Member-only story
I Don’t Think I’ve ‘Got This’
A cautionary tale.
TRIGGER WARNING: This story deals with the topic of opioid addiction.
Tomorrow marks the four-week mark for me since massive breast and abdominal surgery — a double mastectomy with immediate DIEP Flap breast reconstruction. For those of you who haven’t been following along and may be unfamiliar, this means that I was my own donor, that my belly tissue was repurposed, transplanted to my chest, and made into new “breasts,” upon the medically necessary removal of the original articles.
As I’ve mentioned here before, pain management during my four day hospital stay was ineffective; the normal cocktail of narcotic medications wasn’t available to me because of issues with low blood pressure.
As soon as it stabilized, and the staff finally found something I could tolerate, I was sent packing, armed with prescribed oxycodone (Percocet), and expected to manage things at home, on my own.
In the early days, I took a pill every four hours, as directed, then stretched it out to six. But after the first week or so of trying the every-six-hour schedule, I found that the last two hours of every cycle were absolute hell, spent sobbing and shaking, wondering how it could be that with each passing day, I felt worse than the one before.
