Sunday 27 January 2013

Boot to the Drugs - Here's Your Brain OFF Drugs

Pharmaceutically clean, whatever the cost, is where I've hedged my bets now. I've decided pain is the lesser of evils. It's a lesser evil than shutting down my brain and living like a freakin' zombie, although I distinctly recall not moaning for brains...well, maybe once, but I was probably moaning in nostalgia for my own. Either that or I was really hungry? Maybe I was just moaning.

Pain is also usually a lesser evil to dying from medication toxicity, but it's a subjective thing. There occasionally comes a time when I'd gladly chew off a body part to rid myself of the pain, but since most of the pain comes from my hip joints that would just be perverted. If I could bend that far I might be a happier person, pain or no pain.

Now tell me you don't have a really weird image in your head.

As for the remark about dying, it's only half-serious, but drugs poison us. It doesn't matter if they're legal or illegal. They alter our chemistry. If I'd known as much about chemistry back in high school as I do now, I might have bothered to graduate. There's nothing more educational than being forced to learn about a million different drugs that could, possibly, help you, but generally do more harm than good.

About a year or two ago, I was sent rather quickly to a hospital emergency. They were going to send me by ambulance, but I refused since I was borrowing someone's car. I wasn't dying, so it was stupid. I had an enlarged liver. Looking up the information, it turns out they call it drug-induced hepatitis (no, not contagious hepatitis). It disappears as soon as you stop taking the drugs, which means acetaminophen in my case. They tested me at the hospital and no emergency intervention was necessary. I had to lie on a gurney for about 6 hours to discover I was fine. Sigh.

The great thing about the liver is that it will repair itself. They can do transplants using only portions of a living donor's liver. They will grow back the missing piece, and the recipient will grow a full liver out of the portion that is given to them, assuming there's tissue compatibility, etc. Just hope you don't start developing a sudden taste for vast quantities of alcohol if your donor is a little too happy in life. (No I don't have stats to support that - it was a joke.)

Drugs damage more than the liver, of course. The kidneys have to process portions, the bladder has its own fun I'm sure. There's basically the whole path the drugs have to follow, as well as where they're absorbed and sent. Drugs go to the brain. I wonder what's been done to mine. Time to activate a few brain cells to replace the old ones. I guess it's a good thing I have new things to occupy me all the time. Apparently with every new thing we do, a new pathway develops in the brain, allowing your brain better access to the information stored there.

While researching computer storage a while back, I discovered that the storage capacity of the human brain was approximately 2.5 petabytes (a petabyte will be the next unit of measure in computers after the terabyte). Pretty cool stuff, huh? Just imagine being able to have all your music files uploaded to your head. You wouldn't need an mp3 player ever again. People would look really stupid, though, since most would be bobbing their heads to cerebral vibrations. A bit like brain farts if you ask me.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please keep your comments respectful, without strong profanity, or they will not be published. Thank you.