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Part I: Morphine, morphia— lovely words with delightfully stretchy syllables; say mooorphine and you hear a foghorn; you feel taffy on your tongue; you articulate the very core of craving, the voice of someone saying more more more.
My first recollection of morphine, an opiate derived from the poppy plant, is this: 16 years old, four wisdom teeth with roots so deep I could feel their ache in my neck, jangling down my arms. "They have to come out," the dentist said, so out they came. Blown under by a gale of anesthesia, I woke up later with a shredded mouth and gums sutured shut but still bloody. I remember being hustled home, wrapped in a blue blanket, and waiting while the Percocet (another opioid) prescription was filled. Pain transforms time, takes what was a thoroughbred racehorse galloping toward the fluorescent finish line and poof, turns it into an overweight donkey doing a dusty plod on a cobbled road. And then there she was, my mother, two tablets in her palm. I swallowed them down and sometime later—10 minutes? 10 years?—the pain began to ebb. What had before been intolerable was now becoming pleasurable; all was right with the world. And it was then that I realized how to define joy. It was not an additional emotion; it was simply the subtraction of suffering. How odd, that what we seek as a basic human right, the engine that drives our every action, is shaped like a minus sign. Yes, less is more.
While toothaches have come and gone in my life, headaches, figuratively speaking, have not. Sometime in my late teens a psychiatrist prescribed my first medication for depression, imipramine, which I stayed on for many years despite its limited, or perhaps nonexistent, effectiveness. Imipramine gave me a furred mouth and a clippety-clop heart. Its oddest side effect: prodigious sweating unlike any I had ever known. At last I switched to nortriptyline, an equally weak punch, and therefore spent my teens and early twenties doing what I have already amply, if not excessively, if not obsessively, documented in my books—ping-ponging through mental hospitals, carving out for myself a career as a mental patient who also occasionally went to school.