First, I am neither a scientist nor a medical professional.  I will mess up terminology and my theories will be unfounded & nonsensical perhaps.

I also am not passing judgment on anyone else or suggesting what anyone else should do in any situation – as we are all individuals and each situation is unique.  And for the record not only did I get a morphine drip for a second yesterday, they also tried to get me to take Percocet and wrote me an Rx for Vicodin (I didn’t take the pills and didn’t fill the script – but I did have a glass of wine when I got home).

Now that that is out of the way lets talk about me and pain medication and what not.

Some of you know that I suffered a traumatic head injury about 15 yrs ago.    This has caused my natural pain-gauge to go off kilter and I find it difficult to provide accurate measurements to what I’m experiencing at times.  This can be useful and a bit of a curse, depending on how you look at it.

I have a notion that I’m just going to throw out there.  I don’t think pain medications work on me – at all – period.  Like I am mostly immune to them, if that is a thing.

Twelve yrs ago when I was having my second son (post tbi) I don’t think the epidural worked.  I ended up with some permanent numbness (in my legs) but that is the only thing I can tell you that epidural did to me.  It was the only sensation I was aware of.

I usually refuse pain meds, not because I am cool or tough, I have my own reasons that are personal and about me and no one else – but yesterday they gave me a morphine drip prior to cleaning out the wound.  It made my arm itch like crazy – but  as soon as I realized what was going on, I unplugged the syringe that had the dope in it.    I don’t know how much of it got in me – but I know it had zero affect on my leg (I did start to giggle and the room got very bright & blurry for a few mins).

THEN the doctor started shooting lidocaine directly into the open wound and under the flaps of skin.  Not only did I feel every injection, I then felt EVERTHING she did to me.  I watched the whole time and it was not in my head, I did not imagine it.  I felt when she cut my skin off, I felt when she scraped the rocks out, I felt when she flushed and scrubbed and I felt the needle and thread going in and out.  Not the nudge of it, the very stinging, burning sensation of it.  I was screaming like a maniac and my poor husband said, “She doesn’t cry like that it hurts her”.

She told me to look away and that it was ‘impossible’ for me to ‘metabolize to the drugs’ [and feel the pain].

What she doesn’t know is that my brain works different.  I BELIEVE that the way opiates work are by hindering or obstructing a signal in your brain that tells you youre in pain and that somewhere among what I imagine to be a spider web or highway of connections in my brain that carries those signals, there is a road block.

In the same way that I have complete numbness in some parts of my body, and an inability to experience pain at other times, narcotics just don’t work for me.

When the impact occurred many years ago, leaving my skull fractured and me in a coma, it shook things up and left the ‘synapse roadmap’ askew in my head, and for that reason, the little neurons or electrons or whatever the fuck they are, don’t make it to their intended destination.

That is my theory.  So yeah, by all means, if you get a tooth extracted or strain your back or whatever and the medication does its job and provides you with relief, good, that’s what it is supposed to do but for me, it just doesn’t work – and I don’t like feeling loopy in my head, especially when it doesn’t take the pain away any how.

So please, if you made it this far in my silly little post, pray that my cut heals and does not get infected – because I don’t want them to have to open it up and reclose it.  ((unless it is a lesson for me to experience the pain to be more sensitive to others who have pain))

Thank you – be well,

Luv K