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Comfy in the chilly but warming sun of about-to-be winter, and handling with care. Seriously: in fact, Tramadol is classified as an opioid, a dangerous drug--and in Massachusetts, particularly, opioids are fearsome because people commit crimes to get them, same as with heroin. The same way Oxycontin is called "hillbilly heroin" because of its addictive properties and popularity among small-town American junkies without access to big cities, so Tramadol has a similar reputation. It needs to be carefully used, and my hat is off to the physician's assistant who trusted me enough to allow me to use it for a month on my own recognizance, as it were. She knows I'm in recovery. I had friends who are dead because of addictions they could not or would not try to arrest. I know I can't screw around with this stuff. On the other hand, my present (soon to be former) primary care doctor doesn't want to prescribe anything for pain. I got the "good dish" from a cab driver who transports me to medical appointments--namely that the doctor had a patient who took his pain meds, pulverized them, shot up with them, and died. The doctor got into legal issues, and treats me now like Hunter S. Thompson or William Burroughs. Both much more talented than I am, but that's not the point. But my pain management doctor was okay with it, at least on a trial basis. And of course I'm being extremely cooperative and careful. The pain, if it's not GONE, is seriously reduced to where it might as well not be there. Getting some ur-poem out of it is nice, too. The point was not poetry--it was managing pain that was so intense often I could barely walk. And I'm probably the only American poet who ever put Richard Topcliffe into a poem. Ken On 11/22/2014 6:07 PM, Patrick McManus wrote: > Cheers Ken enjoy that rest area and shade P