A hydrocodone post

Woke up this morning in pain from the wound. Also a headache. It's dark and kind of rainy out, which on the one hand helps stoke the self-pity, but on the other hand makes me feel a little better about being immobilized because what I really miss is biking and I wouldn't be doing that in this weather anyway. Not that I want bad weather for the next 5 weeks, but it's easier to not miss doing something when you couldn't do it anyway.

Damn my ass hurts. (It does, a lot, but I'm also obligated to write "ass" at least once in each post.)

I took a hydrocodone last night (and for those of you keeping score, hydrocodone is basically vicodin) and one the first day, but I'm nervous about using them. There's a pride issue, since I've read on the pilonidal.org forums of several people who had this procedure and didn't take any pain medication. I've never been invested in being a tough guy, but I do find myself wanting to not need or want pain medication. So there's that. And connected to that is the fear that if I need pain medication, prescription pain medication, then I'm not healing properly or as quickly or as well as I should or want to. I've been fairly mobile around the house, and shifting around on our pull-out couch where I've been set up in the most lavish sick-room style (1 small table for the new Pynchon book I won't finish, my Sigg water bottle [the colored Nalgene ones are bad for you, it turns out], my meds, and my phone, 1 small table for the books and articles I'm to use to finish the conference paper on Steven Berkoff's choruses that I won't actually be working on in this condition, a lap desk for my laptop [I'm not sitting to use it, but placing it on the floor so I can type lying off the edge of the bed], a basket full of magazines, gum, and SweetTarts, the TV turned towards the couch, and remotes somewhere on this bed amongst all the pillows. Did I mention that my wife is a champ? This morning she left me the new Doonesbury collection, "Heckuva Job, Bushie!" She's a healer by nature and now by trade [not "now" as in with her husband laid up, but "now" as in she is a massage therapist and energy healer and is writing her Master's DMT thesis on PTSD.]). So yes. I'm quite set up, but I fear that I've been moving too much and that this is why I'm in pain.

There's also the fact that I used to smoke, sometimes don't monitor my alcohol intake, and am generally obsessive compulsive. Not clinically OCD, but if there's something I want to purchase that's over $50, I will spend weeks researching it, trying it on, thinking about it, making jokes to my wife about it, until finally I get rid of the idea of owning it or I break down and get it, making sure to spend at least a week feeling weird about having it before moving on to enjoy it. Type of thing. So I'm nervous about becoming hooked on hydrocodone, which is, as the assuredly reliable Wikipedia informs me, a habit-forming drug. Which it very well would be, seeing as how it's an opioid. (Poor thing: no "-oid" was ever respected in high school. Only the opiates ever got any. The "-oid" I'm assuming denotes that it's a synthetic drug, as opposed to the opiates, which are derived from the plant. Hence the getting more action. Where is this bit going?

It's going to take a hydrocodone and watch some Simpson's.)