Morphine, Morphine, what made you so mean?
You never used to do me like you do.
Where's that sweet gal I once knew?

--Gillian Welch, My Morphine

I had my first experience with morphine the other day, after my bladder surgery, while I was in the hospital. I was given a spinal anesthetic for the surgery, and it took several hours to wear off. So while I was still numb from the chest down I felt no pain at all. But when the anesthetic wore off, the pain came on all at once.

All of a sudden, my bladder was on fire with pain.

I asked the nurse to bring me something for pain and she wanted me to rate the pain on a scale of one to ten. I couldn't really think in those terms, so I simply said "Well, it's WAY above a five." That must have been enough for her. She brought a syringe and injected it into my IV tube.

I asked her what I was getting and she told me that it was "synthetic Morphine." I had just enough time to think "Oh, wow, I'm gonna really feel this stuff..." and then WOOSH!

It was like I had hyper-warped across the entire universe and back to where I started in a about half a second. And I felt REALLY weird. I don't know how to describe it, really. I didn't feel like myself, for one thing. And my speech and hearing was strange. It felt like there was some sort of time-gap between when words would form in my mouth and then leave my mouth and then travel to my own ears.

My wife, mother and step-dad were visiting me when I got the morphine and they seemed to be slightly ahead of me in time. It was like I was struggling to keep up with what was going on around me and lagging behind. I kept apologizing and saying I felt like I'd been drugged. Mom reminded me that I had been drugged. I'd asked to be drugged.

For the rest of the afternoon, until the morphine wore off, I constantly felt like I was out of sync with time. I was either slightly behind time or slightly ahead of it. I know that sounds weird, but it's the closest I can come to describing what I felt.

I was also itching all over. Especially my nose. I could NOT get my nose to stop itching.

Oh, yeah, the morphine knocked the pain out completely.

I didn't get morphine again for the rest of the time I was in the hospital. They brought me lower-grade pain-killers when I'd ask for something for pain. And I'm glad, really. I can understand how morphine would be addictive for some people. If you like the experience of having reality chemically altered, you'd REALLY get a sense of that with regular use of morphine.

Here are some fun facts about about morphine from the net:

• German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner discovered how to make morphine from the poppy. He named the drug after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.



• The most common "synthetic morphine" is OxyContin. So I'm guessing that's what I was given in the hospital. I wish I'd asked to be sure, just for my own information. Nonetheless, if it was OxyContin, I can understand why so many people get addicted to it.



• According to FunTrivia.com (and if you can't trust them, who can you trust?) opium and heroin are derived from the same poppy plants as morphine. Heroin is one and a half to two times as strong as morphine. They refused to bring me heroin in the hospital. The nurse was so surprised when I asked for it that I got the idea that they didn't even have any heroin.



• The American Civil War produced so many morphine addicts (over 400,000) that morphine addiction became known as "soldier's disease."
  
  
• In the late 1800's, morphine was marketed as Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which new mothers were supposed to rub on the gums of teething infants. It promised to settle them down. I'm pretty damn sure it must have worked.



• Actor Bela Lugosi, jazz great Charlie Parker, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the inventor of Coca Cola were all morphine junkies.



• The known side effects of morphine include respiratory depression, constipation, pupil constriction, and that itching I mentioned earlier.

So there you go. I can now add morphine to the list of drugs I've experienced. And I honestly hope to never experience it again. Partly because it's so disorienting. Partly because of that itching. But mostly because I hope I never have pain that's severe enough to warrant the use of morphine again!

Labels: Bladder Cancer, Personal, Trivial Matters