Are you Poisoning Me?

During one of our meetings with the quality of life team, one of the things they brought up was pain management. In a world with an opioid epidemic, having a conversation about what the standard of care is for someone in Asher’s (and our) position, is a necessary thing. At that time, we were given a couple of pre-filled oral syringes of morphine to have available, should he get to a state where he was in such pain that traditional pain killers weren’t doing the trick

As I mentioned in the previous post, Asher was having a rough time, and, at this point, was consistently complaining about headaches. We were just a few days from our return to St. Jude, but we felt it was time to give him a dose of morphine to see how it would help. So at bedtime, I took one of the syringes, and gave it to him.

That night he slept… like a rock. He woke up much later than he normally did, and he was super groggy. Asher, normally the most “morning person” in the house did not like or function well with groggy. My wife asked “How much did you give him?” To which I responded, “I gave him one of the syringes.”
“The WHOLE THING?”
“Yeah?”
“David, there was about 4 doses in one syringe!”
“Oh…”

Asher shot me a dirty side eye. and said, “Are you trying to poison me!?!?”

“No, son! I’m so sorry! I thought it was just one dose!”

The rest of the day he felt off, and he didn’t let me forget it. I walked into his room later that afternoon, and saw he had Google pulled up on his iPad, which was unusual. The boy typically knew exactly what he wanted to do/watch on his iPad, and it was almost always some gamer or war history video on YouTube. I leaned down to see what he was searching for, and there it was: “Morphine Side Effects.” Sigh.

That definite cemented that father-of-the-year feeling for me that day.