When I read today's topic for the WEGO Health Activists Blogger Challenge and I saw it said "TAking the high road" the song I quoted in the title was the only thought I had. I wasn't even sure what it meant to "take the high road" until a friend explained to me that it was to take the way most traveled and the most easily accessible path.
The only instance in regard to my health that I could come up with where I've taken the high road is in the case of pain medication. For years I fought it. I did succumb at one point and got a medication distribution pump surgically implanted in my abdomen....and that was in response to my absolute tiredness of fighting with pharmacies to get them to fill the doctor's prescriptions. Getting the scripts was no problem....every doctor I saw who knew anything about my medical history, knew that I needed the pain meds....and if they knew me they knew that I require high high doses of the most heavy hitting drugs because my body simply doesn't respond to anything else. That could possibly be the result of being on high doses of psychiatric meds for the past thirty years....or it could just be my obstinate body....but at any rate, to find a pharmacist willing to fill the doctors' scripts was almost impossible....so I opted for the implanted pump.
That only worked for a year or two until my body became acclimated to the morphine and the dilaudid from the pump as well. I was unwilling to take the higher and higher doses the doctors prescribed and so began for a number of years to just go without. I wasn't dependent on the meds. But my next five years or so were chapters from the annals of hell. I toughed it out...determined not to be "beholden" to any drug, doctor or pharmacist.....until finally...I hit the wall.
With the encouragement/prompting of a good friend who is also a retired nurse, I began to take the pain meds more frequently....although still not regularly....until I was hospitalized and was put on a standing dose of pain meds. I discovered when I got home, that I am now physically dependent on the meds. NOTE....that is NOT an addiction. it is a medical dependency...JUST AS a diabetic is dependent on their meds. Do I like it? NO. But I've come to realize that my life is not worth living without them. I had zero quality of life ....I still have pain. I still am very uncomfortable....but I am not any longer in agony.
Sometimes....when the low road is flooded and impassable, there is nothing but to take the high road.
No comments:
Post a Comment