Man meets morphine...leaves boy.

Brain surgery.
Shit's a bitch.
But it's nothing compared to the headache afterwards.
Sweet lord have mercy on my dome.
Look at the photo.
The train tracks (i.e. staples) in the photo are especially interesting given the fact that the doctors told me that they would be making a "keyhole incision". Keyhole my ass! It has thus far been likened to a machete gash along the nothing-keyhole-like-broadside-of-my-face.
Here's the post-op story.

After doing my time in the hospital and recovering well the doctors send me home. I roll out in my wheel chair with my rimmie-rims blinging in that so-cal sun feeling like about 6 dollars and 35 cents. I stop to get my vicodin in the hospital pharmacy on the way out, but that's it. The next day I wake up with a massive headache of new proportions, so I take the prescribed double shot of vicodin and try to go back to bed. It does NOT work. The pills don't touch the pain, which is now moving around and throbbing and shooting and passing over in waves and I eventually give in and say "Yes! Please take me back to that horrible place were they stuck all those horrible things into my soft body."
My father hops out of the car outside the ER yelling "brain sugery" and "gurney, gurney!" which has the desired effect. Within no time I'm in the Harbor-UCLA emergency room.
The pain was awful, the only comparable pain I can reference being a few days earlier when a well-intentioned but nonetheless inexpert female nursing student with an audience of two pulled a catheter out of my yonson. Lucky me who didn't know that once they pull the catheter out there's still a lil' balloon in there for an extra 3 seconds of excruciating discomfort. But back to the big brain.
It's pulsing and killing me on that ER bed and they put 5mg of morphine, a pain killer that hadn't been necessary when I was actually in the hospital, straight into my bloodstream. I wait a minute, and the pain subsides a little but lingers there, throbbing. Thus far, I am not too impressed with drugs. Vicodin has officially failed me and was never that strong or particularly fun in the first place, and now, morphine is like chump change. I ask for a little more and they shoot me up with another 5mg.
Now let's take a moment to discuss morphine's fame. As a young American boy, WWII movies are without a doubt the greatest source on morphine. When some young private is lying in the midst of the field bleeding to death, his buddies with invariably share a look, saying without talking, "give him the morphine, kill him, it's the right thing to do." The wounded soldier will cry out until his friends collect enough of those little army-green dosages that they then slam repeatedly into his thigh. His eyes get glassy and his breathing slows as all pain vanishes and the young PFC gets a calm, last moment of life on moist European soil.
Quite a moment for a young male movie-goer. Holy shit dude! Morphine.
But there in the hospital, two 5mg doses later, I wasn't staring up at clouds, birds weren't chirping, and I could still feel the headache. Only if I had been dying would I have been more disappointed in morphine.
An hour later though, the doctors wrapped up their investigation, deciding they had better send me home with some steroids to lower the swelling in and around my head, as well as a few more vicodin. My father or mother, in their divine wisdom of the moment, ask for another 5mg of morphine for the road, which the docs proffer willingly and which I accept openly, along with two vicodin pills and 4 little steroid pills. The faint whispers of the headache are still there, but I'm starting to feel better and I think, "hey, maybe it just took the morphine time to kick in..."
Well, either that is the gods honest truth, and I am the unlucky soldier whose blood stream requires 2 hours to absorb my euthanasian dose, or I had fallen into what real drug lovers call the "cocktail".
The next four hours were unlike anything I've ever experienced. Lying in my bed at home, cold sweating but not uncomfortable, out of it but not sleeping, I finally realized why they gave morphine to dying men. I was dead. I was so flat-out stoned that I was uncomfortable. There were certainly not vivid signs of life. I didn't feel like I was breathing and it didn't matter to me one bit. I was oddly moist from the sweating but not hot. I wasn't awake but I certainly wasn't alseep, or around for that matter. 35,000 feet.
If I had had three bullets in my side, it wouldn't have mattered. If my intestines had been blown out and were slopping onto the ground by my side I wouldn't even have realized. Needlesstosay, staples in my head weren't a big theme.
So...morphine...I take it back. You're alright, as long as you come in various dosages and with a steroid vicodin chaser.
You can be my reaper anytime.