Morphine - day 1

I started the morphine last night. Side effects so far have been:

• feeling very spaced out and floaty
• body temperature out of whack (mostly much too hot, but occasionally freezing cold)
• bad nausea
• bit dizzy (different to spaced out - actually feeing like you're going to fall over)
• itching all over
• talking too loud and saying things I probably shouldn't
• feeling a bit hyper

It hasn't had any effect on the pain yet, and the evil screwdriver-in-the-eye headache that started yesterday afternoon is still going strong. I didn't get any sleep last night because of that and the overheating thing. I've had to have the TENS machine on the 'burn-your-skin-off' setting all day, just to reduce the screwdriver-in-the-eye enough to be able to work. It feels like my back is being flayed alive by it. The burns are always so bad that I then can't use the TENS for a week afterwards, to give them time to heal, so I was hoping it'd knock the nerves back to sense today and then I'd be OK, but that doesn't seem to happening. Doesn't bode well for tomorrow. Also not helped by the fact that one of the wires has malfunctioned, so I can't make the TENS stay running properly - it keeps shorting out. New leads on order, just hope they get here before it goes completely.

The spaced out thing tends to come on within half an hour of taking a pill and last for several hours afterwards; these are immediate release pills, not slow release like last time, so I get an attack of some side effects straight after each pill, and the rest just seem to be constant. At the moment I daren't drive because when the floatiness happens I just have the feeling that I wouldn't react quickly enough on the road. I got a lift to the office today and I guess I'll just have to see tomorrow.

I think at the moment the morphine is also acting a bit like anti-depressants; I feel a bit removed from my fears about it - if I don't think about it, I'm OK, but if someone starts talking to me about it, I can feel the panic surging up and it's a real struggle to push it down. This anti-dep effect isn't necessarily as encouraging as you might think - the same thing happened last time on morphine and with a couple of other things since, but then it all went to pot.