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Writer's pictureKristin Lindstrom

Episode 98: My Break-up with Opioids

Sorry this took so long.


I’ve often wondered how some people can become addicted to drugs like opioids; my experience with them has not been happy. But in the last two years I’ve been given oxycontin as a painkiller for six operations: two hip replacements, a knee replacement and three back operations.

My first reactions to the drug were relatively mild hallucinations, hallucinations that felt astonishingly real. I was standing next to a nurse looking out the window of my room at the hospital when I saw a huge murmuration of birds. I turned to her and said, “Do you see those birds?”

“No,” she said curtly. “Get back to bed.”

Harrumph. I couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t seen them.

Other relatively benign hallucinations happened when I was home. I looked across the street one day and saw the creatures from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are gamboling around my neighbor’s front yard. They had a swing, a band and card game going. The funny thing is I’d never read the book.

But as with a good boyfriend turned bad, so did the hallucinations. In August I had very serious back surgery and was under anesthesia for 10 hours. They had trouble pulling me out of it, but the hallucinations began when they gave me oxycontin. Again, these hallucinations were frighteningly realistic.

I believed I had flown from Baltimore to VHC Health in Arlington with a woman who had been beaten, I thought, by her husband. I was ‘told’ the airplane was a flying hospital. But I was really in bed in my ICU room with my husband sitting in a side chair. I watched the woman curl up on the floor. Perry was staring at me; he feared I was going crazy.

Finally, a male nurse came in to help. He bent over the woman and put his arms around her. Then they melded together and turned into a chair.

Hunh.

But worse than that was the wild Halloween party the ICU staff was throwing. The ICU is a vast grey, rather dreary room filled with computers that are shared between the many nurses. A lot of people were moving about. I could see quite a few young men in costume who appeared to be watching a football game.

The party just getting started.

This was August. Wormy bugs crawled down the walls in waves and found their way into my water and my food. My nurse was not sympathetic. To be accurate, these bugs turned into little T-Rexes in my food and marched around on top of it. Hospital food is bad enough without that. Black dogs of all sizes were roaming through the unit. Raucous music played and dirty children kept peeking at me from the television and the chest. The kids on the television screen became outlined in vibrating, flaming red.

Large statues of devilish characters decorated the main room, red eyes blinking on and off, heads turning from side to side. Nurses wore hideous head masks. Hairy monsters strolled the aisles, leering in at me through the thin curtain at my door.

I thought this seemed like a rather expensive party.

I was worried Perry hadn’t been in to see me and began to fear he had been killed in a car wreck, in spite of reassurances from the nurses that he had been in multiple times, as had my surgeon. I have no memory of these visits.

On the second day, happily, the Halloween party theme evaporated, only to be replaced by the conviction that my long-suffering nurse was trying to kill me. I kept an eagle eye out for her. When she came to give me a cloth bath I was debating whether she was preparing my body for the grave.

Throughout Perry was terrified that I wouldn’t come out of it.

In my case, my relationship with oxycontin turned very sour, but happily I came out of the funk when they stopped giving it to me after a long, frightening two and a half days.

Perry was sick with relief.

In an article from author Elaine K Howley’s in U.S. News on November 5, 2018, Dr. Steven Severyn, an anesthesiologist, and director of the Comprehensive Pain and Headache Center at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Neurological Institute, said this about opioids, “For the past couple of decades, prescription opioids such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, and morphine have been popular choices for helping patients to manage acute pain.” While there are many different ways to treat pain, “opioids have long been considered the ‘go-to’ drugs to help manage acute pain,” Severyn says, but they may be overkill for some conditions.

Oddly my doctors didn’t pursue any of the alternatives for me, save for Tylenol. Really? I was even told that other drugs had not been developed to the extent of the opioids due to the money to be made. I am not sure this is true, as since then I’ve seen articles online that offer alternatives.

I hear the ICU is naming a new wing after me.







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