Morphine

Recovery from this surgery has been the worst by far.

The last few days since I left the hospital have been really tough.  They gave me a slow-release morphine pill when I was in the hospital to help with the pain.  I was never quite sure how much it was doing, but I felt pretty good on Wednesday when I left.  On the way home, I felt good enough to eat at my favorite restaurant (Firebirds Grill) while we waited for CVS to fill my prescription order.

When I got home, I took some of the new pain drugs we just got, which should be the same ones I was taking at the hospital, and I went to bed for 4 hours.  When I got up, I thought I was dying.  My mouth was so aggressively dry that it almost unendurable.  I know what you're thinking: "His mouth was a little dry?  That doesn't sound so bad."  Have you ever heard of the cinnamon challenge.  It feels roughly like that.

So I drank some water and calmed down, and then I transferred to the wheelchair so I could go pee.  That went okay, but by the time I was ready to transfer back into bed, I felt so weak and light-headed, I didn't think I could continue sitting up, and I definitely didn't trust myself to do the transfer into bed.  We ended up using a slide board to do the transfer so I didn't have to support my weight.  I haven't used that since rehab over a year ago.

When I got in bed, I felt completely terrible.  Weak and light-headed and just awful.  I wasn't sure what my blood pressure was, but I felt it might be dangerously low.  I couldn't find my pulse which has never been a problem.  Eventually, I decided to call the paramedics to come measure my blood pressure.

While I was waiting for the paramedics, I decided to use my fancy adjustable bed to elevate my feet, and my mom had the idea to use my fancy air-pumped leg squeezers to try to squeeze blood up toward my heard.  I think that worked, and by the time the medics arrived, I was feeling a lot better.  When they measured my BP, it was in a pretty good range, but I would love to know what it had been.

The paramedics said that both the dry-mouth and the weird feeling could be caused by the morphine, so I decided to stop it cold-turkey.  The pain would be better than the side-effects.  So I stopped all pain meds on Wednesday night.

The problem with slow-release pain meds is that they don't leave your system just because you stopped taking them. It is now Friday evening, and I think I'm still feeling some of the after effects of the morphine.  I think I have a morphine hangover.  I haven't been out of bed in two whole days, and the dry-mouth, while improving, is still a problem.  The lightheaded feeling is better, but still present, and the pain has slowly been returning.  Turns out the morphine was doing a lot about the pain.  In general, I feel horrible, but I don't regret stopping the morphine... yet.

I'm so glad my mom has been here.  I don't think I could do this without her.  She has allowed me to stay in bed by bringing me everything I need when I need it.  Without her, I would have had to transfer out of bed every 4 hours at least to pee.  I don't think I could have done it.

In the next hour or so, I'm going to attempt to get out of bed and into the wheelchair.  I have no idea how it's going to go, but I'm looking forward to trying it.  I think the pain is going to be a problem, but I also think I'm going to have to either suck it up or go back on the morphine.  It would have to be incredibly bad for that to happen.  I don't ever want to take morphine again.