having a bad day or two

      haven't been feeling the best in the world and i am sure it is just a passing thing. as bad as i have it i have a friend of mine in who is having a worse day and i am sure would trade places with me. she decided to undergo back surgery to try and improve her ability to get around. it was tough going through back surgery myself at 28 let alone at the age i am now. i admire her courage to try and make things right. so i am not going to have a blog of pictures where people are sick or being treated , but instead a blog with pretty pictures while i let your mind think bad thoughts. 

      at 28 i too, had just finished back surgery to wake up in recovery with  really bad back pain and continual muscle cramps from my eyebrows to my toes , turning the muscles on and off intermittently like someone playing with a light switch. i had a controversial out dated procedure at the time called chymopaypaine injection where they take papaya enzyme , much like meat tenderizer and inject it into the center of your damaged disc where it proceeds to eat out the center of your disc and allows the disc to shrink or pull away from spinal column. although i went through pretesting to see if i was allergic to the enzyme of which i wasn't at time, it still had an allergic reaction and was causing the intermittent muscle cramping. 

    day after day for a total of 7 days , i lay in hospital bed as they alternated with hot and cold packs and took me to whirlpools where a small crane would pick me up and hover me over a tub and release me into it . nothing helped . until one night i had a small nurse come in and she apparently could read the pain in my eyes , as i took another shot off demerol , my only relief to the constant pain and it was short lived and would allow me to sleep an hour at most. she asked later if i was still in pain and i was in bad pain as i was sweating it out in there. she said she would fix me up. 

    she calls the doctor up and he orders morphine for me. and she shoots me up in a vien as i mainline the drug for the first time. i could feel the warmth as it entered my blood stream and coursed its way to my head and all of a sudden i was feeling better as i settled back with my liquid diet of beef broth and green jello in 1 inch cubes cut ever so neatly and water to wash it al down. it was just about as yummy as i described and the thought of it now still makes me ill. 

     but as i sat there and watched my plate of food and listened to little rascals on the tv, i made an astonishing discovery as the jello would wiggle when i pushed the tray out would suddenly grow more 1 inch chunks. further wiggling had the cubes spilling out over the side of the bowl and now 1 inch jello cubes were filling up the corner of the room . well math was a good subject and knowing some conversions i was at once calculating how fast the room was filling up and thinking i was at the end room at end of the hall furthest from nursing station , i figured i had better get a nurse moving in my direction before i smothered under all these green jello cubes. just as the nurse came in i became really sick and to spare details it took that nurse awhile to make things right. she would roll me one way  and clean me and shove sheets under me, and then move to other side.  and she couldn't have been no more than 5'2" and yet she so aptly made me better and i was soon asleep for my first peaceful sleep in a week or better. all thanks to her. 

     i have never been able to thank her as that night was the only time she was on duty while i was there. 

there radical new procedure was eventually scrapped , as to many patients had experienced symptoms like mine. so my friend undergoing back surgery today should hopefully be able to avoid at least one procedure, potentially harming and obsolete. now if they just have improved the drugs.