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.

Smoke Bombs

My father and I didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye as I grew up. There was often tension between us and I blamed it on his stubbornness. I realize now it had more to do with the fact that we’re so alike… I inherited his stubbornness. Through all the stubbornness, when I look back I can recall many cherished memories with my father, memories I won’t soon forget. Sitting in a tin boat out on the lake and singing “Suspicious Minds” together. Every time we stopped at a gas station he would buy me a soda and a king sized candy bar of my choice (I never said we were healthy, just happy). I’ll never forget the moment I told him I was calling off the wedding to The Ex. He asked me if I was sure, and when he was certain that I was, he told me that he would handle everything. He did everything he could to protect me from the disaster I had created.

One of my favorite memories of my father was when I was around 8 or 9 years old. There were quite a few kids on my block the same age as me, most of them boys. It used to irritate me that the boys would play with me, but the second my brother came around I was left behind because I was a girl. They would play sports with my brother: football, baseball, basketball… and they always deemed these sports a ‘boys game’. They refused to let me play. I remember one such day. The boy I was playing with that day was my next door neighbor. We’d been playing various games for a couple of hours when my brother returned home (from where, I don’t remember) and asked my companion if he wanted to play football with him. Of course he wanted to. They once again informed me that it was a ‘boy’s game’ and I couldn’t partake. I very maturely accepted this… and ran straight to my father sobbing that it’s wasn’t fair, just wasn’t fair! My father, in an attempt to cheer me up, told me he had something more fun than football. I, of course, didn’t buy it. Parents just don’t understand. That is until he produced the smoke bombs. He had caught my interest. I watched as he lit a smoke bomb, a smoky blue little round thing, and handed it to me. He told me to toss it in the middle of the field where the boys were playing, which I happily did. They boys stopped immediately and came running toward the source of the smoke. (“Cool, smoke bombs!” “Awesome!”) My brother, eager to play, reached for one when my father stopped him and informed him that this was my game and that he and the neighbor boy couldn’t play.

How cool is my dad?

The Moral of the Story: Today I love the feeling that only a father can give you when you realize how much he loves you.