Short Bowel Syndrome & The Dreaded Morphine

It’s not often I talk about my illness - there are far more interesting subjects in this world and I think just about everybody eventually finds it boring listening to others rattle on about how ill they are. Even I bore myself if I talk about it too much! But yesterday I was in pain. Bad pain.

Some of you will already know that I have short bowel syndrome, but you probably don’t know much about what that can mean. Obviously, the name tells you that my bowel is shorter than that of most people, but how does that affect me?

Well I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of every way it affects me - that really would be boring - but one of the things that happens is that my bowel becomes irritated and ends up feeling as if somebody is sticking a red hot poker inside me. If any of you have ever eaten a hot curry or really spicy chilli, you’ll no doubt have experienced the so called ‘ring of fire’. Well this is like that, only worse.

It’s worse because, not only does it burn around the opening and right up inside my bowel, but when my bowel is trying to rid itself of whatever’s causing the irritation (that could be a piece of vegetable that’s got stuck, a drink that was a little too strong….the list is pretty much endless) while it’s trying to expel said irritant, it also pushes out part of itself. When that happens, the exposed part of the bowel feels like a big, sore bubble that's stuck under my bum. Yes, I know that’s probably too much information, but it’s the way it is and some people have to live with things that they’d rather not.

Anyhow, yesterday morning that happened and it was painful. Very painful. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sit, stand, lay down….whatever I did it still hurt like mad. It hurt so much that I took morphine.

I don’t like taking morphine, y’see. In fact, after becoming addicted to the stuff some years ago after it was prescribed following my original surgery (when the majority of my bowel was removed) and spending a month in the throws of withdrawal (which are apparently the same as heroine withdrawal) I swore I’d never use it again. I'd become tolerant, so it wasn't doing it's job anymore, and what happens when you forget to take it just isn't funny. However, while I was in hospital over Christmas, the bowel specialist whose care I was under thought I ought to try it again. He’d seen how much pain I could be in (and experienced it with other patients, obviously - this is a specialist unit for people with serious bowel problems) and thought it quite ridiculous that I’d rather go through that kind of pain than take morphine to ease it. No doubt he’s never tried getting off the stuff once addiction’s taken hold, though.

To cut a long story short, I agreed to take it but only at times when the pain’s really bad. He wanted me to take it daily in order to stave off pain, but I won’t do that. No way. Yesterday I took some for the second time since leaving hospital. I hate the stuff. Not only is it highly addictive but I have an allergic reaction to it. About six hours after taking it I start to itch. The itch gets progressively worse until I’m scratching myself all over and doesn’t give up until about 24 hours later. The addictive thing aside, how on earth could I put up with that kind of scratching all day every day? The doc says not to worry about the reaction as it isn’t dangerous, but it’s bloody annoying, that much I do know, but I guess when you measure of day of scratching against hours and hours of immense pain, there isn’t really a choice. And apparently morphine’s the only thing that’s strong enough to work on me because of my limited absorption. That certainly seems to be the case, because paracetamols and other drugs I’ve tried do absolutely nothing to ease it. They don’t even ease a headache, let alone ‘burning bum’, as I call it. Neither do they do anything for dry bowel contractions (when the bowels contracting to rid itself of something that isn’t there) or the pain I get when food gets blocked behind my re-connection site so morphine it is. I shall be very careful with it, though.

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