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Like him, I enjoy the waiting. Once I have decided that today is going to be a tramadol day, and I've given myself a deadline before which I absolutely will not cave in and take it, my experience of pain is transformed. Rather than grinding and hopeless, it feels charged, electric. The difficulty I have standing up (or sitting down) begins to feel noble. The constant, miserable, and exhausting stretching I do to relieve pain and stiffness in my joints acquires a warm-up quality.I am already removed one degree from my own experience and it is a little more observable, a little more interesting. I know that in a little while, after some sore but delicious anticipation, it will melt away in an exquisitely gradual, perceptible way. And then I will feel expansive and happy. The hours ahead are no longer to be endured but rather to be savored, and this knowledge invigorates me, refocusing my day.Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
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