Post surgery, people ask a predictable question: Is it better? I've tried avoiding the answer until the answer is clear. Surgery leaves one with puffiness, the drugs mask a trail that pain cuts through the body, recovery soothes one part of the system but complicates the rest. There is, I reason, no answer to make, so I've avoided making one.
Yet, I will say--this surgery was successful. The pain of the old bone and apparatus that was pushing against my skin is gone. The post surgical pain of cut bone is gone. The puffiness of healing is subsiding. My chin hangs now on nothing and slouches inward. I wear surgical masks in public to avoid stares. I am Michael Jackson! now simply lacking those elegant bandages he wore on his fingertips.
I'll soon have a follow up appointment with the surgeon who will concur with my general thoughts and proclaim success. Hopefully, we'll next figure out when surgery 2 will happen, and when we'll pull a flap of skin from somewhere on my body over the hole in my neck. I apparently do very well with anasthesia, and can bear being put out for days. I apparently wake from surgery feeling terrific which I did the first time, and this last time, too. My worries are slaked on some of the procedural issues: heart, good; will, strong; healing, adequate.
My head is being pulled away from worry by trivialities I'm jamming into it as quickly as possible. This is the time, in Indiana, for planning Spring gardening. I'm looking into reseeding a patch by the driveway with wildflowers, turning a large portion of the front where there's been flower decimation into a vegetable patch this year, forming a better herb experiment, being a more diligent weeder. I'm trying to figure how I, with this tracheotomy tube and an inability to exert can build a raised bed in the back where I've been dumping yard waste--how I might, stone by stone, build a free form wall and seed a bed of shade plants--hostas, ferns, bleeding hearts, astilbes, and how they will accomodate the inevitable blackberries shit into the bed by birds, the violets, beautiful as they are for a week and aggressive as they are for the rest of summer.
I'm learning how to count in Danish--technically, that's "one and twenty" in translation, not twenty-one. I'm hearing myself say please and thank you in Danish and imagining I'm doing so on the streets of Copenhagen, having been handed some weinerbrod and kaffee by a handsome little Danish kid wearing those inevitable Euro clothes (of course he's handsome, this is my imagination). When the thought of my voicebox being removed intrudes upon me, I open an email from Comme une Francaise that purports to teach me tricks of French that lessen my non-native vibe...realizing in one part of my mind that no one will ever judge my accent again (always hated), and can only judge my proficiency in spelling. When thoughts of the next recovery and the inevitable pain that comes with it crowds me, I think of the technicalities of loading all those grammatical symbols for Danish and French into my Ipad so that when it speaks for me, it can at least sound accurate.
When I wonder about the high rates of mortality from head and neck cancer in general, I think of a dog I'd like to get if I can, if I recover well from surgery 2, if I feel able to be ambulatory on a daily basis and fair to its need to go sniff the neighbor's mail box post and pee on their Christmas roses. A rescue dog, a non-shedder, housetrained, a bit mature, small, likes a lap--someone who like me needs another chance at proving worth and value, and hates shitting where he or she eats.
You see, I do make a lousy correspondent from the edges of reality. Faced with not knowing what will come next, I return each time to the easy fantasy that I'll overcome everything with ease and power. What happens, actually, is that I stumble over recovery with luck and chance, and the power is simply supplied by my stubborness, not some great will, insight or perception. Like soda, I open up the future with an expection of sweet froth; if it emerges flat, I pour it out for spoiled.
So while I recover, the weather is typically Indiana. It is jacksawing between a dying gasp of Winter and a lick here and there of Spring--I do like this. From the standpoint of poetry, one can only be amazed to see a crocus with a dust of snow upon it; from myth, how can you avoid thinking of Persephone struggling to break free of six months in hell? In reality, there's no way to avoid daydreaming a rocker on the back deck, the door open, the breeze and sunlight, a non-shedding companion chasing squirrels into the maple tree, an emerging bed of astilbe fronds, peach, white and violent magenta waving under it, a wall of stone placed to look old and accidental, a bird bathing in a bath made to look terra cotta, a well placed vision seeing it all as if by seeing it, it could be true.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Bad Addict
I, among the majority of people I've known, am addicted to caffeine--particularly in the form of coffee. I grew up Midwestern Hoosier in the Sixties and Seventies which meant that coffee (Folger's, normally), was served at every meal. My Aunt Effie, a woman whose fried chicken, chocolate cake and--believe it or not--jello could reduce me to a mere quiver of desire, was my favorite pre-kindergarten babysitter; she would serve me half coffee, half milk to enjoy with her as we watched television together. At four, I was a junkie.
