Wishing Dad good luck for a good sleep did not work. He awoke with pains that seared and branded and made him cry out when he adjusted in bed, pains that worsened over the next day, pains he hissed ashen-faced that he could not deal with, pains that made him cry out and shout when helping him move to the toilet or to bed.  He thinks he cracked a rib when I used the gate belt after he fell, to bring him his hands and knees, and then up to the toilet seat.  Jessica, the on-call hospice nurse, tells me over the phone to give him a 0.25 ml oral morphine syringe from his E-kit to see if it helps with his pain, and then another syringe if it does not.  I will do that, I say, and I ask her to come to the house anyway, on a Saturday, to hear directly from him what he is experiencing so I do not bear the burden of correct translation.  We could take him to the hospital for an x-ray, but the experience of pain and exhaustion of getting him there and undergoing the procedure would bring no gain: there is no treatment for a cracked rib but weeks of rest and pain management.  I cracked four ribs several years ago in a mountain biking crash, and I well remember the weeks of agonizing searing pain, and how grateful I was for oxycodone, without which I would not have slept, the more so because a week after my wreck I camped for three weeks with 34 boy scouts at the National Jamboree, a trip two years in the making.  So, he will try the morphine.  And he reported that the 0.25 ml dose did dull his pain, but was bitter-tasting, made him drowsy, made his body tingle, and caused some nausea.  But it did dull his pain.  This dosage, or even double, he can safely take for pain every hour, says Jessica.  She will have a fresh supply of morphine sent over, which is much easier to obtain for a patient on hospice than not, she says.  I felt relieved the low dosage helped.  He, too, felt relieved, from the worst of the pain, and was grateful.

(Pictured: Boot Hill grave marker in Peoche NV, the mining town of my father’s grandfather.)