Saturday, February 12, 2011

I had my first drink of milk tonight


One week ago today, I had Roux-en-Y Gastric Biapass surgery. Just 7 days ago, I was in an out of consciousness every couple of hours. The nurses would enter my room each 3 hours with a syringe loaded with 1 mg of Dilaudid. Dilaudid is a narcotic one order of magnitude more powerful than morphine. It is literally 10 times more powerful than morphine unit for unit, mg for mg. This was necessary because of the fairly extreme discomfort associated with this surgery. Their is a lot of trauma with this surgery.

I discovered that my narcotic resistance is even stronger than I thought. After about 1 day or 8 shots of Dilaudid, I understood that this injection caused a great wave of nausea through my body. I literally felt sick like, I needed to throw up. That's a tough moment when your guts have just been cut out. There was no rush of euphoria upon injection. Within 60 seconds I would be nauseated.

Make no mistake about it, it was worth the nausea. After about 10 or 12 minutes, the nausea would subside and I would have 3 peaceful hours that were relatively comfortable and pain-free. I considered that a fair trade. It also allowed me to sleep in a relatively uncomfortable bed. Still, I failed to see the pleasure in this drug that would make it an addictive illicit vice. The same thing can be said for Lortab, which the doc also prescribed for me.

Now on the other hand...

As I sat down to watch Full Color Football, I decided to test my luck. At this point, my doctors have authorized me to drink milk in small quantities. For some reason, I had my doubts. Still, I went to the cupboard, grabbed a small glass, and poured and 4 or 5 ounces.

When I took my first drink, my eyes rolled up in the back of my head, my brain released massive quantities of dopamine and serotonin, and I let out a huge "aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh..." In short, I had the sort of reaction that narcotics users usually have when they shoot up.

Now, this could be because I am a starving man on a 1,000 kcal per day liquid diet, and milk is a super food. Still, that milk was amazing. It just might have been the best thing I ever tasted. Milk instantly became my favorite food again for the first time since childhood. I am looking forward to more. I mean I am really hooked.

It's funny, Dilaudid and Lortab do little or nothing for me. Milk does.