In the month following my double mastectomy, I was in pain. This fact should have come as no surprise – the doctors warned me, as did the literature, and logic, too – but somehow it did. Apart from childbirth (times three) and a broken finger when I was little, I haven’t had much experience with physical pain and certainly not pain that continued, unabated, for weeks.
When I got home from the hospital, I popped some co-codamol and sat down to watch what I call narishkeit TV. All day long I lay on the sofa and watched sitcom after sitcom. I laughed and then I rolled my eyes and then I decided that I wasn’t cut out for this life. If I had to do nothing but stare at the screen, at least I needed something intelligent.
I remember why I picked Dopesick on Disney+. I had that annoyingly Jewish impulse to see how the series depicted the Sackler family, the Jewish owners of Purdue Pharma, creators and marketers of OxyContin (short answer: the Sacklers are portrayed as greedy, heartless, and basically, pure evil, all of which play into antisemitic tropes. But, I have to say, it is also a fair description of the Sacklers). From the first episode, I was hooked, and quickly, the show instilled in me a fear of the dangers of drugs stronger than any campaign in my youth. (“This is your brain,” a man said, holding up a raw egg in a famous televised public service announcement in 1980s America. “This is drugs,” he explained, gesturing to a frying pan. He cracked the eggs into the pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” he concluded, holding up the pan so we could watch and listen to the sizzling of a sunny-side-up egg.) Two episodes into Dopesick, when my alarm dinged, telling me it was time to take my co-codamol, I refused to do so.
Funny creatures that we are, we forget bodily pain quite easily. (I used to beg my mother to tell me about her experience giving birth to my sister and me, but she shrugged haplessly, only remembering that my father had told her a joke one of the times and, laughing, she went into labour). The one-year anniversary of my surgery is coming up, and I’ve managed to erase from my memory how miserable I was all that time, lying on the sofa, fluid filling the drains coming out of my chest, Dopesick on the screen. For the most part, I’ve forgotten Dopesick itself, remembering only feeling pity for the character of Samuel Finnix (Michael Keaton), a kindly country doctor who descends into the dark world of a junkie.
Maybe this is the great advantage of living in Britain and not America. Seattle, I’ve heard, is a disaster. And Portland. And San Francisco. But I haven’t see the opioid crisis first-hand.
Or, I hadn’t seen it, not before last week.
This summer, like most summers, I’m in Canada, shuttling between my family in Toronto and my husband’s in Quebec, covering distances that, for the average Briton, would seem enormous. For variety, last week, we decided to take our midday rest in Ottawa, the nation’s capital. I must confess I have a minor city crush on Ottawa. Despite being a mere four hours from Toronto, it’s a city I didn’t visit until I was well into adulthood and fell for it when I did. The parliament buildings, with their copper roofs; the Rideau Canal flowing through town; the ByWard Market, with its colourful fare; the Fairmount Château Laurier, built like a fairytale castle; the 30-plus foot high Louise Bourgeois Spider (“Maman,” she’s called) whose legs you walk through to get to the National Gallery. It is all a joy, particularly in the heat of summer (less so in winter, I imagine, for Ottawa is the world’s coldest capital city).
We visited the leafy parts of town, meeting up with colleague-friends and talking about the things we talk about (research, gossip, and antisemitism, naturally), ate lunch, wandered the streets, and took silly pictures behind the looming Ottawa sign. Then back into the car we went to set off on the second leg of the trip. As we pulled out of our parking spot, we saw them: men and women lying in a stupor.
Two, then four, ten, maybe 15, no, 20. Lying on the ground, or bent over themselves, falling against walls, spinning in circles. The opioid crisis, in the flesh. I hadn’t even realised that Canada had been affected. It was a US phenomenon in my mind.
Then again, any country that prescribes fentanyl, OxyContin, even codeine (like the co-codamols I was loathe to take) can surely find itself in the same predicament.
As I moaned in pain in the weeks after my surgery, my husband scolded me about not taking my pills. He had a point. I didn’t have a chronic condition and was unlikely to become addicted. But seeing the opioid crisis up close, I don’t regret my decision – and I’m not sure I wouldn’t make the same one again.
