Chapter I - Viva Opium!
December 7th, a day that shall live in infamy. Sixty-seven years to the day that those filthy Nips pulled their sneak attack on battleship row, a bolt of lightening struck me in the ass. As I bent over to zip up a bag of luggage I was packing for a meeting in Atlanta, something akin to a pit bull reached up and bit me on the left butt-cheek. A shot of boiling acid must have been injected into my ass because the back of my leg was obviously on fire. I tried to sit, stand, lay flat on my back, my stomach, anything to ease the flow of flaming napalm running down my leg. Nothing worked. It was getting late, so I decided to self-medicate by taking a couple of Vicodin, drinking three fingers of scotch and going to bed.
When I awoke on Monday morning, my leg was still smoldering. There was no way I was going out of town like this, so I cancelled my trip and called my primary care doctor for an appointment. After an examination, my doctor’s 12 years of medical training and his 20 some-odd years of experience as a physician lead him to the sage prognosis that I had pinched a nerve in my lower back. He prescribed more Vicodin, a muscle relaxant and told me to lay flat for a few days. He said I should be better within about a week, but to call him back if nothing changed. After a $25 co-pay and $50 for prescriptions, I went back to bed.
Over the next three days I was high as fuck. I would stay awake only long enough to take more drugs, eat and piss. The pain was getting better, but I noticed that my legs were beginning to get numb. At first, it felt like my feet were going to sleep or were really cold. Over the next couple of days the numbness slowly spread from my feet, to my calves, to my hamstrings and to my ass. I began to have a hard time walking, but I wasn’t sure if it was the numbness or the drugs. It still hurt like hell to stand up, but because of the copious amounts of Vicodin in my system, I just didn’t care.
Thursday morning is when I got scared that something was seriously wrong. In addition to my legs and ass, my butthole, taint and nutsack were now numb. I frantically called Dr. Feelgood and reported my condition. After explaining what a “taint” is to a 60-year old doctor, then being informed that the proper term for it is “perineum”, I was told to go to the emergency room for an MRI. The wife and kids were already gone to school, so I decided to cowboy-up and take myself on in. I popped a handful of Vicodin, waited a half-hour, and then got dressed. I literally couldn’t keep my balance to walk, plus the burning pain was getting worse. I grabbed a chair and used it like a walker to help stabilize myself and began to hobble out to my truck. It took me about 45 minutes to traverse the 30 feet that separate my house from the carport. The pain was becoming more and more unbearable and I began to realize that driving myself to the hospital might be a big mistake. As I got to the truck, I could no longer hold myself up with my legs. I tried to climb in, but the pain was nothing like anything I’d ever experienced. It literally took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. I can’t imagine that being on fire would be any worse than what I was feeling. As I stood waist-deep in the pool of acid, unable to get in my own truck or make it back to the house, I admitted to myself that I was in real trouble and needed help. I called 911 and requested that an ambulance come pick me up.
It seemed like forever, but the paramedics arrived within about 10 minutes. After listening to my list of symptoms and my apology for being such a pussy that I had to call them, they tried to figure out how they were going to get my big ass on the stretcher. We all debated for a while, but couldn’t come up with an easy plan. The only way to get on the stretcher was to climb my ass on there. They lowered it to a little below waist high, set a backboard on top of the pad and pushed it right up against me. All I needed to do was sit down, lay back and swing my legs up. The paramedics helped by holding my shoulders and tried to lift my legs as gently as possible, but the pain was indescribable. I screamed in a high-pitched voice like an 8-year-old girl who just got a pony for Christmas. A symphony of falsetto obscenities spewed from my lungs and I begged God to make the pain stop, but he wasn’t listening. Tears were streaming down my face and I had to force myself to inhale. I was in such pain that I think it scared the paramedics. Mercifully, they slid the backboard over a bit, centering my body on the stretcher. As one paramedic began to strap me down, another radioed the hospital to let them know we were coming. They took my vital signs and talked to the hospital a little more before wheeling me around to the back of the ambulance and loading me inside.
