Pain comes with old age, right? Old people are supposed
to have brittle bones and weak immune systems along with twenty other issues,
right?
As I got older, my grandma didn’t seem to age
at all. She cooked, cleaned, and exercised as if she was still young. I always
joked around about how I was more of an old lady than she was because she was
more active than I. This past summer, my grandma started to have pain in her lower
back and legs, as well as stomach problems. We all assumed it was just her old
age catching up to her, that nothing was wrong with her. My parents took her
the hospital one day because she complained of discomfort. The doctors ran
tests and found that she had a stomach ulcer. Long story short, they treated
her ulcer and gave her an injection to help ease the pain in her lower body.
Along with this, they gave her omeprazole to reduced her stomach acid, tramadol
HCL to reduce her pain, and tizanidine HCL to help with her muscle spasms.
Why is it that the doctors identified the ulcer
in her stomach as an ulcer and not something else? How did they determine the
severity of the ulcer? Latour talks about collecting and analyzing the different
soils found in the forest and categorizing them with the help of the Munsell code.
The Munsell code created a reference where others could look and interpret the
findings. This relates to previous doctors and researchers identifying what a
stomach ulcer is and providing ways of identifying it in patients through tests such as x-rays.
Hey! This suggests to me the old question of Odysseus' ship, where on his long voyage home from Troy to Ithaca, he kept replacing boards and pieces of his ship. By the end of the voyage, he had replaced every board. Is it still the same ship? I think this applies to all of us. Do my asthma medications that allow me to play sports make me less me? Do pain meds take something away from your grandmother?
ReplyDeleteI tend to think not. I would argue that we are relationally defined, and that if you took away the sports cliches embedded in me, I would be someone very different, but not closer to any "true self" that may or may not exist.
This is an interesting story about your grandma. It is true that how you take care of your body can affect how you feel when you're older. As for the pain medication, do you think that her taking it has taken away a piece of her own identity (her being healthy)?
ReplyDeleteThis idea of being "incomplete" due to medication is a very intriguing topic to me. I personally feel that if your medication is helping you feel more like yourself (i.e., healthier, happier, at your very best), the medication is making you more complete, not less. Medication is, after all, generally meant to be beneficially for a person. Abuse it, and the expected negative side effects may take place. Sometimes, even the prescribed usage can cause those negative side effects. However, I simply believe that if you are taking something that is ultimately made to help improve you, that is an effort to be more complete.
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