'til the shadows and the lights were one

For your amusement, now that I can actually sort of laugh about the fiasco of my hospital encounter, I present to you before and after:



I took this after my first shot of dilaudid. It was IM in the buttocks - not so fun, but it worked quickly and i felt better. I thought, "oh ho ho, pain meds are working, won't it be fun to document this hospital stay in photos parce que c'est la vie cystique, n'est pas?" (sorry for my francophone friends if my French is bad. it's been une longue temps) However, I was pretty much incapiaitated with pain 45 minutes after this as the pain increased and the meds did less and less to help (or perhaps they would have helped if I wasn't waiting for hours between doses.) Here is a little secret: when something depresses my CNS, my left eye gets slightly smaller than the right. I have tons of pictures that show this and even brought it up to my eye doc who wanted me to see a neurologist. I declined, but now, every pic of me you see, you'll know if I was secretly hitting the hooch or taking granny's pain killers.



I took this about 6 hours later, after I was admitted and had my wonderful PCA pump. It was set on continuous dosing, which is why you see the button wrapped up. it only occurred to me after they took it away that I might have been able to hit that button for a little extra oomph. Oh well, it did it's job.

And that, mes amies, is a set of the ugliest pics of me you may ever see. I envy those of you who take such cute hospital pictures. I hope my next stay is planned so I can at least have a little lip gloss on hand, rather than the sweaty, dying cowboy took I was sporting.