monkey-mask

The big drug problem in the forties and fifties was morphine. They called it having a monkey on your back. You got “hooked” and there was no escape from that monkey. When I was a kid you still saw black and white movies made in the nineteen thirties and forties about otherwise good guys who lived in the city and had this big problem that was ruining their lives. They all had monkeys on their backs. I used to watch those old movies and I never once saw the monkey they were yammering so much about.

Years later it dawned on me.

“Oh. It’s a metaphorical monkey.”

I still don’t know where they came up with calling it a monkey.

In the sixties and seventies you never would have heard any flower child talk about a monkey. You were stoned or high. You were groovy or cool. You were down. Or possibly up, on speed. But the monkey had disappeared.

The medical establishment still pushes morphine as one of the top three heavy-hitting pain killers of choice. They gave me morphine when I was in the hospital after delivering the twins.

Morphine is supposed to make you completely mellow. I hear from unsubstantiated reports that it doesn’t really take away the pain, but it makes you so laid back that you don’t care. Not me.

But even before the morphine arrived I had to deal with the drug they had injected down my spine to numb me below the waist.

“Now this will remove all sensation in your lower body,” the anesthesiologist, Dr. Painfree, told me. “You will be completely unaware of any physical sensation that’s happening during the surgery. You may just feel a slight tugging or pushing but that’s a normal part of the process. You are actually feeling the shifting inside your abdominal cavity as they’re removing the babies. Are there any questions?”

From my slab-like position on the prep bed, I envision a doctor, hands up to the elbows inside my stomach, feeling around for a baby’s arms to airlift it out then diving back in to get the other one. Will he know which cord is attached to which baby or will he tangle them all up like a ball of twine and be in there untying the knotted strands for hours? And what about all that placental junk? Do they haul it out by hand and dump it into a bucket or what? Animals eat it. Are they going to require something like this of me? I’ve heard of peasant women doing this for nourishment. Well, if they ask, I’m definitely going to order from the hospital cafeteria. No matter how much people complain about hospital food it has to be better than that.

And what about all the extra blood. Where does that go? I mean do they use a sump pump? Does the uterus just hang there limp and empty or do they give me little get your uterus back in shape exercises. Sac-Aerobics.

“How long does the numbness last?” I was too embarrassed to ask anything else. And besides, those doctors always seem so busy. It’s not like they get paid to educate the consumer.

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “It will last as long as they need it to last. This tube is releasing a steady amount of drug to take care of you. Now after the operation, when they take you into recovery and remove the tube in your spine and take you off the IV, you may feel some slight tremors.”

“Tremors? You mean like an earthquake?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. But some women have a reaction to the medication or just to the trauma of having the catheter inserted down along the spinal column. Sometimes it affects the spinal nerves and in that case you may feel some slight shakiness. Mainly along the back and down the legs. But don’t worry. That only happens to about ten percent of epidural patients.”

“Oh.” Where I would come out in the shake lottery was up for grabs at that point.

I went off to surgery and my babies were airlifted out of my abdominal cavity and the staff did something with the blood and did not get the umbilical cords tangled or anything. I was not even offered one helping of afterbirth. I’m just hoping they didn’t freeze dry it to keep me going in my twilight years.