Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax

I don’t know where people get the idea that when you end up on a hospital surgical ward that the best part of the experience are the drugs. That you’re entwined in tubes and wires so that you can’t move, that you have to master the art of urinating into a crook-necked plastic bottle, and that you spend most of the day watching idiotic television shows (the motion alone makes you sick) or simply sleeping through the empty hours may marginally exceed the displeasure of living on vicodin and morphine, but I can’t say that the painkillers made the experience “fun”.

If it weren’t for the pain, I wouldn’t take either of these drugs. The nausea bends you over. I spend most of my time sleeping when I take them. Perhaps it is because I have taken so much vicodin over the years that I don’t experience the legendary “vicodin haze” which is said to be recreational. My body and brain have evolved to a point where sense making am not I is a thing of the past. Vicodin just doesn’t do much except make me sleepy, nauseous, and free of pain. The only part of that which is of any interest for me is its pain-killing properties. The same goes for morphine which I received in small doses.

Neither narcotic is a place where I’d like to spend a vacation.