Where A Fall Off A Balcony Can Lead

When I was four I fell from a balcony down onto a flight of stairs onr floor below.  The damage to my spine was considerable; I was in extreme pain for hours every day.  There were no really successful pain killers back in those days for which i suppose I was lucky, although being wrapped in blankets,itchy, raw wool blankets that had been soaking in boiling water--Sister Kenney's way of dealing with the then unknown progression of the after effects of a polio attack--was a raging daily nightmare and did nothing.  I grew up in a home where there was a lot of polite social drinking, the the refreshments were offered to the youngsters (you'd think we were an Italian peasant's home, but I guess WASP drinking habits are such a part of the social convention that children join the group with impunity.  At any rate, I quickly seized on the virtue of liquor to dull pain, and from then on I was a happy imbiber, now perhaps twelve or so in age.  The constant pain made me an exceptionally jittery person; all I wanted was to calm down, but that was not for me, alas.  Masturbation was another way to soothe me, and I took that up with almost mad enthusiasm, although I don't know many boys who maintained a take it or leave it position when they discovered the delights and imperatives of puberty.  Although by the time I was in graduate school I was quite a toper, but not a hopeless drunk, since I took to heart my mother's admonition pointing out to me army veteran friends of my sister in college, men visibly still healing their wounds, soaking their serious pains in booze.  My situation was not improved when my wife suddenly died, and the attending physician gave me a prescription for secanol.  It was years later when I had sufficient clarity one day actually while traveling in Europe to ask myself why I was preparing to take a secanol pill as a kind of pick me up at ten in the morning, and I threw the rest down the toilet.  A similar moment of revelation came to me at dinner one night after I had moved to Brookline with my family from Palo Alto, this was not even a decade later, when I under the care of a Palo Alto physician who had prescribed for me Valium.  I don't know how I managed to renew the prescription but I was always well supplied even on the East Coast and then one night while dining with friends at home after I had consumed a quart of whiskey which the Valium seemed to demand of me I began to hallucinate that giant scissors were coming toward me to slice off my nipples, and I leapt from my chair and ran out into the night and to the MassMentalHealth building nearby where in my student days I had been a guinea pig for LSD experimentation.  That nighttime run seemed to clear my head and I threw the rest of the Valium down the toilet.  It was around this time that the pain in my back which had grown intermittent once my skeleton had become full grown and I could discard my brace, altogether ceased.  The fusion which the orthopedic surgeon had declined to do saying the operation was in its infancy and too dangerous had happened of its own accord apparently.  At eighty four I have no back pains of any sort, but the legacy of all those years is fearful insomnia, so I am happy that I have discovered Ambien, or its generic equivalent zolpidem, to which I am clearly mildly addicted, but which has given me  a good night's uninterrupted sleep for the past fifteen twenty years.  It is maddening, however, that the medical insurance and the doctor's office combine to see that I do not get a thirty day refill (all the state will allow) until almost the day, so that planned trips out of town have to be accompanied by the most obscene wheedling bowing and scraping--all metaphorical of course--if I am to get my prescription early.  And then I choose to cut each pill in two so as to get the maximum effect, taking the second half at my urine break middle of the night.  Oh, the self pity I can generate for myself sitting at the dining room table using the pill cutter, making sure that these tiny bits do not escape my clumpsy unfeeling arthritic fingers, since then I might be A PILL SHORT1