When it comes to drugs, the most powerful one I’ve ever tried, by far, is morphine. I’ve tried others; there’s no honor in pretending otherwise. But it was morphine that helped me understand the true allure — and consequence — of humanity’s long, thorny love affair with mind-altering substances.
Before my experience with morphine, I thought that different kinds of mind-altering substances had different purposes: alcohol to relax; marijuana to alter perspective; tobacco to ease stress; pain-killers to, well, kill the pain. After my experience with morphine, I came to understand that mind-altering substances actually have only one true purpose, which they never achieve: to kill pain. So many different kinds of pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, social pain. The human condition is defined by pain. We are born with it, we live with it, and it lives on in our loved ones after we are gone.
With morphine, I learned that it is not possible to kill pain. One can prevent it, or failing that, delay it — but eventually we all must endure it. What morphine does frighteningly well is put the pain on a very long, very distant, and very soothing layaway. And when it comes due, it comes with a substantial amount of interest.
I wouldn’t be alive today without the modern anesthetics and pharmaceuticals that made it possible for neurosurgeons to slice open my head, vaporize a section of my skull using an insanely fast surgical drill, cut through the labyrinth of my inner ear to expose the nerve bundle behind it, and delicately resect (cut out) the strawberry-sized tumor that had grown around the nerve bundle the way an old tree grows around the wires of a chain link fence. I would have died from the intense pain; I would have died from the trauma; I would have died from infection. There are a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t be alive today, but here I am. And one of my biggest heroes of the whole painful and terrifying affair, besides my wife, my children, my parents and extended family, my friends, my employer, my health insurance, and my amazing, god-like surgical team, was morphine.
…
The full force of a massive and thunderous waterfall falling directly onto the right side of my head, which is pinned against a rock at the bottom. A hydraulic press bearing down with four tons of force, merciless and unrelenting. A thousand watts of microwave energy screaming pain and emanating inward from the furthest reaches of space, yet outward at the same time. I felt magnitudes of pain after my surgery. I never forgot for a moment it was there. I could see it and touch it in my mind, painfully and viscerally, and I didn’t care. The morphine drip took care of it. The morphine didn’t erase the pain. The pain was still vivid, torrential, devastating. The pain was shredding me into millions of jagged strips that I would never put together in the same way ever again. I just didn’t care about it at the moment.
Drip… drip… drip.
…
Part four: https://cityliteral.com/2017/09/10/do-you-want-to-know-how-i-got-these-scars-part-four