Oxycodonehydrochloride: Bian Eno and Harold Budd's The Plateaux of Mirror

On Bastille Day 2012 I climbed Lake Mountain to see the snowfall, slipped and broke my fibula. Read about it here. A week after initial examination I was booked for surgery to get a plate put in to hold the break in place so it could heal properly. There was one viable window for this and I took it rather than wait two more weeks and risk the bone healing the wrong way. I cancelled a vid night at home (there were to be plenty of those in the coming months) and the understanding friend who received this news offered to give me a lift to the hospital. This was a relief as it always felt a little wrong getting a taxi for two blocks. The first time I did that I was ripped off by the driver.

I presented myself at reception where my being in shorts on a day under ten degrees was wondered at. When you have a leg in a cast you have to improvise. As though that was the pass question I was fast tracked up the stairs to strip off, don a little white backless OT number and lie on a bed until attended by a series of medical personnel who asked me questions.

I was wheeled into the operating room, given a nerve block and an epidural both of which had an unsettling feel and asked to count backwards and close my eyes. I did but when I opened them again I looked straight into the eyes of someone who hadn't been there a second before who smiled and said: "That went well."

INTIMATE DETAILS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH MIGHT DISTURB. THOSE AFTER ARE FINE.

Then I was wheeled into a small ward where I was to lie down, shut up and be observed for about a day. I had no objection. Each hour I was asked by a nurse to rate my pain. For the first few I was numb from the waist down, unable to move my legs let alone my toes which were also tested. Something I would never have guessed going in was being unable to sense that your genitalia were there but knowing from vague referred pain that you needed to urinate but having no muscular force to do so. I tried the plastic bottle but that also involved feeling around there and the sensation of touching male genitalia that did not register as my own was disturbing. Worse when it's wet from urine you can't even smell. I nevertheless aimed into the bottle and heard some trickling from through the curtain. Looking at the bottle I realised the sound had been from me and there was a slight deposit visible through the plastic. My ability to control my bladder flow returned slowly throughout the evening and night but I will never forget that level of helplessness and unease.

Also returning through the following hours was me ability to feel pain which never left me nor lessened in the day I had yet to lie there. I was regularly given paracetamol which did nothing noticeable but when it became too hard to take another thing called Endone. Oxycodonehydrochloride. A hybrid of natural and synthesised opioid for the treatment of severe pain. It's getting its own chapter in the comic Fibula but a few words here will be necessary. Endone erases pain but also lessens every other part of your consciousness. There is no pleasure in the absence of pain in this case, merely the absence and a profound and constant fatigue. I felt a definite lack of everything I might have registered while conscious, as though I'd had about fifty IQ points removed while my flesh and nerves dealt with the pain. Effective but ... scary, like the situation in the previous paragraph.

I had brought my phone and charger with me and kept it close. With it I could futz about on Facebook, check my email and read whatever was in my Kindle stock. Also, I could send the music I'd put on it to my bluetooth headset, lie back and be still.

Having exhausted the first of Brian Eno's Ambient albums, Music for Airports, over the previous week I chose his next in that series and looped it so that I could drift in and out of sleep with its gentleness to meet me. Indeed, as the first modal fade in rose I lay back and felt more at ease.

Throughout the night I did indeed wake to it, every time a nurse came in to check on me and it provided a good bridge from sleep to wooziness. At about two in the morning the retreating nerve block made the pain it had concealed grow and burn. It rose in intensity steadily over a few hours until I could do no more than ackowledge it. As soon as I could I called a nurse who listened to me and gave me endone.

As this filled out my nervous system with its oddly harsh pain erasure and my consciousness lowered to static functionality the music continued. I concentrated on it until I could relax and accept it. It began to feel like a dose of something the drug had left out, the euphoria that an opioid is supposed to bring, the ingredient X that lulls and caresses.

The Budd/Eno set on this album is not time bound by structure. While there is clear motivation in each piece there is neither an urgency to fulfil a phrase here or stretch one out to the edge of its strength there. There is just a series of visits to landscapes strange but warm, places and vistas whose colours alone provide their shape, fields and horizons of uterine comfort, of ease, of peace.

Once out of hospital I had to continue on the Endone and intially did so from necessity but I learned to wean myself from it by missing dosage periods. This is where my phone's primary purpose enters as I would get whoever was available around for dinner and wine. This, of course carries a potential second problem but it's one I've never been owned by. In two weeks I was off all pain relief and coping with even the most infernal of outbreaks. And when alone during that time, when faced with nothing but the comfortless lack of concentration that ruled out even the lightest of reading or even the most trough-fed viewing I let the Endone harden me to old timber, let my cat parachute on to my doona to warm me in the frozen predawn, and go from wasted oak to floating driftwood just by adding this record.