Thanks, doctors, for insisting I get prescriptions for all the opioids I didn’t need, want, or ask you for. One of these days they’ll come in handy.

As opioid deaths continue rising steeply, you’d think some doctors 

would be loathe to prescribe the damn stuff. I’m not so sure.

The accident happened about a year and a half ago. 

I was out for a short bicycle ride along the East River in Manhattan, where I live. Suddenly, my skinny front tire got caught in a groove between two large squares of pavement. Fortunately, I wasn’t going very fast at the time. 

My front wheel froze. I ended up going head-over-handlebars and landing on my side. The fall knocked the wind out of me, but after a few minutes, I got back up on my bike and headed home. That night, when I tried to lie on my side, the area around my rib cage felt a bit tender. The pain was never excruciating, but it wasn’t going away, either. After a few days, it finally dawned on me that I might have cracked a rib. 

It took me a couple of days more after I contacted my primary care physician to get him to recommend an orthopedist, and then to get in to see the orthopedic doc. An X-ray confirmed that I had indeed fractured a rib. The doctor said there wasn’t much to be done about it. He gave me a kind of strap to wear around my chest for the next few weeks until the rib healed, and told his physician's assistant to write out a prescription for me.

“What’s the prescription for?” I asked the doc.

“Oxycodone,” the doctor replied.

“What for? I’m not in any real pain.”

“But you will be,” the doctor insisted.

Well, that scared the hell out of me. Naturally, I ran to the drug store and filled the prescription. I still have it, and all 25 of the 325-milligram Oxycodone pills that were prescribed for me. The promised pain simply never arrived. I think there might have been one night when I needed to take a Tylenol.

Later that year, I underwent hip replacement surgery. Now that was painful for a while. They had me drugged to the gills in the hospital. When it was time to go home, they sent me home with a prescription for — yup Oxycodone again. Only this time the prescription was for 5-milligram pills, 90 of them. I was instructed to take no more than than eight tablets a day. I remember taking five the first day, three for the next two days, and one the day after that. Then I stopped.

So my stash had grown to 25 big dose Oxycodone pills, and 78  smaller dose pills. Then, last week I had surgery to remove some overactive parathyroid glands. Afterward, some member of the surgeon's team — a nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant (I’m not sure which) —  came by my bedside and said she was sending me home with a prescription for Hydrocodone.

“Isn’t that habit-forming?” I asked.

“She smiled, a bit smugly, it seemed to me. “Not if you use it intelligently,” she told me.

Well, I am using it intelligently. I’ve intelligently added five more 325 milligram tablets to my stash of other unused opioids. So I now have 30 big dose Oxycodone pills and 78 smaller dose pills. There are several ways my little drug accumulation could come in handy.

First, the Republican Party is getting ready to slash Social Security and Medicare payments that senior citizens like me have paid for via payroll deduction all our adult lives. To quote Newsweek:

Florida Senator Marco Rubio admits that the Republican tax cut plan, which benefits corporations and the wealthy, will require cuts to Social Security and Medicare to pay for it.

Fortunately, if the government cuts my income, I have a way to supplement it, at least for a little while. According to the Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services of New York, Oxy is selling on the street for a buck a milligram. That makes my little stash of unwanted dope worth over $10,000. 

I could use that money to replace what Marco Rubio and other Republicans are planning to confiscate from my Social Security income and hand over to the rich to reward them for...being rich.

Or I could just save it for the day when I have some incurable disease that the same pig-headed doctors who today try to stuff me with Oxy will insist I get treatment for — with chemotherapy for example. It will make me sick as a dog, render me dependent on other people for basic everyday needs, reduce me to a prisoner in my own home, and in the end might extend my life by six suffering weeks.

When that time comes, it'll be down the hatch with all those little Oxys, followed with a chaser of a really nice cabernet sauvignon. And I’ll be sure to leave thank you notes to all the docs who insisted I have those pills. Copy to the news media.