As Needed For Pain

By Sunday evening I'd emptied a bottle of Tylenol, Motrin, and Alleve--a liver-battering barrage of pills that didn't so much as put a dent in the world of pain I'd awoken to that morning. Ungodly, terrible pain that I wish I could tell you was the result of some heroic act--say an injury suffered while diving to snatch a toddler from the path of a cement truck. Alas, the truth is I slept on my neck funny. We're not talking about your typical stiff neck that's usually forgotten by noon, I'm talking about sheer hell. Please believe me, I couldn't possibly exaggerate how much pain I was in. It was quite remarkably horrible--much like having a red hot clamp being slowly tightened at the base of the neck, shooting fiery shards of pain toward my left shoulder, like the devil's own nail gun.

As I mentioned, I ingested insane quantities of the standard pain remedies, but this evil affliction was laughingly swatting the over-the-counter stuff away like Shaq guarding a 6-foot kiddie-basket. I might as well have been taking Skittles. Clearly I needed something a tad stronger, but it was Sunday and my doctor was nowhere to be found. As the day passed, the pain became increasingly intense to the point where I was absolutely unable to stand or sit upright long enough to go to the bathroom. Thus I spent the day writhing about on the floor, contorting my limbs into every wacky position imaginable, in hopes of finding some way to gain a moments relief. My wife would come into the room to find me disgracefully splayed out in the kind of postures one usually associates with someone who'd fallen from a skyscraper and landed on a taxi. Nothing worked. The only ray of hope that shone my way during this excruciating episode was when my adorable daughter--disturbed by her father's sudden and bizzare change in behavior--would occasionally toddle over and kiss me on the forehead. This was the only thing that offered me any surcease from my longing for the sweet release of death.

Being a sober and conservative woman, my wife refused my pitiful pleading to try knocking on neighbor's doors to see if she could borrow a cup of morphine, and contented herself by seeing that the children maintained a safe distance from this rabid beast that their father had become. She claims that at one point I began to pound the floor with my fists, hissing "pain bad, pain bad," like Frankenstein. She finally phoned my mother with the news, and returned with the merciful report that mom had some leftover pain-killers and said she'd run them over as soon as she could. Help is on the way, thank the good Lord--just the idea of pain killers helps kill pain. In fact I was sufficiently cheered by this turn in my fortunes that I was able to have a more-or-less normal conversation with my wife. "It's probably Meningitis," she speculated. "Really," I asked, "what's that all about?" "You die." "Uh huh . . . what about early detection and treatment?" "Too late for that." I see. Unfortunately she failed to convey the true gravity of my condition to my mother, because when she showed up and cheerfully informed me that she'd been mistaken and that her pills were for a bladder infection, she was a bit surprised when I lunged for her throat. I'm afraid the disappointment caused my slippery grasp on sanity to scamper away like a greased pig in a bad dream. I've got to hand it to my mother though, she's a tough old broad. Given the fact that I only had one good arm, she was eventually able to beat me down.

I guess my message this week is that "Pain is Bad." It's a very frightening prospect--that life can go from being a pleasant little affair to an exercise in intense suffering and ceaseless misery. I'm tell'n ya, screw everything else--if you haven't got your health, life sucks. Even more unsettling is the little tricks your mind likes to play on you when you're forced to spend a day diagnosing your own affliction. As the minutes crawled by before my doctors appointment, I'd already resigned myself to a protracted demise as a result of a rare case of incurable neckular spinal bone-abifiditis.

So you can imagine my relief when it turned out I was merely the victim of a pinched nerve. (There's something nice about having a doctor tell you you're not going to die.) I even impressed my wife--who pretty much thinks of me as a big fakey whiner--when I let the doctor give me a cortisone injection straight in my neck. The good doctor sent me down the road, with a new lease on life and a prescription for Lortabs. Yee Haw! It's "Killer Time."

Since the anti-inflammatory function of the cortizone shots killed most of the pain, I was pretty much using my prescription as "pleasure pills." It was all going pretty groovy until about five days later when the effects of the shot wore off about the same time I ran out of pills. Back came the pain, with a vengeance, and found me bereft of killers. I knew this would probably happen, but I did it anyway, because quite frankly, I'm a friggin' idiot. It's not that I don't know any better, about eight years ago I broke my tailbone and over the course of that nightmare, I became quite an authority on pain medication. You might be a little bit surprised at just how much sitting a person does during a normal day. It's definitely an activity one is inclined to take for granted, and a quite a luxury really, after you've gone and broke your ass. At the time, I was running a business with close to 50 people in my employ so I had to show up for work and believe me, there's no way I could've functioned without the killers. But as some of you are aware, pain pills can fast become a problem in and of themselves, and I've since come to think of them as "Heroin Light." If you've had to live on pain pills for any length of time you'll know that trying to stop taking them is about as pleasant as being thrown from a car going 60 miles per hour. Eventually I pulled out of this pharmaceutical tailspin, but it proved to be a bigger pain in the ass than my broken tailbone.

So once again, I find myself yoked with pain that won't go away--but I'm sure I'll manage, I've pulled through before. It's just sad that I had to be reminded of what a weak-willed, short-sighted horse's ass I still am. I'll probably always be a sucker for that warm pain pill buzz, though indeed I know what a self-destructive whirlpool it is. Strangely, we foolish mortals don't have much of a taste for what's good for us.