Take One Snail And Call Me In The Morning...continued
Doctors Do Not Know All
Being a child of the antibiotics age and a budding scientist, my slow recovery and trial-and-error treatment came as a big shock. I realized that the nervous system, the body’s wiring diagram, doesn’t always get things right. It’s not very good at fixing itself, and when it tries it often makes the wrong attachments, so things get even worse.
And doctors are not so flash at making up its deficiencies. I went to one of the best pain clinics in the United States, where most patients had conditions far more serious than mine. My neurologist was stunned when I finally reacted to one of his drugs, an old standby called Tegretol that was originally developed to treat epilepsy. "We aren’t used to people getting better around here," he said.
Pain clinics are big on teaching coping skills, because pain patients have to cope with the shortcomings of pain drugs. I was lucky. By the time I had reached the maximum dosage of one of the weaker opiates, a combination of time, surgery and Tegretol had taken away my need for any opiates at all. After a few days of withdrawal my brain emerged from the opiate-induced fog.
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