just got back today. i never never experienced pain to this degree in my life ever. i got to the hospital tuesday afternoon. they prepped me for surgery and on of the questions i was asked was whether i would want a duramorf or not. it is a heavy duty pain killer with one undesirable side effect: you can't urinate for 24-48 hours after receiving it. i opted to have it because i was also told that this particular operation is highly invasive and one of the most painful that can be done to the ankle. i woke up in the recovery room. no memory of the operation whatsoever. what i was amused by was the raging erection i had. who gets a boner while being operated on? well, i'm guessing it's more like a morning wood than anything but still funny as hell to think in the midst of having my knee and ankle torn up i am lying there fully erect. once i awoke and assured them i was coherent i was brought to my hospital room where i spent the next 3 days and 3 nights. the first night i felt almost no pain in the ankle. nurses and doctors repeatedly asked me "on a scale of 1 to 10, rate your pain". gleefully i kept answering "2... but am i going to be able to pee soon?" finally at 2am, after standing on one leg dangling my penis into what looked like a goose necked juice container for 10 minutes with not even a drop to show for my efforts, i relented and the nurse inserted a foley catheter. imagine a 1/4" thick rubber tube being inserted into your penis until it reaches your bladder at which point a bubble is inflated in it to keep it in place. the discomfort is soon forgotten as several hours of pent up urine is released and i can finally fall asleep. wednesday morning i wake up to teh now familiar question. "3" i answer, the ankle is starting to hurt a bit more. "the duramorf is starting to wear off" the nurse says. still, all day the pain is manageable. i am given a few meds orally to help and all is under control - until i try walking with crutches. that sent the pain up to about an 8. some morphine in my IV brought it back down to a 6 however which was relatively comfortable. to ensure i maintain this comfort level i am given a patient controlled analgesic (PCA) which lets me give myself a small hit of morphine at the touch of a button. i use this sparingly through the night and eventually fall asleep at around 2. at 3 i wake up yelling in pain. literally. the nurse rushes in "on a scale..." "10 10 10 fuck!" i scream. i am grasping my ankle doubled over in bed. she dumps an extra couple hits of morphine into my IV. i take 3 other pain meds orally. finally after about an hour and some serious sweat and tears the pain level is brought down below 8 and i fall asleep. not without side effects however. the next day i was completely out of it. words on the page wouldn't come into focus. i couldn't keep my eyes open. conversations with visitors were less than intelligible. but the pain was behind me. it now being thursday i knew i was supposed to go home the following day so i stopped using the PCA and relied solely on the orally administered drugs to keep the pain under control. this worked until 1am at which point the pain levels just started to climb. eventually after going from 6 to 8.5 the nurse suggested i continue with the morphine which i did. she also doubled the dose on one of the oral meds - oxycodone - just to be sure. friday morning i wake up after not really having slept at all. the doctor tells me, in spite of my reliance on the pca the previous night he still wants me checking out that afternoon. the nurse removes my IV and the PCA and i wait out the day until my ride arrives in the late afternoon. the pain is manageable throughout the day and in addition i experience an interesting side effect of what must have been the double dose of oxycodone. during my stay i started reading a book called "talking photography" - a collection of articles written by a photographer about photography. unfortunately i had enough attention span to read about a sentence at a time before blacking out or losing focus of the words on the page. during these blackouts i would sometimes visualize something that had no bearing in what i was reading. one particularly interesting visual happened after reading a passage about a photographer who started shooting as a kid. next thing i know i am watching a young child with a camera walking around directing chimpanzees to pose for him. when i come back to the book i am confused why there was no mention of that anywhere in the text. this happened all day. another instance had me seeing a photo of a man in a purple hallway with a mettalic membrane walking awy from an overturned bicycle and a a trail of bicycle parts. again, no connection to my reading material at all. it took me like six hours to get through a hundred pages. finally it was time to go home. i am here now unable to sleep. neither pain med i was prescribed is doing much to bring my pain levels below the 7 they are currently at. but at least a 7 is bearable.