It Only Hurt When I Breathed

So I'm hurting this morning. The pain medication wore off sometime in the night. The sac that my heart hangs in is inflamed and swelled. Whenever my heart beats (or more accurately, about every three to four beats) there is a spear of hot pain that runs through my chest, mostly my heart. It finally got bad enough that I gave up trying to sleep and got up about thirty minutes ago.

Percocet. Colchicine. Zofran. Bottled water, room temperature. Seedless grapes.

Rest.

Resting means writing, today and likely every day for the next five weeks. I've got a pile of books I want to read while recovering, but writing will be the key. Writing is always the key. Among the books are Amelia Gray's novel Threats and Frederick Seidel's The Cosmos Poems. After that it's a couple of Bolaño's I've been eager to read  - Distant Star and By Night in Chile.

The meds are working good now and the pain is gone for a bit. I need this for more reasons than simply to be free of pain. I've had a bit of trauma I'm working through, too. My medication Antabuse (used for alcoholism but also opiate addiction) was in my system at the time of my surgery. I had taken a couple doses within the time frame that it would still be present and I hadn't remembered doing so. Couple this with the fact that the surgical staff had no idea about it either, and you've got a torturous situation worthy of Hell itself.

Post-op I felt everything, was there for every single second of it. Pulling the drain tube from my chest. Check. My deflated lung pushing against my ribs whenever I took a breath. Check. All of it. It took twenty-six hours for anyone to figure out the Antabuse had effectively blocked the pain medication. I took shallow breathes that felt like knife wounds for that entire twenty-six hours, and that's all I did. I couldn't eat, couldn't drink fluids, couldn't sleep. For one day and two hours my entire existence was pain.

When the medical team did figure out how to help me (which included, among other things, an epidural along with a couple nerve blockers) I could only wait for it to start up again. It hasn't yet, but I'm scared it might, so I wait. I read, I write, and I wait.

At least I'm alive to do it.