My Brain on Drugs

"Did you find my pasta.....? You know, that... thing I use to serve the pasta with. What's it called? Anyway, did you find it?"
"No, but I found this. It was behind the stove".
"Good lord, I've been looking for that knife for months."
My husband looked at me like I was crazy. "Looking for what?"
"The knife."
"The what?"
"The knife. Right there. Didn't you say you just found it behind the stove."
"Yes, but...."
"It's the steak knife I've been looking for." Again with the "crazy" look.
"Uh, honey"?

I looked in the sink. It was a steak fork. When I called it a knife, it didn't look like a knife to me. It looked like a fork. But "fork" had temporarily taken up residence somewhere else.

Cymbalta, the wonder drug that mostly keeps my back pain, and as a bonus my neck and shoulder pain, under control, the lovely drug that sometimes allows me to sleep more than five hours a night, has fried my brain. It's just like the egg in that commercial. It's not just that I can't find my keys anymore. No one can ever find their keys. If I take my rings off before I cook, within two minutes I have no idea where they are. I'll tell JP something, then ask him if I'd already told him. I can't remember nouns. I don't remember a  lot of what he's told me. (I refuse to think he's just messing with me when he swears up and down that he told me something a few days before.) We actually got into a fight over whether he had set up my computer for tabs. I don't remember him doing it. All I know is I can do tabs now.

I've wonder sometimes if it's worth it. What's a little pain, after all? It can't be so bad that I'm willing to give up my memory. But your body has a way of making you forget how awful pain can be. If it didn't, no one would have more than one kid.

I tested that theory out last spring when I decided to stop taking the Cymbalta. I spent three weeks weening myself off of it. Ibuprofen would be fine, I thought. That stuff works on anything. Within a couple months I knew I'd made a mistake. My brain was unfried, but I was miserable. So I went back on it.

This was probably when I accepted that my life was never going to be what it used to be. My back is irreparably damaged, it's come close to ruining my life, and I have to live differently now. I still don't know precisely what that entails. But there's always a chance that if you tell me something, the next time you bring it up, I won't know what the hell you're talking about.