I started smoking when I left high school and fell quickly into its rhythms--a cigarette upon rising, after meals, after sex, mid-movie, after everything. Many attempts came and passed at quitting. There were resolutions of jogging that required that smoking be banned from my life--fail. There were well-intentioned health reasons to quit that passed like mile markers, there were reasoned attempts to save my skin and good looks.
I had those two reasons to believe that my overall behavior was addiction prone, even though cocaine held no interest to me, I didn't want to blast goofballs, and I was quite capable of getting through virtually any crisis without sucking down copious amounts of weed. I never took up alcohol as an agent of relaxation or pleasure, though I still associate cheap beer with drag shows and the kinds of fun late nights I no longer have at my age (I am addicted to reasonable bedtime).
So I did think that as pain became a part of my cancer life, and as it became more and more necessary to ameliorate it, that opiates might really fundamentally change me--that I'd be a slack mouthed non-particpant in conscious life--and that eventually, I would choose that sensation over any other. It just hasn't worked that way.
I have a small array of medicines that help me manage pain. I use a Fentanyl patch that I change every 72 hours. I have two levels of elixirs that I use--one, that some call a lortab elixir mixes hydrocodone and acetaminophen, and that is like my patch, a rather low-dose response. The big gun for me is a morphine elixir that in quite insignificant doses can put me out for a solid sleep, and that I tend to use only at night, late, when my mouth is throbbing and my brain is dancing like a hot coal walker.
As I face my Friday sugery to remove extraneous stuff from my mouth, I also find myself hopeful that one of the outcomes will be a great lessening of pain, and a lessening of the need to fight against it. I find that far from addiction to pain killing and the opiates it loves, I'd like to relegate them to the back of my medical armory. Admittedly, there have been few times when I've operated in a fog state because of them--I've not had to dose to the point of comic staggers, or willingly give up my car keys (though I don't drive much anyway--3 times over the past year is positively unAmerican, right?). Opiates, however, in any dose do dull one--I theorize they at the very least desensetize the emotional response, and circulating throughout me on an ongoing basis, they take an edge away that is essentially Mark in all its sharp glory.
I have somewhat off-handedly praised my morphine sulfate in what it can do for me--it really will deliver a knock-out blow and it really will put me to sleep--but I've never come to love it or even want to desire it. Frankly, I find it rather scary. I keep a healthy regard for its facts against my fantasies--morphine was always the word that people whispered when there was no hope of surviving and my old relatives were slipping away; this was the thing that preceded death but wasn't living either. On the cloud, the cancers they had, the maladies of age, they became pieces of otherness--I became part of a scene that was floating backwards as much as any other family member--a blurred waving vision. That was the separation drug.
To use it was to love it, I heard--rather like how some are said to encounter meth and after one sniff, bite or drink (however one takes it), be incapable of saying no. I have had my moments where I wondered--sometimes when I've forgotten to change my patch after 72 hours and have gone into 90 some hours, I feel the difference--the constant gnaw of hurt that gets chopped down by that low dose patch returns, and I remember why I wear it in the first place. I change the patch and perhaps an hour later feel a relief--and I sigh, with the gratitude of a person who does not like mouth pain one bit--and wouldn't you? But yes, I wonder--is that addiction?
I doubt it. The thing that keeps careening through my mind this week as I pour lortab elixir into my tube is how I'd like to not do it (the taste is weird), and when I squirt the tiny morphine elixir into my intake I think of how I'd like to not worry about this stuff, and when I change the patch that punches me with pain killer I know that my skin would be happier without this clingy film on it. I realize that I would like to be certain I'm all back, all in one place, all of a single thought process, with no drag weight upon it.
I'd like to know that I am conscious, totally, and that I feel everything. That what I feel is the true signal of the body and that its pains are passing and ephemeral, mile markers back into the City of Life. Addicts, I figure, aren't interested in that place--even those addicted as I was to cigarettes, even those of us who can't do without just-ground Kenyan shade-grown in the morning--we're all drugging against some part of the reality of that place. We kid ourselves that one addiction is less than others, that we hurt no one but approving one and disapproving others, and on the surface, it's hard to argue against that. My love of coffee isn't ruining nearly as much as your need to cook meth--overtly. But the 8 year old who doesn't go to school who picked my beans might have an argument to make against that.
I look forward to waving good bye to pain, and to not refilling a lortab prescription. Let us hope that soon enough, I can tell you all how it feels to feel everything, that the sun is hot, and the wind is bracing, and the soreness has gone away.
