This week, strange associations made me thought of Suede.
They started on Tuesday.
On a topic of Neuropharmacology and Addiction I will finish to teach in a couple of weeks, I asked my pupils to read a scientific paper and to elaborate some answers.
One of the main findings of the paper was that a low dose of morphine increases the preference for this drug in food restricted rodents. Thus my pupils also had to write a few paragraphs of morphine pharmacodynamics.
As expected, a student wrote that opiates stimulate mu, delta and kappa receptors and modify the permeability to specific ionic channels on the cell membrane, but she also wrote that they “induce indifference to pain”.
As I found this statement pretty simple and pretty convincing, her description remained in my head as I continued reviewing some other works.
Suddenly, I was listening “Trash” and thinking about the increasing rate of worldwide opiate addiction and concluding that the world is so painful that we need to take pills to deal with pain.
This idea guided me to another idea.
Almost four years ago, I heard Suede for the very first time.
A cousin of my wife gave us tickets for Corona Capital, in Mexico City. On that particular edition of the festival, Suede was one of the special guests.
The festival occurred in the cold Sunday night of November 20th.
On May 4th, after a long period of hopelessness, medical ineffective treatments, unappetizing diets and zero alcohol and nicotine to deal with gastroesophageal reflux, I'd had a surgery.
I still had to take tons of pills and I had to eat tasteless food and I had to drink plain water all day long, to avoid suffocating with my own gastric acids and to mitigate nauseas, and so I still felt weak and miserable at the festival.
We arrived to the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez around five or six in the afternoon and we listened to Peter, Bjorn & John and to Eagles of Death Metal –I guess it was their first show after the tragic show at Bataclan– and then we moved to the stage in which Suede would play.
As we walked, we passed by another stage on which a band produced by John Frusciante was playing. The music was so loud and the audience was so frenetic, but the lights and the sounds made me experienced an awful reminiscence of my illness.
On those previous miserable weeks following surgery, one day I accidentally mixed Gabapentin to deal with the mononeurophaties provoked by the excessive amount of drugs I had taken for months and Tramadol to deal with the pain provoked by the surgery. It was a dangerous combination. I felt so dizzy and nauseating and paranoid that I believed I was about to stop breathing. I just turned off my body.
Finally, as we left behind these lights and sounds, my wife and myself stepped close to the Suede's stage and we found a nice place pretty close to it. As the wind fiercely blew and I felt that I was about to threw up, the band came onto the stage and I tried to enjoy their music.
As the show progressed and the frontman and the audience connected as if they were longtime lovers who were able to see each other for the first time after centuries of censorship, prohibition and loneliness, and I felt weak and nauseating and I remembered that awful experience with Gabapentin and Tramadol, I felt l was a heroin addict dealing with cold turkey.
As I was paying attention to the lyrics of “Trash”, I also remembered how meaningless I felt in my job. Then I was on my second year of posdoc. Apparently, in general, the students of my colleagues and the colleagues of other departments and their students saw me at me as undergrad. It was annoying.
I wanted to make a difference, but I was so weak and worried about my condition. Sometimes I even felt that I was invisible and pathetic. Sometimes I felt so sick that I abruptly had to leave my job without telling anyone how sick I was.
Before the surgery, I was so ill and weak that I wasn't even able to perform a stereotaxic surgery from the beginning to the end, or to read a single paper for five consecutive minutes. Nobody knew and cared about my condition.
I've been listening to Suede the entire week and thinking about how miserable I was.
I guess all these thoughts their music reminds me of, made me not to listen to their music very often.
Nevertheless, though I have a lot more responsibilities and I feel a lot more involved in my job, sometimes I still feel I am trash.
