been tak­ing, right? At a quar­ter dose, even!

Wow.

There were a few hours there where I was­n’t aware of any pain but the neu­ro­path­ic stuff. I can’t begin to explain how dif­fer­ent that is. On my per­son­al pain scale, 1 = absence of pain = “myth­i­cal.” The last month has been full of 8s.

I was extreme­ly nau­se­at­ed and near­ly passed out in the mid­dle of Fry’s, but I was­n’t in hor­ri­ble pain. I’m still feel­ing bet­ter than usu­al, over 12 hours lat­er, par­tial­ly for hav­ing slept better.

I have 29 more of those tiny pills, and they’ll be stretched out as long as I can make them last. They’re worth more to me than dia­monds right now. I begin to under­stand why addicts “doc­tor shop” and scheme to get more pre­scrip­tions if their doc­tors refuse them. 

Heck, I’m start­ing to under­stand addicts, peri­od, in a sense. I’ve gone off the mor­phine, cold turkey, sev­er­al times now. Oth­er than hav­ing the pain back full force, and expe­ri­enc­ing increased anx­i­ety because of antic­i­pat­ing that, I haven’t had any side effects—certainly noth­ing one could call “with­draw­al.” I could get psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly addict­ed, at the very least, to these lit­tle mir­a­cle-work­ing pills. And that scares the hell out of me.