...and then a Miracle Happened

Last weekend the aches were worse, and/or the advil and tylenol worked less well & for less long, especially on Sunday and Monday. Clearly on Monday I my daily maximum of advil and tylenol would have run out before I went to bed. Last Thursday my doctor wrote me a prescription for morphine in response to my concern about taking too much advil and tylenol in an effort to "get ahead of the pain" (take the meds at the first signs of pain rather than after it has set in) while their effects seem to be lasting for shorter periods of time. I had planned to hold onto this as a backup plan -- but on MOnday night I filled it and took one before going to bed.

I was afraid it would make me groggy and -- oh, sort of take me away from myself. The thing is, I want to function better, not worse, and I was thinking that a heavy duty narcotic would not exactly help with that. I think of morphine as a street drug and an end-of-life palliative. However, it did neither of these things; it just made the pain go away. It felt a little strange at the beginning, but not much. It didn't make me sleepy, either -- in fact I was so happy to be pain free that I stayed up reading for awhile, enjoying the feeling. The pain seemed to be starting to come back in the night and I took another one. (These are low dose every-4-hr pills, and it had been 5 hrs since my first one.) It was still 4 hours until my alarm would go off and I was no longer worried about being too groggy to function in the morning.

And then I woke up and felt fine. Well I was a little nauseous, which I had been warned about, but no pain. I did take advil at 7, and again before bed, and just now. But we are talking about a decrease from 1800mg advil plus 2g tylenol a day to just 1200 mg advil/day. Maybe I will try cutting it down to 800 -- since, after all, the only reason I am taking anything is to "get ahead of the pain," which doesn't seem to be coming at this point in such force as it was. I don't know if the morphine had something to do with it or whether for some reason it just hit me harder at the beginning of this chemo week, so there is less left of it now.

Anyway it has felt like a miracle. Last night I was thinking, gee, this is a pretty good life we have here, when I'm not going around aching all the time!

Having said that.... you're going to laugh at this, but I want to ask all you people sending me prayers and well wishes not to waste them on the aches and pains I'm having now. This will be over in a couple of weeks, the chemo and its associated pains. If I got to choose I'd want them all put all directly into my long term survival and all its indicators. A nicely shrunk tumor, as close to gone as possible by the time they take it out, and no more nodes -- or very few -- would be fabulous. No recurrences and metastases, and how about 40-50 more years of life?

I guess it's a tall order -- but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

And now I'm off to go lead a bikeride. 32 miles today, and I should come back with a loaf of bread and have my first reiki session!

Oh yeah -- of course I've had no bowel movements since the morphine. It was worth it, that one time, but .... I suppose this is why addicts inject it, hmmm? BTW my oncologist gave me morphine instead of codeine because it's supposed to be less constipating.