D+3 through D+7
The Routine
For the next five days, I developed a routine. Get up as normal and take a 'bath' after everyone else had theirs and were about their day. I never really slept well on my back and on top of the bedsheets. I would wake up every 2-3 times a night as the pain medication wore off. Or, more commonly, I had rolled over and found a sharp pain shooting up my foot because I had bumped it in the night.
By the following Sunday, D+5, I stopped taking the Percocet and started taking Motrin/Ibuprofen. I did not like the side effects. I did feel a little uptick in pain, but was not worth the constipation, dry-mouth, nausea, and loopiness it gave me. I was also edgy to my family when I took the pills. The pharmacy gave me enough Percocet to last me two years, it seems. Way too many!
The worst, I will say, was the constipation. They gave me a laxative to take along with the Percocet. But when you finally have to 'go' at three in the morning, sitting on the toilet with all the blood rushing to your foot makes for an extremely painful experience. Not worth it!
Maybe it is just me, but the 'feel good' was there for a little bit after I took the Percocet, but I didn't feel the need to continue to take the meds. I certainly wasn't Dr. House and had to have my fix every four hours. However, I did some research on the couch. Now, I don't have a chronic pain condition that the fictional Dr. House had, nor real people with real chronic pain.
However, I do have an appreciation for how it could be easily to become addicted. It is my understanding that addiction is nearly non-existent up to around the initial five days of use. However, when someone crosses the 10th day, addiction skyrockets.
I just hope my unit Drug-Demand-Officer doesn't announce a drug-test in the near future. Looks like my spit and pee are good-to-go. But lay off my hair...
D+7
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