Despite the dolorous tones of my previous post I’m now fine. I’m not sure where root canals got their painful reputation — what actually hurts is the #%$!@* abscessed tooth that have to be treated with a root canal.

In fact, just an hour after I better than I have for more than a week.

A few hours after that the last $%)$@*! Vicodin wore off and now I really feel great.

But that’s not what you come to this site expecting, nor is it what I came here to talk about.

Instead, you want to know something else opiates like Vicodin cure? Libidos. Or at least it always cures me of anything like one. Admittedly I’m often in, um, pain when taking prescription painkillers, but on other occasions when I’ve been in comparable pain but using non-opiate analgesics like Toradol a.k.a. ketorolac I was otherwise, well, unimpaired.

Now that I’m back to just a couple of ibuprofen (plus completing a course of antibiotics) I’m… interested again.

And actually, technically, that’s not even what I came here to talk about.

Because before things got to the 3:00AM “hmm, Vicodin or the pliers in the kitchen drawer? Decisions, decisions?” point I’d noticed that in kind of a dog-leg jog away from BDSM, whenever I was erotically distracted my awareness of pain was equally distracted.

I’m not exactly sure how one would write a human-subjects grant application for something like this, let alone get a review board to certify it, but I’m very curious now whether there’s been any research done into erotic and/or sexual stimulation as palliative care.

And, incidentally, no I’m not imagining variations on porn cliché #31, involving the sexy dental-hygienist costume.

Quick aside: despite quite a bit of Googling it turns out that while most “sexy XYZ” costumes are for women there aren’t any readily-findable “sexy dentist” costumes for women. And of course nurses. Sexy tooth-fairy costumes, yes. And at least two dentist costumes meant for men. There are, in the imaginations of “sexy” costume designers… or just as likely their customers… no women dentists and thus no call for special costumes for them. There are “sexy” women doctor’s costumes, which I guess is a nod in the “right” direction considering more than half of all med-school students are now women. But dentists are right out. Not that everyone’s fantasy “sexy” dentist or hygienist would be only female or only male. I just think the omission is odd. Oh, and to conclude this digression, one of the “sexy” male dentist costumes has a giant blue plastic tie that has “open wide” printed on it. So, um, yeah.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so no, I’m actually not thinking about the caregiver-straddling-the-patient schtick for distraction. (In the exceedingly unlikely chance one of my own caregivers is reading this I’m not thinking about you. In this context anyway.) Not least because over time that could get a annoying for the caregiver. In fact I’m not sure how one would go about it. (Audio or visual stimulation through headsets? Participation from a partner? Discreetly placed TENS units? I dunno.

I’m guessing if I participated in such research I’d end up, as usual, in the control group.

By the way, even the forgoing discussion — stimulating though it might be — is not what I came here to talk about. I mostly wanted to mention that now that I’ve recovered from my little experiment in dental agony I’m going to take up to a couple of days to unwind, and maybe convert this site to a whole new blogging platform (as the delightfully not-work-safe AlwaysArousedGirl has been urging me to do for several years now.)