A cold turkey

Well, that was interesting. As I've mentioned in passing, I recently had to cancel a holiday because of back trouble. A low disc - L3, I believe - had misbehaved sufficiently to put pressure on a nerve, causing referred pain in front of my hip and down my thigh. I still have a large numb area on one leg, akin to the sensation caused by a dental anaesthetic. The pain was bad enough to require strong pain relief, and I ended up taking co-codamol 30/500 in gradually decreasing numbers for the best part of three weeks. The relief it gave, especially in the early days when I took two tablets every 6 hours and 400mg Ibuprofen every 8 hours, was immense. No pain - just a dreamy vagueness and lethargy. Great.

I took the last dose of co-codamol on Sunday evening. Monday I felt smug, stupidly - my back seemed better almost all day, and I only needed a couple of plain paracetamol to be able to sleep in comfort that night. Tuesday, however, was another matter. I had to go to three back-to-back Diocesan meetings in Oban, and by the end of the two-hour car journey to get to them (and I wasn't driving) I felt sure I was catching flu. Paracetamol took the edge off the aching shoulders and legs and the pounding headache, but failed to deal with the sudden floods of heat, the stomach cramps, the burning soft palate. I became less and less able to focus on the matter in hand, and by the time we got to discussing diocesan communications, I was barely civil.

The drive home was made bearable by easy conversation, drinks of water, and curiously strong mints. By this time I had considered the possibility of withdrawal symptoms, but feared I might instead have infected a whole room-full of Piskies - and the diocese of Argyll and The Isles can't afford to lose people in this manner. I headed straight for Google and found reams of stuff from people whose intake of codeine had far exceeded mine, but whose symptoms were all familiar. Some of the comments on blogs and help forums (fora?) made sensible suggestions about dealing with the situation, and several were adamant about going cold turkey - not tailing off the drugs, not taking another one just to get through the night.

Today has been better, though I still had the headache at breakfast. Now, at 11.30pm, I note that I've reached the magic 72 hour figure which should mean it's over, more or less. Apparently that's what it takes to get rid of the last traces. I was prescribed the codeine by one doctor and told how often to take it, and in what combination, by another. It was wonderfully effective. But I think I would have liked to have been told how I would feel when I stopped taking it, and perhaps advised how best to deal with the symptoms of withdrawal.

And I shall never again wonder how people become addicted to the stuff.

Take action

This jolly little map indicates that we're having interesting weather. In fact, the red - which the astute will notice extends over the homeland of this blog - carries the caption "Take action" on the Met Office site I referred to yesterday. I've never actually seen the red over our neck of the woods since I started using the site, and was sufficiently intrigued to check its recommendations. They're actually pretty basic, to do with tying down the garden, putting the car indoors and not leaving your bed under a shoogly old chimney stack. (And if you're wondering: the last instruction is the least tampered with by my attempt at whimsical paraphrase)

What it doesn't warn you of is the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning or insanity induced by the shrieking of the CO alarm. A sudden down-draught from the chimney obviously caused a blow-back of gas-fire fumes; this particular chimney has always been subject to strange currents of air and used to fill the room with smoke in the old days. We've solved the insanity problem by removing the alarm to the hall and we've dispersed the fumes by opening a window - even though that is one of the "don't"s in the Met Office list.

There are compensations, however: I had a jolly time watching cars vanishing under the waves on the shore road at high tide, and noting that not only had someone left a white van parked on the seaward side of the road but also there were people obviously sitting in their parked cars with the lights on enjoying the thrills. I imagine they don't think of all the stones cast up by the waves.

Now it's dark, and we can't see much. The wind has fallen strangely silent in a way I find ominous; I fear it may be a case of reculer pour mieux sauter or something more scientific like the eye of the storm, for more and worse is promised. When I was a child in Glasgow, all I worried about was the possibility of being brained by flying slates off the tenements of Hyndland and Broomhill or the fanlight at the top of the close where we lived being shattered by a chimney pot, but these worries actually existed more in the minds of my parents. I found it exhilarating. Now I know that the worst storms wait till midnight to terrorise us and wreck our sleep, having first silenced the telly so that we have nothing else to think about.

I shall go out in the lull and tie down the garden. Or something.