But that's not really my question... They also left the pitocin running for 7 hours after the surgery, which caused one single, horrific, 7-hour-long contraction. If that wasn't bad enough, whatever drug was in the PCA pump did absolutely nothing for the pain at all, except to take away any ability to deal with the pain. It was like I was sealed up in my head, with the constant screaming pounding pain, and I couldn't think at all and my hearing was "throbbing" in and out. I was far too stupid to do anything other than lie there as a tortured animal, and I kept pushing that stupid button because I was too stupid to form the rather simple thought that the drug was magnifying the pain. With my second baby I had a 52-hour back labor and I was delirious from the pain between about hour 42 and hour 48 of labor. That was pretty grueling, but it was nothing like the pitocin pain after #1.
At one point several hours into the pitocin & "morphine" my husband went out into the hallway to track down the nurse and told her "the morphine isn't working." The nurse replied digustedly that "the morphine CAN'T 'not work'" and then she stomped into the room and slammed the IV equipment around a bit and stomped back out without a word to me. After that the feeling of being walled up inside with the pain got even worse, so I'm quite willing to believe that she upped the dosage.
So, anyway, lots of you have experience with morphine -- has anyone ever had this kind of experience? I know that codeine "doesn't work" on some people, and I am suspicious that I may be one of those people. (After both babies I took one of the tylenol-codeine combos and it seemed to have exactly the same effect as just plain tylenol.) Is there such a thing as people who get no pain relief from morphine? Both of my epidurals were with one of the "caine" drugs (related to novicaine, lidocaine, etc.) and I think that those are chemically pretty different from the narcotic drugs. The other thing I've wondered about was maybe they lied and they didn't use morphine and they used some other drug that doesn't really work well...
-- cathy :-)