When I was in my mid-twenties, I got my big toenail ripped out during a martial arts competition.
My nerves are weird–it’s a Marfan thing, or a having-been-starved-as-a-child thing, or god knows what else, and with the synesthesia I gather my pain is kind of unusual. I feel a lot of pain when I feel pain. And there are a lot of nerves in the foot. So the ultimate outcome was that I cleaned the wound, wrapped it with some bacitracin, went to sleep–and a few hours later, woke screaming. The pain was incredible. I’d experienced multiple fractures, shattered teeth, beatings and falls and all sorts of stupid injuries, burns and tears and an early-term miscarriage, and yet nothing had *ever* hurt like this toenail getting ripped out. With my synesthesia it was like everything in the room took on a limning of blue-white fire, and I could taste it like a lightning strike, everything was only agony.
So I went to a doctor friend, and he prescribed me some Vicodin+acetaminophen. Eight fat pills, scored down their middles. I knew that I have a slightly idiosyncratic response to some meds, so I broke a pill in half along the line and took just the one-half dose.
And within a couple of hours, everything was fine.
The guy I was dating was kinda a dick, and used the excuse of my foot being hurt to hang out with other women at the bar, because he knew I couldn’t walk down the hill to find him. But everything was fine! I walked to fetch him home.
He treated me badly that night–verbally abusive and angry, as usual. But it was fine. I didn’t mind. I didn’t feel *good,* I just felt fine.
The house was cold, but that was fine. I was hungry, but I wasn’t really hungry, it was fine. I was grieving my relationship with my mother, with whom after much provocation I had finally gone no-contact, but now I wasn’t unhappy about it, it was fine. My best friend had a while earlier spun a web of incredibly dangerous lies about me to protect herself from being caught out cheating, and I’d cut her off, and I missed her so much, but I didn’t, now–I was fine. Everything was fine. Absolutely everything was absolutely fine.
I didn’t feel bubbly or happy or good, I just felt like all the places in me that hurt, physical and mental and spiritual, were just sort of covered in a big lukewarm blanket and out of my attention. No more the pain from my ruined right shoulder, my bad knee, my endless aching grief. It was all fine.
And in the middle of all of that came to me an understanding. If I finish this prescription, I will need more.
So I never finished it. I dealt with very bad sleep for the next couple of weeks, until the jangled nerves in my toe settled down a bit, and kept the seven and a half pills in their bottle in a shoebox under the bed, and I never had another one. Because I don’t think that we get too many chances to not make a mistake, when the mistake is very attractive, and I wasn’t sure how many more chances I’d have.
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