You mean people do this for pleasure??

I absolutely DETEST taking pethidine.

It makes me feel what Dave and I have come to describe as "jangly."

I can't bear anyone touching me or even talking to me.

Every small tap or slurp is magnified a thousand times, so I jump out of my skin at nothing and feel like I want to strangle anyone who dares even to breathe in my presence.

It makes my muscles twitch, so that, out of the blue a cup of tea I'm holding might shoot across the room. I don't even carry my baby down the stairs as I'm frightened I'll drop him.

It makes me sweat. I wake up in the night literally drenched, lying in a wet bed that I have to either change or give up on, choosing instead to plod downstairs to the sofa.

It makes me itch. I watch this twitchy, itchy wreck, constantly scratching at herself like an addict and slurring through mangled sentences. I simply stay in my bedroom now, so that I don't have to share that pathetic version of me with those that love me the most. Sometimes it means I spend days on end upstairs vomiting and hiding away.

It keeps me awake, so it's fairly common to see me padding about at 3am. Often I don't actually manage to get to sleep until dawn.

It mashes my brain and makes me forget what I'm writing or whatever I was in the middle of saying. I hate that, it embarrasses me.

I have to take it by injection, giving me sore legs, ugly bruises and the constant risk of abscesses.

When I've taken it, an hour or so later I almost always desperately plead at my husband "What about this did I think was better than being in pain?"

But tomorrow or the next day, the pain will rage and all over again it will seem inconceivable that I just tolerate it. It is not a tolerable pain.