Codeine confidential

Codeine

Dihydrocodeine

I nick cocodamol tablets from my dad. They're crap for pain relief, but brilliant for sending you a bit squiffy. The dose is pretty good in prescription cocodamol; you get 30mg codeine "cut with" a bit of paracetamol in each tablet. So long as you don't take them too often, i.e. no more than once a week, you get quite a nice effect from taking a couple of them - unless you're my sister, then you die (she's terrible allergic, you see).

While others around the UK are nursing booze-fuelled hangovers, I'm still feeling slightly like an out of body experience, but my coffee (which all of Cakesnifferdom knows how to make for me) will soon kick in.


Not all fun
But it's not all fun with codeine. Cocodamol are actually prescribed for pain relief of all things. A couple of years ago, I did my back in. It was so severe that I couldn't walk, sit, lie - nothing. After being gingerly placed in my mum's car (accompanied by much agonised screaming), I was driven to the GP who didn't really examine me or look me in the face, but wrote me a script for cocodamol.

Whereas cocodamol are great for sending a person squiffy in the head, they're pretty useless for relieving agonising back pain. Worse still, given enough of them, they make a person feel a bit sick and soon have the effect of causing constipation. One of the worst things about doing your back is sitting up straight is just about impossible. Sitting on the toilet is just as bad, and sitting on the toilet while using your back and other muscles to squeeze out a poo can actually cause enough pain to make a person faint. Imagine then, the added problem of your poos developing codeine-induced grappling hooks that effectively make them hang on to your colon for dear life. Fuckers. So much pain and a really bloated abdomen.

So that's my take on cocodamol: never take it for its intended purpose because it's not very good.


Threadbared
I recently took to blog cruising again and I came across the delightfully entertaining and eloquent Whinger - she's in California, you know.

Being on the lookout for new blogging experiences to add to the excellent ones that I already read, I followed the links that Whinger had on her blog (she seemed pretty shrewed and I trusted her taste). One of the links was Threadbared and I highly recommend it; I don't think I've laughed so much in ages.