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Thursday 12 September 2013

Nighttime wanderings

So I guess it is time to talk about unmentionables.  I am very English and really think that any need to discuss bodily functions is totally unnecessary but, for those of us going through treatment regimes which involve ingesting medication, perhaps I ought to spill the beans.

I have never been a Lady Montdore about my bowels.  She felt that one should go "once in the morning" and any more was "totally unnecessary".  This is despite the fact I grew up with a man, born in 1914, who had the same formulated Edwardian ideal.  As does my father-in-law (who occasionally likes to share this TMI at breakfast!).

The honest truth is that once you start on medication, you need more medication to counteract the side effects of the medication.  So you end up with an ever increasing pile of pills and an ever increasing pile of side effects.  So what to do?

I was moaning to my friend, Lisa, in Australia about morphine giving me constipation.  She had, quite rightly, asked me what I was doing up at 3.30 am.  She had had the same reaction to morphine.  Her words

"It stopped me dead in my tracks.  Literally."

Yup.  I get that.  It is like walking around having had over-eaten one of those "All you can eat" Chinese banquets that seem like such a good idea at the time.  It is uncomfortable.  (That's an English understatement by the way).

So what to do?  Of course, you can go to the doctor and be prescribed more medicine to counteract this particularly distressing side effect of the morphine.  Or you can go cold turkey, eat a load of figs and hope that Christine's Chilli will do the trick.  (It did).

I KNOW this sounds really weird and that I should accept every bit of help that modern medicine can give me and that I have been wandering round the house for three nights in a row in extreme discomfort from 3 am onwards but, somehow, I feel rather proud of myself for doing this, without having to take another pill.

And therein lies a blog of true Englishness - all inference and no substance.......

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