Dream: Mom's Morphine Drip

[note: Mom’s in fine health, I don’t know where this came from. Dad’s been through morphine drips with his cancer treatment in the past couple of years, but has always had excellent care.]

Dream 20040416, 4:30 AM:

I’m at Mom and Dad’s house, the old one not the new one. There is a woman here who is some famous doctor, but I think the stuff she’s really famous for is in mathematics, not medicine. I read a biography of her in a magazine article, but it’s in a monitor screen – it seems more like reading a microfiche than looking at a website. The article starts off with saying how she’s at the peak of her life at 58 (the number seems to change a couple of times – it looked like something in the twenties at first, then it was something else, but resolved to 58 – I may have been trying to catch a writing shift, but didn’t notice it). The woman is sitting in the living room talking to several people; she’s making notes on the front of a newspaper. I remember that she writes HLA and a long number; it looks kind of like a license plate number, or a code. Mom comes in, saying something about a restaurant that the doctor lady is going to visit later, and the doctor seems annoyed at being interrupted. She says something curt like “Thanks for the restaurant review, now let’s get back to this…” and continues talking.

Then, the doctor asks Mom about her morphine drip. Mom has an IV stand, and says that it’s hardly dripping at all, you have to watch it for several seconds to catch it. As she says this, it drips several times; she is surprised. The doctor looks at it, and fiddles with it, and I can see a squirt of the morphine going into the clear part of the bag; she does thsi a couple of times. I’m concerned about an overdose. Then, Mom is lying in a hospital bed, and we’re talking about suing the doctor, who is still there, but not working on her. Dad says something about how she wasn’t in this weird kind of labor before the doctor messed with her morphine drip.

Then, I’m walking home from somewhere over near Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Walt’s house. I stop to look at the driveway of one house, and imagine it with a different arrangement of bricks and concrete blocks on either side of the drive. Then, a great black dog, like a Labrador, comes bounding out of the woods; I am concerned for a minute because it is very big, but it seems friendly when it comes up to me. I wake up.