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[marilyn.monroe]

ATLANTA (AP) – A Georgia woman fighting a flesh-eating disease is refusing to take pain medications during some procedures, partly because of her personal convictions, her father said.

Aimee Copeland, the 24-year-old Georgia graduate student fighting to survive a flesh-eating bacterial infection that she contracted after an accident.

Aimee Copeland despises the use of morphine in her treatment, despite its effectiveness at blocking her pain, her father said in a Friday online update on his daughter's condition. Her graduate-school study of holistic pain management techniques leads her to feel she's a "traitor to her convictions" when she uses drugs to manage her pain, Andy Copeland said.

He also said the morphine has been making his daughter groggy, confused and has given her unpleasant hallucinatory episodes.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-06-15/flesh-eating-disease/55624576/1

Mind over matter.

[Forsythia]

Ok that's just hot...

[marilyn.monroe]

Aimee Copeland Pleads for Painkillers, Feels Like 'Patchwork Quilt'

Copeland, 24, was hesitant to take morphine, telling her father she felt like "a traitor to her convictions." But her preferred method of pain management, meditation, proved no match for the sting of skin grafts and muscle flaps to close a gaping wound on her abdomen and groin.
 
"Aimee is now taking pain medication in as liberal a dose as can be prescribed," Copeland's father, Andy Copeland, wrote in a blog post. "If she even dared to refuse taking it, which she wouldn't, then the doctors would most certainly administer it in an IV drip."
 
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/aimee-copeland-pleads-painkillers-feels-patchwork-quilt/story?id=16594112

[Deanna]

This young woman has been through so much.  It is sad but yet a reminder to many of us (myself included) that the little crap that we whine about really is insignificant in the bigger picture.  Many blessings go out to her, her family and the friends that are strong enough to stand by her side.