On Thursday, I went to the hospital in the hopes that my troubles with my kidney stone would get resolved.  They saw me eventually, gave me a terrible IV, a weak shot of Morphine that didn’t seem to do anything, and then sent me home with a prescription for Percocet.  I was to use the pain medication to get through the time of the stone passing.

I’ve always known this drug as Percocet, but maybe you know it as Oxycodone-acetamine?  I’ve heard people talk about Oxy before.  They’re probably talking about the same drug.  I think it’s supposed to be stronger than Vicodin.

The prescription reads: Take 1 to 2 tablets every 6 hours as needed for pain.  In other words, take no more than 8 in a 24 hour period, or 1 every three hours.

The bottle contained 20 pills, and the instructions said I should use them over the next 5 days.  That math just doesn’t add up.

I’ve been in discomfort for days, so I’ve been taking my Percocet.  Just within the last couple of days, I’ve noticed that it hasn’t had that much impact on the pain itself.  But I think I’ve been hallucinating a little bit.  Or maybe they’ve been fever dreams.

Look.  I’ve been high on Oxy, trippin’ balls on Percocet.  So I’ll just share a couple of the more interesting experiences and move on.

The first started Saturday evening.  It was so subtle that I didn’t really notice it.  I’d been rewatching Stranger Things, and since I’ve been having so much trouble sleeping, I kept slipping in and out of consciousness.  I knew that I was dreaming about Stranger Things, and I had some idea that if I conjured up the right images from Stranger Things, I could control my pain.  In fact, I was certain that the discomfort I was experiencing had to do with me existing partially in the upside-down.

Even after we finished rewatching that series, that idea stayed with me.  That if I summoned up the image of Wil Byers and Eleven simultaneously, the pain would get driven off for a short while.  It might have even worked a couple of times.

Later, another idea grew in strength as the Stranger Things dream diminished.  My guts had been replaced with a bio-mechanical equipment that was extremely good at processing numbers.  I was part of a large network, mostly used for as part of a large chain of encryption algorithms.  Somewhere along the line, I’d sustained substantial damage, and all the pain I was feeling was a manifestation of calculation errors.  Every time my stomach muscles would tense, I could feel numbers bleeding out of my powers, being ripped from my being and whisked off onto the network to be consumed by another process.

You can bet this last one is going to show up in one of my stories.

This morning, around 3AM, I decided to try and stop taking the Percocet.  It wasn’t really helping with the pain, and these weird visions weren’t helping, either.  I started doing some focused meditation.  I placed my hands in a triangle over my belly and imagined forming a bubble between my hands which extended into my body towards my back.  This was my IDGAF bubble field.  As long as I could keep that bubble in tact, I didn’t care about what was happening inside the bubble.  The pain didn’t exist.  Everything in the bubble didn’t matter.

The focused breathing really helped, and I managed to get my pain under good control.  Good enough that I was able to fall back asleep without having to take more Percocet.

I’m off the Percocet now.  Unless there’s a significant flair up, I’m probably good to go.  Ibuprofen is doing a better job now, probably because my main problem the last few days has been inflammation, which the Ibuprofen addresses.

I should be able to go back to work tomorrow.