Sister Morphine

--The Rolling Stones

Thank you for that intro, Mick and the Boys. It's time for that segment of the program we call 'Confession of the Week." Today's confession: I am on morphine.

Shock! Horror!

I've finally relented and allowed them to give me a small quantity of IV morphine before meals so that the pain in my mouth and throat will subside and allow me to swallow. Thereby ensuring I don't lose any more weight and that I eat enough to support my (hopefully) growing new bone marrow and immune system.

This is a huge step for me. The Physician's Assistant who comes around every day just finally begged me to take some, assured me I wouldn't end up a junkie, and told me that food was important enough to justify narcotics. So I relented. But why so resistant, Miz Haggis?

Well, it all goes back to Little House on the Prairie.

Do you remember the shark-jumping 9th season where Pa Ingalls moves the family to the city only to find Albert acting like a hoodlum? Where he forces him to go back to Walnut Grove to learn how to act like a decent god-fearing citizen? Where he finds out that Albert has been stealing morphine from Doc Baker's surgery and is now ADDICTED TO MORPHINE!!! One of the final scenes involved Doc and Pa essentially kidnapping Albert and making him detox. There was a vomiting scene so grody that, to this day, when someone says "morphine" I think of Matthew Laborteaux wretching in full technicolor all over his bed and Michael Landon. Followed by the scene in which he says he's going to make Pa Ingalls proud, and we are foreshadowed into the knowledge that he will someday become Doc Albert Ingalls. Cue the single tear in Landon's eye, the extreme close-up of the healed father-son relationship, the credits---and then the flashback in my head to the morphine vomit scene.

This was my dilemma. Every time they said, "you should take some morphine for that" I was adamant that I was no Albert "Hoodlum" Ingalls barfing all over Doc Baker's office in prairie-town Minnesota. That's all I'd need; Mrs. Oleson telling the whole town about my problems and trying to run Laura and Almonzo out of Walnut Grove on the strength of my addiction. I wasn't havin' it.

Then my lunch arrived and I couldn't even begin to eat the liquid stuff I'd ordered (soup, milk shake, boost and whipped potatoes), and I wondered WWPID? What would Pa Ingalls do? Pa Ingalls--and I'm convinced Mr. Michael Landon himself--would tell me to take the hit and eat the food. And so I did. Because if there's one thing you always get from a Little House episode, it's a lesson learned.