A victim of Vioxx...?

My Mother tells anyone who will listen that my Dad, her husband, was a victim of Vioxx. It's not true, but I am personally to blame for her believing this. What my Dad was a victim of was mostly his own fault. He smoked for 60 + years and couldn't put them down. Not after his first heart attack, not after his second open-heart surgery, not after they told him it would kill him. When he died, his heart probably looked like a black jelly bean. What they told him was that his heart would never be able to survive any surgery, ever again. And here's what happened...

Two years before he died he developed an aortic aneurism. They couldn't operate then because his heart would never be able to come back from it. So, because of the pain it caused him, he started taking vicodin. Eventually, his surgeon called him in and told him about a new procedure that he would be a candidate for and it was successful. But he was addicted to the vicodin by then. The entire time he took it he had trouble with his bowel movements. He couldn't go. At one point it got so bad he tried to dig out his own stool with his fingers. It was awful. I told him the vicodin was doing that to him and he said he knew it and that he knew he should get off of them but at that point he couldn't. He had a family doctor at the time that just kept writing those scripts. He lost a ton of weight and couldn't eat. Finally, I made him go to the hospital. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have. And if I knew then what I now know, I wouldn't have made him go. He would have died in his own bed within 24 to 48 hours. His bowel was impacted (I personally, am sure it was from the vicodin) and they told him then: Sugery, or wait it out (which meant certain death).  Long story, short...he opted for surgery, and lived about a week longer.

All of this was before Mom's diagnosis of Alzheimer's. A couple of months after he died, Mom was lamenting over what killed him and (stupid me) I told her I thought his Doctor over-prescribed the vocodin (and it was over prescribed, whether it killed him or not). I explained to her that it bound him up to the point that it caused the impaction. Well, she got things turned around and started seeing all of those commercialsabout getting on the lawsuit if you had a loved one who died from Vioxx...completely different drug! And that was all it took.

Every time she starts to talk about him now, it's always the same thing..."that damn vioxx killed him." She'll tell someone that he smoked non-filtered cigarettes for 40 years, before switching to filtered, but that ain't what killed him. It was that damn vioxx.

We had some friends over on Saturday afternoon and Mom was telling the story about how she and Dad met. Its a cool story and they enjoyed it. Then she said, "but he didn't live long after that...he was a victim of the Vioxx scandal." Now, there was a new one on me...now it was a scandal and he didn't seem to live much longer after they met. Later, when Mom wasn't around, my friend asked me, "So how old was your Dad when he died?"

I assured her that he did live longer than Mom made it sound.  They were married for just over 49 years. But I'm sure that to her, it wasn't long enough.