A Vicodin A Day

The human body is fascinating. Specifically, how each human reacts in a different way is fascinating. One person may smoke their entire life and never get cancer. Another may be straight as an arrow – no smoking, drinking, and exceptionally healthy person – and be taken by the disease. I, personally, react to medication much different than others.

When I was in high school I underwent surgery. I was sent home with vicodin for the pain and some sleeping pills to take the first couple of nights. The first night my mom, being the worrier that she is, gave me half of a sleeping pill. Instead of sending me into peaceful dreams of rabbits and rainbows, I spent that night watching the second-hand tic… tic… tic... all night long. No sleep for me. These same very sleeping pills will send my father, who carries a good 100lbs on me, into a kind of sleep that takes an army to wake from.

Flash forward to day two post-surgery. I was in a little bit of pain so I took the first of my vicodins and lay back in the couch to watch some trashy reality shows. There’s a lamp next to the couch that is plugged into an outlet wired to a wall switch so whenever you want to turn the light on and off you can simply use the wall switch. I guess I had unplugged the lamp at some point and plugged it back in to the bottom outlet that isn’t wired to the switch. My father came in and, in an attempt to help me out, went to turn the light on. Neither of us realized that the lamp was plugged into the wrong outlet and, to make a long story short, my father asked me if I had broken the lamp.

This is when I discovered my odd reaction to vicodin. It makes me cry.

I sat there, bawling my eyes out, unable to even explain myself to my poor dad. He thought that he had somehow hurt his poor recovering-from-surgery-and-in-pain daughter’s feelings. He asked me a question and now I couldn’t stop crying – and crying hard. I’m talking “I gasp didn’t gasp break the lamp-puh...uh...uh...” crying.

My father tucked and ran. He felt so bad that he went to the kitchen and made me mashed potatoes and gravy, my favorite comfort food. This made me cry even more. I didn’t know at the time that it was the vicodin – it took me a couple more doses to put that together. I still laugh when I think of my poor father, completely bewildered and not understanding how he made me cry, thinking it’s somehow entirely his fault.

The Moral of the Story: Today I Love life's little oddities.