Drink - Victoria Moore chooses a G&T cure
There are few moments when a gin and tonic seems like a bad idea; far more when it seems like a particularly good one. G&T is my panacea. Just now, I do not expect to be offered one. I am lying tensely on a hospital bed in the ante-room to the operating theatre, inhaling the alien and unpleasant smell of the soulless room. ("I hate it, too. It comes from something they use when they cut people open with the lasers," explained the nurse, wrinkling her nose as she rattled me down the corridor towards my fate.)
How welcome then it is, as the anaesthetist struggles with my spindly blood vessels ("No, we can't get the needle in properly. We'll try the other hand. Can you flex it for me a bit?") to hear that the first thing he is going to give me will feel "just like having a few gin and tonics".
For reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol, I am about to have one of my kidneys taken out. There are two bits that I have been dreading: coming round from the anaesthetic (which turns out to be, in every detail, just as horrid as expected) and the moments immediately before losing consciousness.
It is a strange paradox that although, when drinking, I love the point in the glass at which there's a soothing shift as you hand some degree of control over to the alcohol, I know that I will cling desperately to every last strand and skein of consciousness as the anaesthetic tries to lull me into sleep. At least, I think I will.
Because of this, I have already asked the anaesthetist if he would mind not making me count backwards from ten. I do not want to feel myself slithering desperately in a hole between two numbers, trying to reach the solid curves of a five, having already abandoned the safety of six.
And now, just as I am steeling myself not to mind what is about to happen, he offers me a gin and tonic. Or, at least, some sort of equivalent. It enters my body through a hole in my hand. The effect is virtually instantaneous. I feel wonderful. I float. The room quivers and moves in slices about me, and yet I do not feel dizzy. All doubts and cowardly misgivings are washed clean away. I can almost feel the bubbles of three swiftly downed G&Ts prickling against my tongue. I turn my head and smile benignly at the attendant medical staff, telling them that I feel exactly as they said I would.
Bring on the knives, I don't mind any more. That's the last thing I remember.
It turns out, of course, that my hospital gin and tonics were nothing of the sort. The architect of my relaxation was in fact a man-made opioid called fentanyl, a painkiller that is said to be hundreds of times more potent than heroin. A call to the Royal College of Anaesthetists reveals that it is used before operations because, although while you are "asleep" you won't actually feel any pain, without fentanyl - or a substitute - your body will still respond to the painful stimulus of a surgeon's scalpel with high blood pressure and a fast pulse rate.
Unlike alcohol, which operates at an intercellular level, fentanyl works on the mu receptors in the brain and spinal column. "And you experience the mental effects that someone wishes to obtain if they're an addict," says the RCA.
Indeed, six years ago, an anaesthetist confessed through the pages of the British Medical Journal that he had become a secret fentanyl addict. Two years later, another admitted that "a few mls of fentanyl taken in a glass of orange juice would make a night on call as a junior anaesthetist a complete doddle. I started to do it on a regular basis."
In the United States (although, for some reason, not in the UK), there is a significant problem with fentanyl abuse at street level. Like heroin, it is most commonly injected, but it can also be smoked or snorted. The US National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that fentanyl can also "rapidly stop respiration . . . users have been found dead with the needle used to inject the drug still in their arm".
That was, in other words, some gin and tonic. And now I'm going back - with no regrets - to the Gordon's.
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