If you all remember I posted back on June 12th about my shoulder surgery. This is not an updated but a different story.
What I am about to write about is something that I have written in my personal blog and felt like it needed enough attention I am going to rewrite it for Sisterhood of the Camo Pants.
As I discussed in “Caring” I had first went to the ER for the pain I was experiencing.
I was given a few different types of pain medication. It was almost as if a it was a guessing game would this or that work, what about this combination or that. I found out I am allergic to hydrocodone or something in hydrocodone and I can’t take it. So I was switched to percocet or oxycodone, 2 pills of 5/325mg every 4~6 hours for the pain.
This started a few days after I first heard the pop. I even wrote on a prescription bottle “precious” because honestly it was to a point if I wasn’t on pain medicine – you didn’t want to deal with me and I considered myself like Smeagol in the Lord of the Ring movies.
It didn’t take long. It wasn’t something I even expected, something I denied and dismissed. Something people around me would knew what would happen but I denied… I was addicted. I couldn’t go more than a few hours without taking that ‘precious’ pill without having symptoms of withdraw.
No, not me… I couldn’t be going through withdraw. Not the one thing I have studied in books, had exams over, had friends who experienced it, known people who have died because of it, and now here I was experiencing it.
I felt ashamed.
It wasn’t something I talked about. I quickly admitted it to my husband and began the steps to wean off of it. I handed over the pills to my husband and gave him accountability. I didn’t want to trust myself.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I had read an article about someone who had overdosed and thought how could they do that? how could they not know? And here I was experiencing it for myself. And I realized, it was too easy.
When you are in pain that is all you can think about. The moment you are pain free you want to hang on to that moment. It’s like you’ve been in the dark for weeks and suddenly you’ve felt sunshine on your skin, you don’t want to let it go.
It is extremely easy to not realize you have taken too much. Stop and think about the morphine drips at the hospitals, why do they have a safe guard? Because it’s easy, it’s easy to overdose and not realize it.
