48 Black

4 December 2016

I was alone much of the day because Cheryl took a large mirror into Montreal for our son Mike.
The day started out well with a 30 minute session on the exercise bike and I thought that another reduction in the morphine was due. For a long time I had been on 2mg every 4 hours but had reduced that to 1.8mg and then 1.6mg over the past 2 weeks. Only small changes but each one difficult for a day or so. Today's change to 1.4mg hit me really hard. Perhaps being alone was a factor but I descended into a black hell.

I knew it was just withdrawal and all those nerves that had been asleep with morphine were free to signal pain. Every perception was distorted into the negative. All my usual strategies were not helping. I have been having some of the same pain that I had a few month ago so I started to have thoughts about the treatment not being effective. I could not redirect my mood.



It is now 4 weeks since the radiation finished and my neck has healed well and looks better than before. Even some of the scars from the 2013 surgery are now hard to see. I am able to swallow so the end of the tube feeding should be near. But none of this made a difference. So, I took just an extra 0.5gm of morphine to erase the dose reduction and within 15 minutes I felt better!

One of my first jobs in Canada was working on an inpatient addiction unit so I knew the difficulties but this experience is giving me valuable insight into how hard it is go through the torment of withdrawal.