Morphine, whenever you hear this word, many automatically think ‘illegal drug’ or ‘narcotic’. Morphine can be obtained to be used illegally and it is considered a narcotic pain reliever. But what exactly is morphine used for legally and is it something that I want to put in my body? Those are some really good questions; along with many others I never really had a chance to get the answer for when I was medically given morphine.
In my personal experience, after a car accident that caused my hip to break in two places, I was bed-bound at a hospital where their pain reliever of choice was morphine through a drip bag ever so many hours or when I decided to press that little button. I never pressed the button. My first dose of morphine left me in a relaxed state that if you asked me if I was dancing on clouds I would say yes. It never got rid of the pain, just replaced it with other overwhelming feeling to push the severe pain on the back burner.
Every three hours or so, the nurses would come in and release more of the morphine into my body. About fifteen minutes after doing so at one episode, they attempted to teach me how to use crutches and I ended up passing out after having massive color hallucinations and strange sound effects. Needless to say, morphine is not a drug that you want to take standing up. The word morphine comes from Greek mythology’s god of dreams, Morpheus. However, a dream state is not really the definition for the effects of this drug.
Luckily, I suffered through a day and a half of morphine use for medical purposes and I thought that after leaving the hospital all those strange and not pleasant side effects would go away, but I was wrong. You know how normally when you brush your hair you do loose a tiny bit of it with each brushing? Well picture brushing your hair and filling up the entire hairbrush with lost hair each and every time you brush. Or waking up and seeing clumps of hair on your pillow. That was my lasting side effect. It took a total of almost eight months for the morphine to completely rid itself from my body.
Even though the above side effects were horrible, there was one that I still haven’t seemed to overcome years later; memory loss. I used to be a wiz at numbers and remembering things in extreme detail, after getting off of the morphine, I would forget phone numbers I have known for years or words that would sit on the tip of my tongue and I have the hardest time remembering. Here it is, years later and I do believe that those three hourly doses of morphine killed a portion of my brain cells that controlled long term memory.
Medically, morphine is used because it acts directly onto your central nervous system to relieve pain. Morphine is medically the drug of choice for managing severe pain because it is the only narcotic that is the most effective. Morphine can be given as a treatment for short term or long term around the clock pain. The long term morphine, if needed around the clock, is normally given intra venous by a medical staff, however another long term use is for the morphine to be given as an epidural, injecting it into the base of the spine will relieve pain anywhere from 12 to 24 hours, but doing this can slow the circulation in the spine.
Morphine is a very forceful drug that medically can be used not only as a relief for severe pain, but also as a cough suppressant, and as a treatment for diarrhea. Even though, this drug does great things in the medical world, the side effects, I believe are too great to use this narcotic, period.
Side effects go beyond nausea, loss of appetite, sleep problems, dizziness. Most medications have these same effects. Morphine goes beyond that. Morphine can cause seizures, memory problems, renal failure, coma, hypoventilation, cardiac arrest, respiratory, arrest, miscarriages, hair loss, and death. Studies also have shown that just one injection, one does of morphine is enough to alter certain genes in our DNA.
In conclusion, before you are given morphine, or if you see the nurse giving you starting to give you something that you have no clue what it is, ask. Always consult your doctor before taking morphine because if you already have a certain type of condition, such as low blood pressure, asthma, or even a thyroid issue, morphine can do more harm than good. Your body isn’t just a here and now thing; it is a long term thing that needs to be taken care of properly for it and your future!
