It was two weeks after the micro-discectomy in late September, 2006. My left leg was still not right and my foot was numb.
I stopped taking the dilaudid a week after surgery, after the immediate surgical pain passed. A couple of days later I had my fourth vomit attack due to the lovely combination of migraine and methadone. Maybe it didn’t occur to me then, or maybe Dr. Beecher (the pain management doc) didn’t warn me about the potential side effects; he insisted that for all its effectiveness, methadone was a simple fix, mild compared to other meds I’d tried. Dr. Beecher also knew about my history with chronic migraine.
Mine are called “severe chronic migraine without aura.” The aura can include things like seeing zig-zaggy lines, sparks, bright dots, sometimes tingling, etc., but that happened to me once, and my migraines don’t make me nauseous. My triggers are when I’m super tired, forget to eat, don’t drink enough water, or just stressed out. Chocolate and alcohol are classic triggers, but I don’t eat those things anyway. I like to bake chocolate things for other people; I don’t drink liquor; I’ll drink a beer once in a blue moon. My migraines vary in intensity and duration. Sometimes they last for a day, a few days, a week, or more. This particular migraine — two weeks after my surgery — was extreme and it was not going away. I had to use my injectable sumatriptan (my migraine rescue medication) twice.
This was quite possibly the most puke I’ve ever expelled in one sitting. For real.
But for some reason, this time, the combo of the two drugs resulted into a giant explosion of throw-up. It was especially challenging because I had to A) lean over the edge of the bed and vomit all over the floor, and then B) crawl on my hands and knees — through the puddle of puke — to the bathroom, throw my arms up to grasp the toilet bowl, and puke my guts out, all with a fresh incision in my back. I spent eight hours in the bathroom that day, staring into the evil face of the toilet, endlessly throwing up, worried the convulsing provoked by the intensity of my up-chucking might make my stitches pop out.
That dramatic chapter ended my relationship with methadone. The next day, I made a follow-up appointment to see Dr. Beecher.
In the meantime, I spent my days I reading about alternative medications and nerve damage. I tried to think positively. I remembered how Dr. Jones poo-pooed the numbness in my shin after my first surgery. He was confident the feeling would return.
Sensation is the first to go and the last to come back. Nerves can take over a year to heal.
Fast forward two years: It was safe to give up. Sensation never came back. The numbness was still there.