Briefly, On The Universal Sucktitude of Painkillers

Painkillers…what a stupid term for medically trying to trick your brain into thinking something that is not is so.

Photo: Petty Officer 2nd Class Jesse B. Awalt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s this thing that happens right before the morphine hits — or maybe as it hits, it’s hard to tell, sort of all runs together. But in that space of time between the nurse pushing down the plunger to send however many milligrams of medical grade dope intravenously coursing through one’s system there is a clarifying moment. Brightly contrasted between rational, cognitive thought and the wave that announces you are now higher than a bad haircut on a giraffe. You know what is about to happen, that it is happening, and that it happened, all in some immeasurable amount of time that seems like nothing and forever both. Painkillers…what a stupid term for medically trying to trick your brain into thinking something that is not is so.

I utterly hate and loathe that feeling.

It scares the hell out of me. I don’t like my mind not clear. The more time I spend in the hospital, and the times my providers usually strongarm and insist on me taking the pain meds I religiously avoid at all costs, the more my hatred grows. It has reached the point that during a procedure when I need to be put under the medsurge team has written…