I started smoking when I left high school and fell quickly into its rhythms--a cigarette upon rising, after meals, after sex, mid-movie, after everything. Many attempts came and passed at quitting. There were resolutions of jogging that required that smoking be banned from my life--fail. There were well-intentioned health reasons to quit that passed like mile markers, there were reasoned attempts to save my skin and good looks.
I had those two reasons to believe that my overall behavior was addiction prone, even though cocaine held no interest to me, I didn't want to blast goofballs, and I was quite capable of getting through virtually any crisis without sucking down copious amounts of weed. I never took up alcohol as an agent of relaxation or pleasure, though I still associate cheap beer with drag shows and the kinds of fun late nights I no longer have at my age (I am addicted to reasonable bedtime).
So I did think that as pain became a part of my cancer life, and as it became more and more necessary to ameliorate it, that opiates might really fundamentally change me--that I'd be a slack mouthed non-particpant in conscious life--and that eventually, I would choose that sensation over any other. It just hasn't worked that way.
I have a small array of medicines that help me manage pain. I use a Fentanyl patch that I change every 72 hours. I have two levels of elixirs that I use--one, that some call a lortab elixir mixes hydrocodone and acetaminophen, and that is like my patch, a rather low-dose response. The big gun for me is a morphine elixir that in quite insignificant doses can put me out for a solid sleep, and that I tend to use only at night, late, when my mouth is throbbing and my brain is dancing like a hot coal walker.
As I face my Friday sugery to remove extraneous stuff from my mouth, I also find myself hopeful that one of the outcomes will be a great lessening of pain, and a lessening of the need to fight against it. I find that far from addiction to pain killing and the opiates it loves, I'd like to relegate them to the back of my medical armory. Admittedly, there have been few times when I've operated in a fog state because of them--I've not had to dose to the point of comic staggers, or willingly give up my car keys (though I don't drive much anyway--3 times over the past year is positively unAmerican, right?). Opiates, however, in any dose do dull one--I theorize they at the very least desensetize the emotional response, and circulating throughout me on an ongoing basis, they take an edge away that is essentially Mark in all its sharp glory.
I have somewhat off-handedly praised my morphine sulfate in what it can do for me--it really will deliver a knock-out blow and it really will put me to sleep--but I've never come to love it or even want to desire it. Frankly, I find it rather scary. I keep a healthy regard for its facts against my fantasies--morphine was always the word that people whispered when there was no hope of surviving and my old relatives were slipping away; this was the thing that preceded death but wasn't living either. On the cloud, the cancers they had, the maladies of age, they became pieces of otherness--I became part of a scene that was floating backwards as much as any other family member--a blurred waving vision. That was the separation drug.
To use it was to love it, I heard--rather like how some are said to encounter meth and after one sniff, bite or drink (however one takes it), be incapable of saying no. I have had my moments where I wondered--sometimes when I've forgotten to change my patch after 72 hours and have gone into 90 some hours, I feel the difference--the constant gnaw of hurt that gets chopped down by that low dose patch returns, and I remember why I wear it in the first place. I change the patch and perhaps an hour later feel a relief--and I sigh, with the gratitude of a person who does not like mouth pain one bit--and wouldn't you? But yes, I wonder--is that addiction?
I doubt it. The thing that keeps careening through my mind this week as I pour lortab elixir into my tube is how I'd like to not do it (the taste is weird), and when I squirt the tiny morphine elixir into my intake I think of how I'd like to not worry about this stuff, and when I change the patch that punches me with pain killer I know that my skin would be happier without this clingy film on it. I realize that I would like to be certain I'm all back, all in one place, all of a single thought process, with no drag weight upon it.
I'd like to know that I am conscious, totally, and that I feel everything. That what I feel is the true signal of the body and that its pains are passing and ephemeral, mile markers back into the City of Life. Addicts, I figure, aren't interested in that place--even those addicted as I was to cigarettes, even those of us who can't do without just-ground Kenyan shade-grown in the morning--we're all drugging against some part of the reality of that place. We kid ourselves that one addiction is less than others, that we hurt no one but approving one and disapproving others, and on the surface, it's hard to argue against that. My love of coffee isn't ruining nearly as much as your need to cook meth--overtly. But the 8 year old who doesn't go to school who picked my beans might have an argument to make against that.
I look forward to waving good bye to pain, and to not refilling a lortab prescription. Let us hope that soon enough, I can tell you all how it feels to feel everything, that the sun is hot, and the wind is bracing, and the soreness has gone away.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)