Depending On Painkillers Doesn’t Make Me An Addict
By Jessica Rapisarda
When I woke up this morning, my bedroom was filled with starlight. Phosphenes, like slow-motion fireworks, slid across my field of vision. The ice pack I’d slipped inside my pillowcase the night before had warmed to a useless room temperature. I rubbed my jaw, my temples, the bridge of my nose. I hefted my body from the mattress, closed my eyes, and felt my way to the medicine cabinet.
With a gentle shake of the bottle, I can tell muscle relaxers from triptans. Valium rustles. Lorzone thunks. Imitrex rattles. Vicodin — 90 pills to a bottle, each one shaped like a small, yellow canoe — sounds like heavy rain. I open the Vicodin. I scramble into the boat just as pain sluices down my skull.
The migraines began when I was 7 years old but became chronic when I was in my mid-twenties. A little more than a year ago, any therapies that had been somewhat successful at dampening the daily pain stopped working. Acupuncture, a rigid sleep schedule, and trigger avoidance suddenly came to naught. Similarly, CAT scans, MRIs, and hormone tests yielded nothing. “You have a vitamin D deficiency. We know that much,” my doctor offered, after yet another blood draw. So I take vitamin D. And vitamin B-12 and probiotics and NSAIDs and muscle relaxers and triptans and steroids and barbiturates and opioids.
