Fun fact! Did you know that if you take 1 percocet every 4 hours, as prescribed by your physician, for two weeks your body will become, for lack of a better word . . . And because it’s the word that should be used, addicted? Me neither! So, if your physician tells you to take 2 pills every 4 hours for 6 weeks, um, yeah. Don’t do it.
I have been taking percocet off and on for the past 6 weeks. Not at the dosage prescribed by my doctor, thank God. Nope, I’m a little soldier who attempts, if possible, to suck it up. So, I’ve been taking maybe 2 a day. I haven’t had much pain for the past 2 days so I haven’t taken any. And, hence, therefore and thusly I woke up after the 2 hours of sleep (5:30 - 7:30 AM) that I was able to get (you try sleeping in a neck brace and see how well you do) with wicked spasms in my arms. I, being me, went immediately to the bad place and thought that I’d managed to break my neck in my sleep…even though I hadn’t moved. But then I thought about the fact that I wasn’t in much pain so, really, what are the odds that a broken neck wouldn’t hurt? Slim to none. Second bad place I went to? Percocet addiction. DING! DING! We may have a winner. Apparently, when your body is trying to rid itself of the demon opiate it spasms. DT’s, anyone?
Now, after waking up and going to multiple bad places (they don’t call me Dark Fury for nothing, after all) I went and read my prescription hand out for the valium which I was also given in case, and I quote, “you start getting muscle spasms.” How, I have been wondering, would Valium help with that? Well, kids, Valium is used to treat symptoms of detox. So, either I’m supposed to be spasming as part of my regular recovery or they bloody knew that I would need them to get through tossing the Percocet. Great. I feel good about that. Wait…not so much. If they knew I’d be spasming during my recovery should they not have told me why? Or, if they knew I’d need them to get through pitching the opiates should they not have told me that as well? Apparently not. Super.
Let us be clear, I am not in any way a Percocet junkie. Opiates are good for pain management and that’s about it. How people get high off this shit I have yet to figure out. It cuts the pain in half and makes you go to sleep. Woo Hoo! Party time? Nope. Not so much. Sleepy time? You betcha’. And, as an insomniac, I can understand the appeal of that but, seriously, it only put me to sleep for about an hour. Big whoop. Not worth it. Tylenol PM is a better sleep aid. But, I digress! I took the Valium and now the spasms have subsided. Also, I may be able to catch a nap if I’m quick about it. I have a finite window for drug induced sleep as for some reason the drugs don’t work so well for me. I blame my hippie gene pool. My father smoked so much dope, dropped so much acid (even though he always had a bad trip . . . the man ain’t right in the head) and took so many pills (no, so many, seriously, he used to go and pick them out by color combination…as in yellow and blue make green so I’ll take 3 of each…what? We’re artsy people.) that I’m convinced that I have opiates and THC permanently embedded in my DNA making it almost impossible for me to get any sort of wacky effect from pain meds. Go, father, it’s your birthday. Hopefully his other kids have inherited this trait as it makes surgery so much easier. Of course, on the down side, he loved morphine and that crap makes me sick as a dog. Oh, well, we can’t have everything in this life.
So, whether or not you decide to follow your doctors orders, if ever you should , God forbid, have a need for pain management is up to you and, let’s face facts, if it’s a fatal disease or a truly horrific incident you shouldn’t worry about the addictive properties. But, as one pal to another, if you can do without it then I advise you to do so. Thus ends my PSA for the day. . . .
Of course, it may just be that after the surgery my muscles and nerves which were injured by the condition which needed fixing are regenerating or attempting in some way to right themselves….Who knows? But why go to the good place when bad is so much easier and I don’t need GPS to get there?
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