In October the pain clinic prescribed me buprenorphine pain relief patches – buprenorphine’s in the same family of drugs as morphine etc., and a controlled drug; ID required every time I go and pick up a prescription from the pharmacy. The omnipresent back pain I’ve had since forever due to the spina bifida occulta, and complicated now by having a lumbar peritoneal shunt rammed into my spine, and a curvature I developed in my teens, has recently been getting worse, and despite maximum doses of the various painkillers I’m prescribed, I was struggling with it. The patches have a number of benefits over the pills – you can’t forget to take them (though with the pills my body would remind me forcefully I was late in taking them if it got much past my usual time for taking them), you don’t have to wait a while for them to fully kick in, and you just change it a couple of times a week. It’s big drawback though is that the damned stuff knocks you out.

For the first few days I was using the patches I wandered around like a zombie, falling asleep at the drop of a hat. Gradually though I got used to them, and the falling asleep thing wasn’t so much of an issue, at least not all of the time, though it does still happen. I’ve been managing okay at work; I time my working hours around the times of day I’ve come to realise are my worst times for dozing off, and if I look as though I might be nodding off, one of my colleagues gives me a prod.

Recently though they’ve increased the dosage, but thankfully it didn’t have the same extreme effect as when I first started using the patches. I was a little more dopey than usual for the first few days after the increase, but that was all. Something weird’s been happening these last few days though because I’ve literally spent most of the last three days asleep. I suppose if I was sitting at the desk at the computer it wouldn’t happen so frequently, or at least I’d wake myself up because I’d bang my head on the keyboard or something, but lounging on the sofa in my little office as I have a habit of doing, snuggled amongst my squidgy cushions with the laptop, it’s all too easy to fall back and just drift off.

Wednesday I was supposed to be finishing an Open University assignment off. Wednesday morning started off well and I spent the morning joining in with a group discussion on the course forum, as directed by the course documentation, but it went downhill from there. Despite supposed to be working on the assignment questions, I dozed on and off for most of the afternoon. By tea-time I’d managed to write the grand total of two paragraphs, and even they didn’t make much sense. With mere hours to go before the clock ticked over towards the rapidly advancing Thursday deadline, I knew what Wednesday evening I’d got to pull my finger out and get stuck into it. So, after tea upstairs I headed again and settled down at the laptop to get stuck into it. The next thing I knew it was 10.30pm and I’d been asleep three hours. I eventually finished the assignment off at 2am.

Thursday was pretty much the same. I managed to get some course reading done while waiting at the anti-coagulation clinic, but my output for the rest of the day was the grand total of two emails written over a span of several hours interspersed with naps of varying lengths.

Friday I managed to get precisely bugger all useful done, again sleeping most of the day.

It’s scary because I can literally be in the middle of doing something, and suddenly I’m out cold. I’ve no recollection of feeling tired, or of dozing off, just waking up sometimes hours later with no idea what happened. I can fall asleep mid-way through typing a sentence, or mid-way through turning the computer off. I’ve posted messages on web forums over the past few days that I’ve no recollection of posting. If I close my eyes to think about something, or ponder where a sentence was going, my thoughts slip sideways into something completely different, and if I’m lucky I wake up a few minutes later wondering what the hell happened, otherwise, undisturbed, it can be hours later.

Then there’s the dreams. Now I don’t recall the list of side-effects of the patches listing “weird dreams” amongst it’s list of many side-effects. I do remember though that my grandma said when she was on oral morphine after she was diagnosed with bowel cancer that she had some very vivid and strange dreams. Vivid and strange they most definitely are. They tend to be those very vivid ones where everything’s so real and so detailed you could almost reach out and touch it, but you’re also totally aware at the same time that it’s only a dream.

I had one recently where I was at work, and every detail of my desk and everything was correct, but there were just two things that made it come under the “vivid and weird” category – one, where the door should have been was replaced by a clear perspex screen, and two, all the people I usually work with were on the other side of this perspex screen watching me while I painted everything in sight bright neon blue with a child’s small plastic paintbrush. Oh, and I was wearing a bright yellow sun dress with daffodils on it. A sun dress, in February?! I guess that one really was a “NeonBlue Dream”!

One of the most recent one was last night, which I blame entirely on reading some somewhat racy fiction on LiveJournal, and the fact that I’d been pondering my forthcoming clinic appointment next week with my neurosurgeon. And no, it wasn’t that kind of dream! You have to admit though that finding yourself in a doctor’s office not in the usual doctor on one side of the desk and patient on the other arrangement but laying with your head on the doctor’s lap while the said doctor strokes your hair and simultaneously plays the harmonica just a little, well, weird. I could I suppose explain the scene in the stuff I’d been reading that I think prompted this particular dream, but I think it’s more fun to leave you to wonder

Then there was the one earlier today in the course of writing this entry. Closed my eyes for a moment (hah!) to ponder where I was going with one particular sentence, and bam! The next thing I knew I was taking a friend’s motorbike for a test drive as said friend had recently passed away (huh? Last I heard from her she was still very much alive, and as far as I know she’s never owned a bike!). After taking the bike for a spin (I’ve only ever once been on a bike, and that was as a passenger, and it’s not an experience I’d care to repeat) I returned to her parent’s house (they were minding the bike) to tell them I would indeed take the bike off their hands, but in the course of walking down their driveway, it turned into another friend’s house, but I carried on down the driveway without skipping a beat.

Now a couple of things that the continuity guys in the dream department really need to know. Firstly, though I have to agree that motorbikes do look good, I am firmly of the belief that the damned things are death-traps waiting to happen, and I’ve never forgotten the story my grandad, who used to be an ambulance driver with extra training, the equivalent of the modern day paramedic, told me about the sticky ending a biker who’d met. Secondly, in the dream I was walking without the aid of any of my usual paraphernalia required for getting around. And lastly, as I have little balance, it usually takes a minimum of three wheels to get me around (pictured right, the model of my wheeled walker, the “Uniscan Triumph”, though mine’s unsurprisingly blue, and also has the optional shopping bag fitted as well). The continuity guys regularly get it wrong, but I put that down to the fact that my mind, at least when it’s freed of this damned body it’s trapped in, forgets it’s tethered to this here body, and plays games of “let’s suppose”. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing though, and it’s nice that the “dream me” gets to do things that the “real life me” can’t do.

So there we are. A flavour of some of the weirdness that’s been going on in my head recently.

On the positive side though, the buprenorphine induced dreams have got me back writing again. That and a combination of the fact that I’ve started reading again. As it was once said that my writing comes under the heading of “a bit weird”, buprenorphine fueled weirdness helps no end. Now I just need to stay awake long enough to be able to do something with this regained creativity. I’ve come up with something for the patches’ manufacturers though; a new tag line for their product…”kills pain – promotes creativity”