The day after the night from hell.

I don’t exactly know how to phrase this delicately, so I’ll just jump right in. MY NEW PAIN MEDICATION ALMOST KILLED ME LAST NIGHT. I’ve always had trouble taking painkillers in decades past — Darvon, Darvocet, Vicodin — but Ultracet nearly did me in. Instead of Dopey and Sleepy (see yesterday’s post) I wound up with something else entirely.

The directions on the bottle tell me to take four pills a day, six hours apart. I took my second dose yesterday shortly before dinner. Sometime around 7 the room was spinning, my stomach was upside-down and my eyes were sensitive to light. I knew what was coming. With Sam still at work I wobbled into the kitchen, grabbed a towel and the biggest plastic potato salad bowl I could find, turned off the lights in the family room and sat on the couch waiting to barf. I would have moved the show into the bathroom except I thought I might pass out, and I’d rather pass out on a sofa than a stone floor.

For the next two hours I sat frozen in one position, lost in a dizzy, nauseated stupor ... hallucinating, moaning and occasionally trying to lie down (which only made it worse). The “big B” finally happened around 9:30. I felt a little better for about 90 seconds after that, allowing just enough time to rinse the bowl and get back to the sofa.

Sam called from the office at 10 to let me know he was running late. I barely remember muttering I was sick, but that was enough to propel him into SUPERHERO MODE because he vaulted into the house less than 20 minutes later to find a non-communicative zombie [me] with her face in a bucket. After sitting motionless with Sam at my side for an additional two hours, during which he did wonderful Sam things like rub my face and hands, there was another “big B” shortly after midnight followed by an immediate exodus to the bedroom because both of us were exhausted. I had to skip all of my late-night meds because I was afraid to put anything — especially pills — in my stomach.

When I got up this morning at 7 I felt healthy but slightly weird. My blood sugar was dropping because I technically hadn’t eaten anything for almost 18 hours. Half a dry bagel did the trick plus all the prescriptions I didn’t take the night before. Plus a Marcy-tini because I was really thirsty. Then I went back to bed until 10.

The moral of the story is, DON’T GET OLD so you won’t have to move into Club Meds and you’ll never have to take prescriptions that make you sick. I will never touch Ultracet again even if the Wicked Queen makes it look like a shiny red apple Mongolian Chicken.

Thank you for reading this.