Life Comes at You Like a Wave

I am trying hard not to let what happened in Boston sink me deeper, sink me to the point where I give up on the goodness of the world. On the inherent goodness of people. This latest attack on people (I won’t call them innocents—aren’t all of us innocent to some degree?) makes me want to flee. But to where? Is there a safer place to live? A saner place?

I know that the horror I felt on Monday night, watching the news unfold, will fade. The images will blur around the edges, the facts become murky, the way a pond darkens as autumn leaves fall on its surface, then sink, rotting, to the bottom.

After all, what can I recall of Newtown?

I have hardened. I don’t like this quality, but I think it is part of human hardwiring, part of the armor which lets us survive. It is how we humans are evolving. In 100 years, or sooner, we will be a species with dexterous thumbs and a missing empathy gene.

After living half a decade I can discern good from evil, hopeful from hopefulness. But my children cannot, or at least not so well, and I can only imagine how the continued onslaught of horrible and ugly and villainous and tragic affects them. It makes me wonder if the decrease in our mental health--and the increase of our drinking and drugging and gunning—is our Darwinian desire to not feel the pain. Peace...

1 of 19

From the New York Times: FDA Likely to Add Limits on Painkillers

I was 1 of 19 who voted to reschedule hydrocodone, a Schedule III prescription opioid used to treat and manage pain, to the more restrictive schedule II.


14 generic companies make 81 versions of this narcotic combination drug most know as Vicodin and as House's drug of choice. Hydrocodone is THE most commonly prescribed medication in the United States. It is supposed to be prescribed for moderate pain related to acute conditions.


I have opined about the need for prescription opioid control before. Indeed, this is a topic I have struggled with in my professional--and personal--life.

My decision came after considering close to three inches of documents, two days of scientific and public testimony, and my own experience the past twenty years studying both the under-treatment of chronic pain and the ravages of prescription drug abuse. Amidst much rhetoric and appeals to improving the education of prescribers, dispensers, and patients about this product, my decision ended up based squarely on the science.

For me, though, this was truly a Sophie's choice--there will be unintended, adverse consequences no matter how the Food and Drug Administration eventually decides. If rescheduled, restricted access for those with legitimate medical need may result in poorly managed pain; if kept in its current schedule, hydrocodone will continue to contribute to the burgeoning epidemic of opioid abuse.

This is not a new problem. Education has not worked, professional regulation has not worked, nor have the current incarnations of prescription drug monitoring programs, to curb the abuse, diversion, and deaths due to unlawful use of opioids. Upscheduling hydrocodone is no panacea, but at least it has the potential to blunt the rise of abuse and, most of all, made it tougher for our young people to access. Peace...

Pain and How to "Kill" It

One of our nation's dirty little secrets is that drugs are destroying a chunk of Appalachia. Not heroin, not coke or crank or inhalants, but prescription pain-killers. OxyContin has the baddest rap, but Vicodin and methadone are heavy-hitters. Ironically, methadone is used to treat heroin addiction, but when a rash of fatal Oxy overdoses flared five years ago, the law clamped down on OxyContin prescribing and methadone became the favored opioid.

You can reduce the supply of a substance, but if you don't dwindle demand, addicts will always find another close substitute. One reason for the rise in OxyContin abuse was the reduction in opium supply when we waged war on terrorism in poppyland - Afghanistan.

Prescription drug abuse is not just a problem in Appalachia - statistics released by the National Institute on Drug Abuse Monitoring the Future survey found 9.2% of 12th graders used prescription painkillers in the past year.

My suggestion? Let's get down to the REAL causes of prescription drug abuse - a societal inability to accept, confront, and work through our collective pain. And, damn, isn't treatment a dirty word? Right up there with prevention...


On the writing front... Karl Iagnemma, one of my favorite scientist/writers released his first, critically-acclaimed novel The Expeditions, published by the Dial Press. I just ordered it from Amazon.

And speaking of Amazon... yesterday also was the separating of the wheat from the chaff in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Guess I was the chaff, as my submission failed to make it to the semi-finalist round. Not that I thought it would - my manuscript is far better now then it was three months ago. It's been fun peeking in on the mayhem over there - check out the forums, then check out the submissions and review your favorites. I can't decide what's more entertaining - ABNA or American Idol.

My personal pain continued with a decidely dead laptop. The intensity of my discomfort increased when the mailbox yielded an agent rejection - my first. As such letters go, it was a 'great' rejection - three paragraphs, personalized, even a few notes about the writing and 'well-developed' voices. But a rejection nonetheless...

But as I skulked into the dark to self-medicate with a hefty dram of Glenlivet, at last... an acceptance. Three micro-flashes accepted into print. Yahoo!

Back to revising, back to writing, slow and steady - cuz you can't rush art.

Believe. Peace, Linda

Virtual Pain

And literal pain, too. The last twenty pages of BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT frizzled my neuronal circuitry to smoky cinders.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve revised and written 10,000 words every three weeks. No exceptions. I churned through this seventh revision in record pace. But for some reason, the last 5,000 words took me nearly two months to complete. I guess I needed to give the ending it’s due attention, because in some ways, the ending is more important than the beginning. After all, there are so many loose ends to resolve. And, as a critical reader, I am so often unsatisfied with most story endings. So I struggled - and endured much pain as I slashed and modified and rewrote to get it just right.

The struggle of slouching towards THE END vaporized early Sunday morning when I typed those two magic words out for the seventh time, saved the file, and zipped it over to my writing group for their reading and critiquing pleasure. I am two weeks behind my self-declared deadline of 9/15; Chrys and I are now targeting the first week of October to exchange manuscripts.

Speaking of pain, you, dear reader and writing procrastinator, haven’t yet met PHOEBE, the female protagonist of my story and BEN’S love interest. Phoebe is a medical student who escapes from her loneliness in her books and pottery. When Phoebe lost her mother to cancer a decade earlier, she fixated on a medical career like her internist father, but as a pain management specialist. Phoebe’s tenacious – a quality responsible for her academic and sculpture successes - but her stubbornness extends to her difficulty in clinging too tight to the past. She begins to break her own psychic pain by honoring her mother's memory through song at her Unitarian Universalist church:

Ben’s eyes open wide as I go front and center before the other dozen choir members on the two steps leading to the pulpit. The director catches our attention with her eye, then signals with her right hand to begin.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home,
A long, long way from home.

My voice quavers, then steadies and strengthens, resonating with my mourning. Ben watches me, his intent eyes glisten in the stippled light. I look away; I can’t break down, not now. The choir joins in on the second verse and the momentary urge to weep passes.

My life has accelerated towards this moment for months, maybe even years, but a surprising calm fills me. A hidden strength returns. I raise my voice in tribute to my mother. And for the first time in what seems an eternity, I don’t feel alone.

May your days be free of physical and psychic pain, virtual and real. Peace, Linda