My disability caused a mid-level health crisis. I last posted just under a week ago. Last Friday, the eighth, I spent the entire day in an ER. If you are not totally disabled, none of the problems I had would have occurred. The doctors provide workarounds using mechanical systems and drugs. The mechanical systems are clumsy and usually draw attention to me. I must grudgingly say they do feel what I don’t have anymore.
Drugs are another area. Some of them have worked just as advertised and you couldn’t ask any more of them. Others come with benefits(?). I’m sure you have figured out that I had been in pain, but the duration would probably surprise you as being over 20 years. I was surprised to learn, and you may be surprised to know that we have only one drug to ease pain. There are tons of different drugs that alleviate pain, but they all come from the opium poppy. They are opiates. I want to stop here and make sure that you know opiates ease the pain. They cannot and will not eliminate pain. I think that’s why some people get in trouble with opiates. I was sure there must be some other way to deal with pain and eliminate it. The only eliminator of pain in terms of drugs is death.
I make that statement because I recently had a trial implant of a spinal cord stimulator, SCS. It works I scrambling the nerve impulses going up the spinal cord. It’s successful in about 50% of those who try it. I was one of the lucky ones. I will get a spinal cord stimulator implanted at the beginning of November.
Let’s get back to the events that temporarily forced me off-line. One of the other drugs I remember provided me with hallucinations. You know they are not real, and you can see both the real things around you and hallucinations. Even though you know the hallucinations are not real, they are still frightening. The last hallucination happened when I had just been transferred to a rehabilitation center after a 16-hour operation. The world seemed dark to me and only came in various shades of green. I was trying to watch the news on television when the TV climbed off the wall and came after me.
The drug that caused me the recent problem was an antibiotic. They suggested I take the antibiotic with yogurt. I did that, and within an hour vomited. The instructions were that being taken twice a day, so I chose 10 AM and 10 PM. I quickly found in the first and second days I couldn’t keep even a simple sip of water for 11 out of the last 12 hours. Sometimes I could eat a small amount of food and in that one-hour grace period. Last Friday was the last day for the antibiotic. I was severely dehydrated, but I probably could have lived off the fat of the land, as they say, for a few more weeks.
It means I have been off-line for almost a week and probably will be for a few days more all because of an infection that people who are not hundred percent disabled will ever experience. Be glad of that because being sick to your stomach for week and not being able to keep much down is hell.
