Pain Pills

Posted on February 23, 2003 in Medications

Every time I have dental surgery, a line forms. “Can I have the vicodin you don’t use?” friends ask.

I keep the pills in case the pain rears up again and flush them down the toilet when they expire. The view of a writer friend, Donna, fits my sense of the drug better: “I hate that stuff,” she said last night. “It makes me sick.”

Vicodin does two things to me: turns me into an affliction tourist who can say that he’d been there and done that without much ill effect and a vegetable who must watch what he eat and drink while he heals. I just don’t get why people want to make themselves sick to the stomach for a few hours of lightheadedness.

Except to make the pain go away, that swelling sear of cold fires burning in the foundations that used to hold a tooth.