Weather here is just windy and cold at the moment. Thought I was going to have to leave the house and travel into the city center, but not only could I really, really not be fucking well bothered, to wriggle out of my comfy, warm, soft dressing robe, OR go that far, walking or otherwise, I didn't need to in the end. Thought I needed to go and get more rigs, trade in the used ones for disposal, for my pain meds, as well as been meaning to pop into a certain pharmacy in the city center next time I'm near there, because I've found their little secret! they have big bottles of those really old-fashioned stick rock candies. Coltsfoot, and liquorice rock, they are like, round in profile, around maybe 4.5-5'' long, slightly flared at the end presumably from being cut on the factory lines after being extruded from molds as a paste and let harden.
(coltsfoot, for the unfamiliar with it, is a herbaceous plant with slightly leathery, and thick green leaves, very low-profiled plant that keeps close to the ground, and produces yellow flowers, although one never sees a flowering plant produce leaves, (Tussilago farfara ...or farfaro, can't remember, is the binomial, Tussilago coming from the latin words meaning 'cough' and 'I ease', its long been used as a herbal treatment for coughs, and this unique british candy, which I've always liked since I was little. As well as, if I am REALLY lucky, occasionally I can find cinder toffee there in big slabs/blocks, and if ever I can find any, I often just buy the entire stock, because its hard to find now, but again, is a firm favourite, comes in big pillow-shaped long rectangular blocks, smooth on the exterior but with a honeycombed, foam-like structure inside, although its tough, not soft like foam, and really, really more-ish.)
Got quite a few different kinds of old fashioned, semi-fossilized varieties of brit-sweets that are hard to locate or not very common now that I like, plus a really old fashioned kind of cough mixture called ''gee's linctus'', thats flavoured with aniseed/liquorice and chilli pepper, the active ingredients being squill and opium tincture, that amazingly is actually still to this day over the counter. FINDING some, is the hard part, but once found, although only one bottle can be sold to a customer at a time per shop that gives a shit, although most do. Found out accidentally a neat trick with it too taking advantage of the high sugar content, a while ago I had been taking an antibiotic that would make someone really quite sick if they ingested even small amounts of alcohol, and theres around 10-15% in the stuff IIRC.
I already had the cough syrup, but could not of course allow it to pass my lips with the antibiotic, so I poured it out into a pan and proceeded to boil off the alcohol, or thats what I meant to do. What actually happened was I forgot about it, and when I did go to check on it, it had foamed right up in the pan, and when poured out into a blob, set into chilli and liquorice/anise-flavoured opium spiked chewy toffee candy that turned out to taste fantastic, would have even if it hadn't the opium, which I've ended up having a preference for, in comparison to morphine/codeine on their own or together thanks to all the minor things poppy plants make. Wasn't right popular with the folks for the pan afterwards, which was NOT easy to clean haha, the stuff set into something so tough and resilient it bent knives if one were hammered through it and an attempt to split or cut it was made. And too soft to shatter with a hammer too. Right in between the two states more or less, so it stuck around tenaciously, other than the actual main amount of it, which of course I ate.
Now I want to make it again, deliberately, although this time I'll use an empty rice pudding or custard tin with the paper label torn off, and a pair of pliers or big artery forceps to hold it over the stove's gas rings so as not to nearly ruin the pan, as I did with the one I used to use for my oil heating baths and made the faux pas of making do a few times with cooking oil, the nutriment-cooking variety that is, and it eventually polymerized into something resembling poorly-set epoxy resin; and the pan couldn't just be treated with the usual solution to that kind of gunk, caustic potash or caustic soda, because alkali metal hydroxides eat through aluminium, dissolving it into blackened sludgy sodium or potassium aluminate goo. Was old though, no handle even and thrown out by my old man, so I could give it a new lease of life on the mag stirplate one of my two hotplates, as Al is of course nonmagnetic, and the pan thin enough to not interfere with coupling to stirbars. As well as being thin aluminium meaning it heated up fast But after repeated heating to the oils boiling point and cooling back down again after I'd finished work for the day, or finished using it for whatever project/s I have going at any one time etc the result was nasty part-polymerized, so still slightly viscous, but mostly, like a block of slightly softened plastic
Consignment to the scrapheap was the easiest option by far. No irreplaceable loss, or much more than an irritation temporarily but I'd sooner have kept my oilbath as it was, and refilled it with highboiling, inert (to most things) nonsmoking silicone oil rather than have to toss it out.
Something good for today: Been sleeping well, and oddly, despite being in a lot of physical pain from my poor, pained, sore, partly skinless feet, for some reason I've been able to use a lot less morphine/oxy. Still only used the one blister strip of it from this week's box, aside from the extras that were both twice the strength of the ones I'm prescribed and shouldn't have been that many to begin with; but the result is still lower than usual without any obvious reason why. The first strip too, that was ALL used for one shot, so I don't understand why I have needed so much less than I would otherwise, since it all went in at one go. Anyhow I've even been sleeping well regardless, its as though my tolerance has somehow dropped without my having actually done anything to force it down OR wait for it to decline. Very strange although not unappreciated.
