The Wall

I'm not sure what happens to marathon runners when they hit the wall within miles of the finish line. But I do know what has happened to Ken.
We're in the dog days of detox. Rather he's in the dog days and the rest of us are watching and at moments cheering him on and then wondering if he should just abandon the race because it appears too overwhelming.
I've reported that he's not under the table sucking his thumb, until now. He's managed to get himself off all oxycotin, something that reverberates with many because of Michael Jackson's sudden death and all that swirls around that.
But these last days have left him without pain killers and raging pain. At one point his sister called me at work to say he was incoherent he was in such pain. I came home, called his pain doctor and the neurosurgeon and asked for help. His pain doctor, who I now want to give our time share in Sedona I'm so grateful, called right back. She reminded us why Ken was doing this. Told him not to abandon this because he'd come so far and then called the neurosurgeon to see if we could work out some compromise about no pain pop during these last two weeks before surgery. Within a few minutes she'd called us back. The two doctors had talked and come up with a plan. The surgeon would move up the date to insert his pain pump and rather than fill it with opiates would fill it with a kind of numb ing agent that would help him through the critical two weeks of detox when he can have no opiates in order to reset his pain receptors. They also put him on a high powered anti-inflammatory until his surgery, now scheduled for July 13. He had acupuncture today and last night we took his sister out to dinner on her last night here before she returns to Indiana. (We figured last night that the two of them hadn't spent this much time together since they were kids and were at Lightening Dude Ranch in northern Indiana. Ken didn't enjoy Lightening Dude Ranch either.)
He is no longer under the table, but he is stepping slowly and counting time by the moment and not by the hour.
Lucas comes tomorrow.
We have four more days to go until the pump insertion and then another time period until he gets the pump filled with morphine and then more time until we get the right mix of meds in the pump.
But until then he's substituting DumDum suckers for pain pops and trying not to notice the difference.