Morphine in the Night

On transatlantic flights I keep a watchful eye the video display which reports the location of our plane, its altitude, time and speed and distance.

Somewhere on these flights comes a moment, driven more by emotion than by the compass or the clock, when you feel the flight no longer tethered to either North America or Europe. It simply exists in a place of its own.

This is the same moment of darkness where your hospital room is attached to neither night nor day. The hospital rhythms and noises change, distant conversations are muddled and IV beeps are less frequent. This moment of darkness and detachment from a somewhat familiar world is when the pain surges, as if it has made its own decision to take advantage of your vulnerabilities.

Beneath my skin the burn oscillates, faster and faster, deeper and farther through my body, burrowing and crackling and drilling until it consumes everything, every feeling, every sensation, pain so intense it shoves its way to the front of the line of conscious thought and refuses to budge.

In this moment of darkness the pain becomes too much and the nurse comes with a shot of morphine. The liquid goes into the IV and before you can feel it you can taste it. For a few seconds this taste, clean and reassuring and medicinal, simply rests in your throat. Then the morphine gently races off to blot the pain. It wraps itself around the pain and simply erases it and in place of the pain a pleasant feeling is left.

This is a simple, unadorned sensation. Then you drift off and when you drift back in you don’t remember a high, you don’t look back on a sense of euphoria. It just feels good to lose the pain.

There is no single, satisfactory metaphor for the effects of a shot of morphine.

Perhaps the passing of a fast train in the snow, when you’re standing close and a few inches of snow have accumulated on the tracks. When the locomotive barrels through the snow blows up into swirling clouds that dance over the roadbed and spread out into the dull wintry gray air.

Somewhat more precise is the tide coming in where tides run unusually high, such as the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of California. The water has a long way to come back in and it moves fast, diligently rushing into channels cut into the mud flats. As it gets closer to shore it spills into all of the nooks and crannies and loads up all of the estuaries.

This is how the implacable pain goes away in the moment of darkness, on this incoming opiate moon tide, insistent and irreversible, when the morphine is as strong as the ocean and as dramatic as railroad track snow billowing up from the racing locomotive.