Wednesday, June 28, 2006

I have received many e-mails and comments on my back injury and recuperation from CQ readers, giving me their personal stories and advice based on their own experiences, and I have found all of it tremendously helpful. I have been grateful for all of the correspondence, but I would like to acknowledge one correspondent whose personal story and outreach to me touched me very deeply, especially considering his experiences with his own difficulties.

I wrote last week about the excruciating pain that the disc rupture caused and the painkillers that doctors prescribed to ease the situation. Some of you wrote to caution me about Vicodin and Percocet and their addictive qualities. One person in particular wrote to me about his own addiction, and in particular gave me solid advice on physiological conditions that would indicate an addictive response from my body. Given the very public nature of his addiction, his note had one hell of a lot of impact on the decisions I have made this week.

That man is Rush Limbaugh.

I know that some people think that conservatives all take orders from Rush, but we're really not that lucky. I have corresponded with Rush' staff on a couple of occasions where they wanted to quote my blog -- they are extremely scrupulous about asking permission -- but other than that, I have never written directly to Rush nor him to me. He read my post and wanted to make sure that I took precautions with pain medication in order to avoid the problems that he faced in very public (and very overblown) fashion.

It takes a special kind of person to reach out in those circumstances to a man unknown to him just to help protect that man from a danger he might not see. That correspondence informed my decisions in the hospital to hold down my pain medication and to transfer to Ibuprofen as soon as possible. I've been fortunate; my pain since the surgery has allowed me to rely on the over-the-counter analgesic instead of the Vicodin and Percocet. Had I never heard from Rush, I might not have had the discipline to make that decision.