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.