my head is on fire!

I am home. I am also ill. The hospital has managed to cure my acute gallbladderitis, but has given me a cold.

I was going to post such things as the list of interesting drugs I have been given in the last week (sorted by order of interestingness, of course), and some rants and advice about hospitals (some of which are to be typed up properly and sent as letters to various places), but my head is too hot for me to be coherent. For now, I will just thank meeping, gerwinium, alexmc, hatter and hiddenpaw for coming to see me - especially alexmc, because he brought me books (plural)!

Also hiddenpaw's dress sense cheered up everyone on the ward. This is not news - the boy has his own personal fashion sense but it's outstanding, & astounding.

I have discovered that Freezepop albums are excellent painkillers. The night I'd had paracetamol, hyoscine and pethedine and was still in pain, I listened to Freezepop on my minidisc player, and my pain level dropped by half. I think the pulsing beat of the music combined with the general perkiness of nine-tenths of the band's songs helped to quell the pulsing sensation going on in my gall bladder. This is Official, and they can use it in publicity if they want to.

I wonder if the world is spinning round because of the cold, or if it's opioid withdrawal ;) (Not actually serious, here.)

serendipity and memeage

I am extremely amused. Two adjacent entries on my friends page start:
Tonight I experienced a rare thing. I was at a professional meeting and I found the person who had organised it disturbingly attractive...
and
It's kinda nice to hear from someone that they think you're attractive. Does wonders for the old self-esteem, there.

If it weren't for the fact that the two people concerned are in very different parts of the world...

btw, I'm not doing the standard "clicky to get 10 interests picked that you can write about" meme because the 10 interests it picked are: cephalopods, disability rights, gay, irc, London, not being normal, Pride flags, science fiction, Thorpe Park and wolves, and I think they are all blindingly obvious, but perhaps I'm wrong. So instead, I'd suggest that people look at my interests (150 is not enough!) and choose the ones you want to ask me about.

I actually hated organic chemistry at university...

...but I kinda like it now. Got into pharmacology when I was desperately researching antidepressants, and I've stayed interested. (Should really look into those again - been reminded by Netdoctor that Efexor can cause raised blood cholesterol levels, and that's also a reason why people develop gallstones. Getting my blood cholesterol level checked is on my list for the week.)

I now know the official difference between an opiate and opioid. Opiates occur naturally (the medicinally useful ones are codeine and morphine), and opioids are synthesised from a starting opiate. So dihydrocodeine, Tramadol and pethidine are opioids.

I am stupidly amused. if you open the structure of codeine and dihydrocodeine as two tabs in the same window, you can rapidly click between them to make your own animated gif. Who'd've thought it - dihydrocodeine is just codeine with its double bond saturated. Huh. btw, those links are from a site calling itself Just For Chemists, which leads to deceptively simple structures for things like pethidine unless you know that Me is a methyl group (-CH₃), Et is an ethyl group (-CH₂CH₃) and Ph is a benzene ring. When I post my List of Interesting Drugs I've Taken Recently, I'll modify the structures to be complete.

omg, I've just found a link to The Synthesis of Tramadol. That rocks. Sadly, it seems to be the only one on there. I'm just... amazed... that the highly toxic-to-me salicylic acid can be reduced & Grignarded and turned into something that doesn't kill me.

And I'm even more stupidly amused to discover that I have now Officially taken a Class A Drug. Does it still count as a Class A Drug if I took it for medicinal purposes under prescription? I want to know! ( Find out below. )