I did still just wake up from a deep, deep nod though, and I'd not had much at all. I can tell its materially less in quantity, that I've been taking this week, though because when I allow the last dose
taken at some time to begin to mostly wear off, but not QUITE go into a withdrawal, not waiting that long, just until its almost totally up and evaporated, but so I am in no discomfort, there is a rather
odd state between totally doped on an opioid analgesic and on the other end, frank, brutal, unmitigated positively-cryogenic-turkey withdrawal from hell, where the rebound begins but produces no physical pain, discomfort and no psychological anxiety, overstimulation, overloading, hyperacusis of senses etc, and it applies only to while sleeping. In that the result is INTENSE, absolutely fucking nuts intense and vivid dreaming, sometimes lucid, where the dream state just doesn't seem to quit. Sleep is a bit shallow doing it usually as it IS pretty much the equivalent of tweaking the tail of the sleeping tiger (I.e allowing it to progress into a horrid withdrawal state) and jumping over the bars of his cage before el tigre' turns round and bites one.
I've never experienced anything like it, save the effect the mild herbal sleep aid,valerian root that one can buy at a health food shop, or grow the plant for, that too produces odd hyperintense bouts of dreaming, lucidly a lot of the time, but with valerian, that effect exhibits a profound and extremely rapid tachyphylaxis response and as such is nullified utterly the third night in a row of taking valerian. Some activity that way the second consecutive night a dose is taken, but on the third, whilst it retains its gentle relaxant sleep aid effects, theres so little effect on dreaming either positive or negative that one may as well have taken a few spoonfuls of tap water instead.
But with the provoked opiate rebound into pre-withdrawal, fuckme circleways, diagonally from behind with a corkscrew and call me the virgin bloody mary, it doesn't STOP when one falls asleep, and on waking and going back to sleep, its still going on just the same, such intense vivid dreaming I've had to just get myself out of bed and on top of it to read or surf the net/play videogames; or else go and apologise to the metaphorical caged tiger, bringing him a serving of what he roars for if ignored promptly to get him to zip it shut and keep quiet. Thats how intense it can be, one after the other after the other after the other, like a boxer throwing punches in the ring, or in the gym, one shockingly in-your-FACE, motherfucker! dream after another with not a moment of respite between them, intense enough to need the pain meds to actually feel like I AM sleeping, instead of more like after dropping a couple of pretty strong blotters of 'cid, or being on special K, or if the intent isn't to stop the phenomenon completely, but if the dreams are anxious ones at all, then a sleeping pill is helpful sometimes.
It can be a lot of fun, though. Even if it often does somewhat resemble being run through a psychic blender, and poured into a spin-dryer/washing machine and getting flung round like a rag doll in a moderately-sized tornado! it can be a bit of a shocker though if my pain meds are taken just as usual and simply mostly wear off, leaving it to happen unplanned, when one suddenly ends up asleep, but feeling like one's whatever-bits-responsible-for-dreams just got plugged into the house mains electric supply with a bare, unfuzed wire! That can leave me shaking all over like a leaf in the wind on waking, not because of physical discomfort, but thanks to the all-night-long (or all day, considering I'm pretty much partly nocturnal) sensory buffeting.
I wonder, thinking about it, I have been taking cimetidine for my guts , a related drug to the active in tagamet, ranitidine, but I chose the former for its enzymatic inhibition of hepatic morphine/oxy-metabolic degradation pathways, was on ranitidine rx, but explained that trick to my doc, and he agreed to let me have the cimetidine instead, so as to squeeze more mileage from my pain relief, without actually taking more analgesics or a larger dose of the 4 already in use [2 kinds of morphine preparation, one of oxycodone, and the NSAID diclofenac as a topical gel for my achy bastardly joints, not counting the occasional, periodic corticosteroid shots into the knee and hip joint cavities, as that can be got away with being done about every 2-3 months or so.
I take that usually, but what has been different this week, or the last few days anyway, is I've been feasting on grapefruit, in different products. Canned white grapefruit in its own juice, as well as drinking
lots of boxed not-from-concentrate fresh GFJ. Absolutely love the stuff, I like the bitterness along with its sweetness, which I find really refreshing. There are however, various flavonoid compounds in grapefruit and other citrus, but especially in grapefruits that bind and block the same cytochrome P450 pathways in the liver that cimetidine does. I bet its that, now, thinking about it (I just realized because of turning round to grab the box of GFJ I'm keeping on my bedside for when I get thirsty...*ahh thats good...gulp...gulp...*contented belch*)
I actually ended up on monday, just using some oxy to keep the pain off etc. and had actually let the morphine shot I'd prepared on getting back home from the docs and the pharmacy sit on the bedside shelf in front of me all day and night. I was most surprised at that, and couldn't figure it out, normally that would have been straight upstairs, prepare, aim, fire, sit back and enjoy, within minutes, perhaps taking the time to make a rollup, or take a piss first but thats about it, as far as waiting would go.
