I Love It! I Hate It! My Epidural That Is

In general, I love my epidural. I love the fact that I don’t get all woozy and weird the way I did with the narcotics, and I love that I have a little button I can push that floods my spinal cord with additional pain killers. It’s a great little system, though not one without a few notable downsides.

First, the machine is not set to automatically spit out enough pain killers to entirely keep the pain at bay. That’s what the magic button is for. The goal is to keep a minimal baseline and have the patient self-administer additional pain killer as they need it. As you heal and the pain recedes, you stop the self-administration. Thus, over time you sort of wean yourself off the pain killers automatically. Cool, with one complication: All those hours I’m sleeping? I’m not pushing the little button. As a result, waking up is pretty brutal.

Second, it only works if the drug they’ve plugged into the machine is the right drug. And by Saturday evening, the pain docs will figure out that the standard concentration they’re using in my case isn’t strong enough. Things get much better after they have the pharmacy work up a stronger concentration of the drug, but Saturday is pretty bad.

Third, the drug is not without its side effects. Most notably in my case, it causes itchiness. And by “itchiness,” think what it might feel like to roll around naked in a field of poison ivy, but without the corresponding rash (not that I’ve done so, but it’s an evocative image is it not?). Really, really awful. And while the docs can -- and at one point do -- provide a mitigating treatment (IV-administered Benadryl), in my case they may as well just hit me in the head with a 2x4.  A few minutes after they hang the drug on the pole I’m down for the count and then dead to the world for hours. So we’ll go with itchy.

Fourth, I won’t learn about this until it comes time to remove the epidural, but the tape they use to hold everything in place is really quite something. People talk about duct tape being sticky, but duct tape has nothing on this stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Boeing uses it to hold its airplanes together. This makes removal something of a problem. When they pull it off, it pretty much takes the top layer of skin with it, leaving you with these incredibly sensitive welts that then to begin to break out into terrible acne because the tape has been blocking your pores for the last four days. Both painful and disgusting.

Last, but by no means least, there’s the small matter that you can’t just get an epidural. It seems the only way you can get an epidural is if you also have a catheter running to your bladder. And while the catheter is actually a really clever bit of technology when it’s lying on the table, actually having to use one is a whole different matter. 

After two days with the catheter, I’m ready for the epidural to go.