The bad days (1)

On the bad days, and there were a lot of them, I still tried to do a post. But some of the worst days were in the hospital where I coud not get online, and those times were bad. So I’ll go back and try to fill some of those in now.

The two worst days were the day before the operation and the day, well actually a night, when a mixup meant I did not get any painkillers until morning.

The second was the worst. I had been moved from Intensive Care to High Dependancy, and then just a few hours later, because I was doing so well, to a normal ward. They also took out the morphine feed I had been usong to control the pain. I should have been given an alternative painkiller, the Oxycodone I mentioned in my last post, but somehow the need for a replacement pain relief was lost.

It started to hit me as I was getting ready for bed, a hideous pain in my side. My best guess is that one of the drains in my right side had somehow clashed with the ribs – remember I’m deformed so the ribs are not in the normal place.

Whatever the truth, it hurt, horribly. I asked for help, but the overnight duty doctors were all tied up on emergencies and it took several hours before one could get round. Then it needed extra authorisation to get the oxycodone prescribed, fair enough, it is a class A drug. There is no criticism of anyone here. Emergencies happen, and have to take priority and class A drugs should not be administered lightly. I have no complaints against anyone.

But meanwhile I ended up lieing in bed, in really bad pain, with no-one to talk to, nothing to do but endure. It was one of the worst moments so far. All I could do was to remind myself, this is not for ever. This will pass.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. It was the same 40 years ago when I was first disabled. Every two or three hours they had to take me off the respirator and stick what was basically a mini vacuum tube down my throat to suck all the muck out of my lungs before I drowned in it. The pain was bad, very bad, and I couldn’t even move whilst they did it.

The way I survived, then and now, was to remember this will pass, there will be an end. And there was. Forty years ago my lungs healed. This time they found the right doctor with the right authority to prescribe the painkiller, and within a hour I was able to start to take an interest in my new ward.

But for those few hours, it was very hard indeed. I’ve heard the various wise and respected leaders say it’s wrong to allow people to take their own life. Their arguments sound good, but I’ve been there when the pain was bad. I could cope by reminding myself it would have an end. How must it be for those people for whom it has no end? Just pain for the rest of your life.

Honourable and well meaning humanists speak of the sanctity of life. Church Leaders and Rabbis quote the 10 Commandments, but the sixth one about not killing is about murder, the killing of someone else, that’s plain from the context. Is it wrong to want an end to pain?

I pray to God that’s a question I never have to decide for real.

I’ll say something about the other bad times later. I’ll try to be a little less downbeat for that.