My friend the morphine pump

Women often say that if men wanted to experience real pain they should give birth to a child.  After my experience with lung surgery last Thursday I think I might have preferred taking a shot at childbirth.  However, with lung surgery pain you have an advantage, it’s called morphine.  I remember absolutely nothing of the surgery, very little of the recovery room and just became coherent enough in my overnight room to learn that the thing in my hand with the button and little green light would become my best friend.  When the little green light came on I pushed the button, opening the floodgates of morphine, drowning the pain and allowing a dreamy darkness to descend.  I became like Pavlov’s dog:  Feel pain, open eyes, see green light, push button, painless darkness.  Repeat. The clock was on the wall directly in front of me and every time I opened my eyes it was the first thing I saw.  I kept thinking what the hell is wrong with this clock?   It keeps jumping ahead ten minutes at a time!  I spent the entire night sleeping in ten minute intervals.  But at least they left me alone with my morphine toy.  By the next night I had been switched to oxycodone tablets which are not nearly so much fun as a morphine pump and the nurses kept waking me up throughout the night to take “vital signs,” give me pills and stick needles in my stomach.  When I finally got into some kind of deep sleep about 4:00 a.m., the door bangs open, the lights go on and the portable X-ray machine comes rolling in followed by the blood sample nurse. After another night of the same I was finally released.  Sunday night as I drifted off to sleep in my own bed imagining that all I had gone through was just a frightening nightmare, I began mumbling,  “There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home… there’s no place….”