Sometimes, it’s the practical things the pain management doctors forget to tell you. For instance, the first thing I would tell anyone going on continual, chronic pain treating opioid therapy? Plan on spending a couple of minutes, morning and night, checking yourself over for mystery wounds. The drugs don’t take away your ability to feel pain – trust me, slam your foot into the wall, you’ll feel it. But, they do seem to deaden your awareness of some kinda of injuries – I haven’t really figured out the pattern, but it’s there.
I was reminded of this tonight when I pulled up my yoga pants to rub some lotion on my ankles and found blood. A lot of blood. Trickled, dried blood. Huh. So, I rolled up the leg a bit higher, and about mid-calf came upon an obviously wet wound, still actively bleeding to the point that I couldn’t really figure out how bad the cut was. Or, for that matter, how the hell I got it – shouldn’t I remember gouging myself deep enough to bleed, not to mention bleed that copiously? I wandered off to clean up the blood and figure out if I was going to need to continue wandering over to the ED.
Thankfully, it looks like I did something to basically puncture myself a couple of times; not terribly long (the longest is about an inch), but kind of deep. I’d suspect a cat, except I’m pretty certain I would have remembered a cat doing that to me. A bit of pressure and butterfly bandages stopped the bleeding, so I think I should be okay sans ED (and really, midnight on a Sunday is not a grand time to wander through the ED).
Still, it’s sort of disconcerting to realize that I can injure myself like that and be completely unaware of it. Prior to the chronic pain and medications, I was one of the bigger babies when it came to injuries – these days, I can walk around long enough to coagulate before I notice!
This is the sort of practical thing everyone going onto long term pain management therapy should be aware of.
The forensic pathologist who developed the currently used system of lethal injection has told CNN that while there might be new drugs that should cause the injection formulation to be revisited and revised, the procedure itself is medically sound if done by competent people.
