medical miscellany

[kaberett]

Despite having Firmly Told Myself that I was going to take All The Painkillers I got sent home with, and then see how stopping went, Because I Know What I'm Like... I decided that yesterday went well enough that I could try not taking them today. Somehow it was not until Adam woke me back up at around 5 p.m. (having had both morning and afternoon naps) that it dawned on me that the exhaustion might just possibly be related to the lack of painkillers...

Meanwhile on Sunday I got around to actually looking up the drug I'd had injected as a spinal block to get me through the first 24 hours post-surgically. I had definitely been aware that I was doing much better than I'd expected, in that when asked how I was my default response in that first 24 hours was "... surprisingly chipper, all things considered"? But the response "ah. ...that'll be the diamorphine." was something I was happy to accept but not something I particularly understood until I went and looked up the oxycodone they started giving me once said diamorphine wore off.

Friends. Friends, I do not know if it was that I never knew this fact or that I had merely forgotten it, but "diamorphine" is in fact the polite don't-scare-the-patients grown-up name of... heroin. I was feeling surprisingly chipper because I had had heroin injected directly into my spine. The heroin that is well known for inducing euphoria. That heroin.

Which does also explain why the terrible bonging machine was so unhappy about my respiration rate dropping below eight breaths per minute:

Post procedure, blood pressure, pulse, sedation, pain scores, oxygen saturation levels and respiratory rate should be recorded every 15 minutes for 1 hour and then every 30 minutes for the next 2 hours.

Respiratory rate, sedation and pain scores must be recorded hourly until at least 24 hours post procedure or longer if the observations are unstable, especially if additional opioids are given. The frequency of other observations may be reduced after 12 hours.

[...]

Additional opioid analgesia may also be given as prescribed provided it is clinically indicated with a pain score of 2 or more AND clinically safe: respiratory rate >8 per minute and sedation score 1-2.

... which would be why they kept the arterial line in until they were happy discharging me to the general ward, then.

Comments

[lebannen]

ahahahahahahaha! I am very glad that diamorphine works as intended for you, and hope that you make a swift recovery and find a balance of taking painkillers that works for you.

My dad was Very Unhappy after being given diamorphine, and complained AT LENGTH that he had HAD DREAMS, and described them in a way that he had never done before. They seemed like perfectly normal descriptions of dreams to everyone else - I did not know the word aphantasia at the time, but yeah we're now pretty sure that my dad was usually aphantasic, and the diamorphine was showing him a whole new world when he just wanted to sleep quietly.

[ludy]

gosh, that must have been incredibly disconcerting for him.

Thanks to this comment I have now realised the fun paradox of it being almost impossible to imagine having aphantasia with a phantasic(? assuming that must be the right word) mind!