There’s a first (and last) for everything

   [apparently my May 15 entry was way too premature]

   The first, in this case, is that in the 41 months that I have been producing this blog I failed to offer an entry last week. Of the 217 entries I have compiled I was unable to produce May 20, because of a continual crawl through the hell known as prescription narcotic withdrawal.
   While the initial days were uncomfortable to say the least, in the past 10 days things went from bad to worse as the purge of prescribed Oxycontin continued to rob me of my cognitive and physical abilities.
   Imagine being chilled and feverish; nauseous and starving; shaky and numb at the same time; unable to eat or sleep. My mind would constantly flit from one random thought to the next — and I literally mean constantly. All my senses were intensified by about four times: light, sound and scent would nearly knock me over … and I was under doctors’ care at the time.
   It is the last time I will ever accept a narcotic as a solution. It’s not worth the pain of withdrawal.
   Now my main problem is wooziness when I try to stand up and gingerly navigate my way through the house as my blood pressure has dropped about 30 points.
   All I can say is God damn Oxycontin and the pill pushers who have foisted this menace on the American public: there is NO WAY this drug should be administered for longer than a month or two to anyone with cancer pain unless they are in a terminal state.
   And get this: I was talking to a young woman at my daughter’s day-care this week who had recently had her tonsils removed. The pain reliever she was given was — you guessed it — Oxycontin.
   I recounted my travails to our baby-sitter and she told me when she had some routine dental work done she was given, yes, Oxycontin.
   What in the hell is going on? 
   I’ll tell you: Congress and the medical establishment are under the thumb of the pharmaceutical industry in this country.
   As I sit in physician waiting rooms near noontime, clean, white, smartly dressed, well-heeled drug reps cruise into doctors’ offices with bags of gourmet food [some even have their own carts] for the welcoming staff.
   I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
   While working in DC a few years back I visited the Lincoln Memorial once again. It is such an awe-inspiring experience.
   However, on this particular visit I exited to the left of the memorial (heading north) and was dumbstruck — dead in my tracks — when the first building I came to was not the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, nor the United States Institute for Peace, nor the Albert Einstein Institute … but the American Pharmacists Association perched “on the only privately held lot in the area.”
   Not 400 feet from Abe.
   No wonder he looks pissed.