Lucky stiff.

Wait until you are genetic mutant freak that is immune to painkillers. Dentist visits take on an entirely new dimension.

Well, the last one was so bad that I was dreading this one.  I remember gripping the handles of the chair and hanging on for dear life.  They asked me if I still hurt after the 4th shot and I told them just to get it over with.

Today seems almost pleasant by comparison, aside from the smell of burning teeth.

My dentist is also a psychologist. He’s very on the alert for signs of pain or discomfort. If I flinch because my eyelashes itch, he stops and asks if I’m ok, reassuring me its ok to tell him if there’s pain. I reassure him that if there’s any pain at all I’ll be flailing all appendages. There will be NO stoicism on my part.

Wow, Buster! Are you immune to even percaset? Its my favorite. After my c-section (and a half-dose of percaset) the nurse could poke my incision and I’d just laugh (which kinda messed with the nurse, which made me laugh more).

The only pain killer which registers is pregabalin. I was a “guinea pig” at the U of Iowa medical center to test it. Pregabalin is the perfect drug - from the pharmaceutical industry standpoint :

* You can never stop taking it. You must ramp up to start and taper down gradually to stop or you go into convusions. The taper up/down part is usually one to two weeks.

* If you forget to take your next dose, pregabalin reminds you by sending you into convulsions. For me, the symptoms resembled Parkinson’s.

Pregabalin doesn’t kill pain, per se. You just don’t care that it exists anymore. When I started taking it, it was as part of a double-blind study. Neither my “handler” nor I were supposed to know if I was taking a placebo, or the real stuff.

When you take Pregabalin for the first time, it is like drinking 100 quintuple-shots of espresso. You do not sleep for three days. You stand in place and vibrate. This was an indication to me that I was taking the good stuff. Remember, I am near 300 pounds, and I was on the low “ramp up” dose. After three days, you crash and sleep for a solid day, you wake up, and feel fine. Pain has now become akin to a companion - a drinking buddy if you will. You don’t care at all if pain is along for the ride.

I kid you not, you can pound your own hand into hamburger with a hammer and you just don’t care. You know it should hurt, some vague part of your brain is trying to tell you it hurts, but you just don’t care.

Now the interesting part was when I blew out two disks in my back and had to get a hydrocortizone epidural without anesthetic. Twice. Now that is an adventure in pain everyone should experience. Kinda puts whacking your thumb with a hammer in perspective. There is nothing quite like getting a four inch needle shoved into your spine to make you feel alive.

Or stopping a line drive softball as a short-stop - with your face - then getting 12 stiches on your cheek to close the wound.

Oh, and then there was the time my appendix blew and I ignored it for three days, and they couldn’t knock me out to perform surgery. Let’s just say that pain and I are ol’ buddies. Perhaps I am lucky in the fact there appears to be no practical limit to physical pain I can absorb.

I forgot to mention, to my eternal regret -

Here is a profile of my “handler” at the U of I : Chief Warrant Officer Bruce A. Smith

This also puts pain into perspective for me.