Trouble In Stealth Mode

One uneventful trip home later and I'm sitting on our sofa with my right side pretty much propped up by the arm cushion and my head leaning back with my face pointed at the ceiling. I'm feeling very groggy and am occasionally falling asleep sitting up. No serious nausea, though, and fortunately no apparent problems with my breathing reflex.

My wife left to get my pain medicine prescription filled, which turned out to be a much more difficult task than you would imagine (partly my fault). The scrip was for hydrocodone elixir (i.e., liquid), so I asked her if she'd get the pharmacist to put a flavor in it to help it go down a bit easier. I was thinking grape or cherry, but I didn't have the wits about me to mention either of these. In short, I left the flavor choice up to her, and for some unknown reason she decided that lemon would be good for a person who has just had his stomach rearranged. So, she asked for and brought home lemon-flavored hydrocodone.

Note: Pain medicine isn't intended to *cause* pain.

The dose she gave me went down my throat for the most part, but a bit of it backwashed and tried to climb up into my sinuses. Neither direction handled things very well - think having a blowtorch fired at your uvula. One coughing fit later, I told her in a voice flavored with misery that there was no way I'd be able to take any more doses of the mixture she'd brought home. She huffed and did her best to keep me from realizing she was pissed at me, and then set out to trade the lemon-flavored lava for regular hydrocodone elixir, no incendiary flavor added.

She went back to the pharmacy that filled the scrip, only to find that it closed early because it was a Saturday. She did eventually get the prescription swapped, but only after driving 30 minutes to the only 24-hour branch of that particular pharmacy and doing god knows how much pleading to get them to transfer the prescription and reissue it in its normal nasty-tasting state. I have no idea exactly how long this took, because I had again passed out on the same spot of the sofa.

I spent most of the rest of the night without moving from that spot. She brought an alarm clock into the living room so that she could sleep on the other part of the sofa and still be able to give me the pain medicine at the proper times.

My memories for the rest of the night and most of Sunday are a bit hazy, but there are a few incidents that I can recall with extreme clarity. Unfortunately, some of these involve some basic bodily input/output functions, so if you don't like that sort of stuff you might want to skip over the next update when it gets posted.