I’d been meaning to have a few truckloads of caliche brought in to re-surface my road, but just hadn’t gotten around to it. The ambulance ride sure made me wish I had, because every pothole in that sumbitch we hit made me scream. The ride to the hospital took about 15 minutes and the guy in the back with me was monitoring my vital signs and talking to the hospital. He hooked up an IV in my arm and gave me a shot for the pain, but it didn’t do any good. I asked him for a rig of heroin or if I could smoke some opium or some shit, but was denied. I’d have to wait until I got to the hospital to get anything stronger. The paramedics wheeled me into the emergency room and handed me off to the ER docs. They asked me a bunch of questions, took more vital signs and finally got around to getting me something to dull the pain. They injected a cocktail of pain medication and Valium into my IV and told me that I’d be heading upstairs to have an MRI. After a few minutes, the drugs took effect and took the edge off. I was still in a lot of pain, but at least I could breathe without screaming.
A procession of doctors, nurses and admissions people paraded through the room before the MRI Tech got there. He took one look at me and said that I was too big to fit in their machine. Now, I realize that I’m a big, fat, overgrown cow-bellied bastard, but what the fuck? When I asked him about what kind of half-assed midget MRI they had, he informed me that he didn’t think my chest and shoulders would fit through the opening in the tube. About that time, a doctor walked in. They discussed sending me to Ft. Worth to a larger MRI and whether a CT Scan would work. I think I pissed them off when I said, “How ‘bout we get a fucking tape measure, get some dimensions and figure out if my fat ass will fit in the machine you’ve got here?” They both left the room, then the MRI guy came back with a plastic ruler. He made a half-hearted attempt at measuring the width of my shoulders, then went upstairs to measure his machine. 45 minutes later I was headed up to get the MRI.
They loaded me onto the conveyor table feet first and ran me into the hole until my shoulders hit the sides of the opening. The MRI guy told me to lay still and left the room to see if enough of my back was in the machine to get a good picture. Once he was satisfied that it would work, he started the machine. The MRI took about 30 minutes to complete, then he backed me out of the hole. I asked him when the doctor would be able to look at the film and was told that it had already been e-mailed to the surgeon for review. By the time I got back to the ER, I was hurting pretty bad again. The nurse gave me another shot and said that they’d be moving me upstairs to a room pretty quickly. The Valium relaxed me, but the pain medication didn’t seem to work as well this time. I was still in a great deal of pain an hour later when they came to take me to my room.
As luck would have it, Weatherford Regional Medical Center is undergoing a big expansion project and the whole place is torn up by the ongoing construction. The nurse told me that, due to the construction, there was a shortage of private rooms. I would be placed in a semi-private room with another patient until a private room was available. At this point, I could give a shit less where they put me, as long as I could get another shot to extinguish the molten lava running down my legs. When I got to my room, I asked the nurse, Crystal, to give me another shot for pain. This time, the shot did absolutely nothing. Before, the Valium at least relaxed me a bit but this time; nothing… I waited about an hour and called Crystal back down to my room to tell her that the shot didn’t work. She said that I was under a different doctor’s orders now and that he hadn’t prescribed Valium with the pain killer. The doctor was on the floor making rounds, so she said that she’d talk to him about increasing my medication. About 20 minutes later, she came back with a syringe full of heaven…
Dilaudid is like synthetic morphine, and the good doctor prescribed me a healthy fucking dose. He also prescribed double the amount of Valium that I was getting in the emergency room. Crystal injected the syringe into my IV, then “pushed” it with some saline. No sooner than she took the saline syringe out of the IV, a warm, peaceful wave of sweet relief rolled throughout my entire body. I was blanketed in a fluffy, warm comfort that I can only describe by comparing it with what a junkie on TV looks like when they shoot heroin. Just like when a junkie shoots up and releases that rubber band strapped around their arm, my eyes rolled back into my head and I drifted off into blissful euphoria. Also like a junkie, I slept so hard that I didn’t even realize that I’d pissed all over myself.
_________________ "why don't you stay stuck in my windsheild over the weekend and think about what you just typed..." cameltoe - 1-26-06
"This just in. Politicians get a lot of pussy. Even the female ones. ." Hoob - 3-17-08
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