Better Living Through Vicodin

Those who know me know I don’t do recreational pharmaceuticals.  I disapprove of them for me; you’re all welcome to dope yourselves into infinity, provided you hurt no one else.

Having given birth to several bouncing baby kidney stones, I learned one word early: MORPHINE.  I was never so happy as when it started to kill the pain.  Unfortunately it’s relatively worthless by mouth.

Last week I had to make an emergency stop to see Dr. Mengele, the dentist.  They triple-booked and I got shuffled to a female who did not share Mengele’s accent.  I asked and it turned out she was from Canada, which definitely explained that.

Dr. Canada did what she referred to as a pulpectomy and scheduled me to come back for a root canal.  I actively decided not to spend a microsecond on the definition of pulpectomy and left, with prescriptions for an antibiotic and vicodin.  I didn’t fill the vicodin because I never had serious pain after a root canal.

After the anesthetic wore off, three ibuprofen killed the pain and that was that.  Until a few days ago, of course, when the pain started up out of nowhere.  Ever have someone drill into your gums without anesthetic and keep drilling?  Me either, but this is what it would no doubt feel like.  Ibuprofen wasn’t helping.

I called Dr. Mengele’s office and they moved my appointment up.  I asked if this was common and they said no.  They advised me to fill the vicodin, which I did.  Like I said, I don’t like recreational pharmaceuticals but I do like pain relief, so off the wife went.

Of course you know it wasn’t going to be that easy.

My wife noted that she never has a problem at the pharmacy, regardless of when she goes.  It could be eight in the morning or eleven at night and she’s in and out.  She also noted that I shouldn’t go because no matter what time I go, it gets crowded or the staff slows down to glacial pace.

This apparently also holds when she goes on my behalf: they were almost out of vicodin.  How a pharmacy runs out of vicodin I’ll never know.

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Late last night, during a rare pain outage, I decided I’d take advantage of the calm to get to bed.  This is not as easy as it sounds, though (nothing is).

Normal people simply go to the room and go to bed.  Not in my house - no way, no sir.

Since I try not to wake my wife (or the snoring spaniel), I don’t turn on the light, therefore I don’t see what small bits of construction my wife has accomplished in my absence.  Even if I do somehow manage to make it to the bed without something crashing to the ground (including me), the fun is usually just beginning.  If I don’t stub a toe and start cursing like Rosie O’Donnell, I’m ahead of the game.  Last night was looking (and sounding) good.

Right up until I made it to the bed.

We have one of those Sleep Number beds.  They are everything the commercials say and more.  The queen and above have dual controls so you can use different settings for each of you (the dog does not have one as yet but he doesn’t always sleep on the bed itself).

Except mine, of course.

Not my bed - my side of the bed.  I’ll get up in the morning to find huge divots that weren’t there the night before.  When I complain, I get the same response I get everywhere: “It works for me.”

Friday at work I discovered a bad USB tuner.  I borrowed one from a coworker and it didn’t work either.  He just plugged it into his computer and brought it right up.  “It works for me.”

So I have to `blow the bed up’ weekly or so.

TERRITORIAL ACQUISITION GAMES

I once heard football described as a territorial acquisition game, which I thought was pretty cool.  Why call it football at all?  I can’t stand sports anyway.

Little did I know that the phrase also applies to the bedroom.

Before you get your panties jumping, I am speaking strictly of Sleeping Space.  Anybody who sleeps with someone (or their pet) knows exactly of what I speak.

To start with, my wife is a Twirler.  Just go put your underwear in the freezer for the remainder of this post, ok? She starts out with nothing covering her, then grabs a little bit of sheet.  Within an hour so so, she has twirled enough of the sheet to resemble a scene from an Italian restaurant with a cocker spaniel and two miles of spaghetti.  (the cocker in this case is snoring)

In addition, my wife has this six foot long `pillow’ she puts against her back as a support.  This would not be an issue at all except for the fact that this pillow could smother a whale and it keeps creeping over to my tiny corner of the bed.  Even with air conditioning the pillow is too hot.  When you add the forty seven pillows my wife likes to have near her in bed, I wind up with the tiniest sliver of sleeping space.

Well, I call it sleeping space, but even Kate Moss would find it restrictive.

And this is if the dog isn’t busy sleeping on the bed.  Because if the wife isn’t taking up all the space via her accouterments (it keeps failing spell check), the dog is taking her place.  As I’ve mentioned, Marshall is the most dangerous of pets: a smart cocker.  He knows full well when I enter the room.  If he’s sleeping where my feet normally go, he realizes he is going to lose the spot, plus it’s dark and he doesn’t want to get sat upon, so he gets right out of there.  And lays on my pillow.

When I head for the pillow, I make some sort of crack about how tough it is for cockers these days, what with pillow space being at a premium.  Marshall humors me by wagging his little stub of a tail and pretending I’m not going to ask him to MOVE.  Eventually he goes elsewhere, which is sometimes the shelf that the bed is up against.  Yes, it’s Spaniel on a Shelf.

Long before I shooed Marshall from my pillow, I discovered the bed was almost flat.  This was in addition to the six foot back pillow that was occupying most of my sleeping space.

My wife, appreciative of my efforts not to wake her but tolerant of the explosions when stuff like this happens, lept up and asked what was wrong.  She must have been jarred awake by my screaming because the bed control was not operating the bed.

“Oh, that’s because it’s not plugged in.”

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There are times I wonder why my wife is not employed at a high level help desk in a Fortune 100 company.  In spite of all my work with electronics, she came up with this first.  Not bad from a dead sleep.

She had apparently unplugged the bed (when was the last time you heard that phrase?) to plug in something else earlier in the day.  Ok, we all make mistakes, but she completely failed to get my agitation at having to play territorial acquisition games and then find that the bed was flat.  I suggested something physically impossible and attempted sleep.

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So tonight, something smells really bad.  Yes, the dog farts from eating too much cat food but this was way more pungent.  It was definitely coming from the dog because he has this habit of sitting right in front of the fan, with his nose almost in it.  So if he smells, it heads right for me.  And he smelled.

Since I didn’t have anything better to do than to complain about my tooth pain, it was time for a bath.  But first, Marshall had to go outside.  Lately Marshall hasn’t wanted to go outside for whatever reason - probably separation anxiety.  I had to chase him all over the house (twice) before I finally got him outside.  Then he barked like someone was trying to kill him so I’d let him back in. (that’s my boy!)

When I finally got him into the tub, he was strangely settled.  I cleaned him up and reached to adjust the bath temperature when he jumped right out of the tub in one leap, from a sit.

The night was not going well.

I dried him off and let him out of the bathroom, much to his delight.  Much to my despair, he took right off for the bedroom because his best friend, the air conditioner, was running.  And there he sat, Soggy Spaniel, on the bed.  Did he sit on the pile of dirty sheets waiting to go in the washer?  No he sat right in one of the depressions caused by air leakage on MY side of the bed

What did you expect?

So now there’s a soggy divot waiting for me when I crawl (or fall) into bed tonight.

Marshall, meanwhile, followed me downstairs and jumped right up on the couch to dry.  Fortunately there was a towel there from earlier when he went outside and spent a few quality moments in his pool (yes, his pool).

As I type this, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or go searching for recreational morphine.