The refusal of all narcotics despite unimaginable pain — the recovery crux

pivotal · hospital, c. 12-20 Nov YDAU

• When: from ER admission onward through the Trauma Wing days ("between let's say four and eight days ago" for the post-surgery near-swat)
• What: Offered IV-Demerol on ER admission and repeatedly by shift-doctors, Gately refuses all narcotics; he had made Pat Montesian swear to have "HISTORY OF NARCOTICS DEPENDENCY NO SCHEDULE C-IV" put on his chart, and nearly had to swat a Trauma M.D. to stop a Demerol drip right after surgery. He is kept on non-narcotic Toradol/ibuprofen against pain the Trauma Specialist warned would be "unlike anything Gately had ever imagined." Pat (and later the Disease, via the wraith-dream) press that codeine/Percoset "wouldn't be a relapse unless his heart of hearts thought it would be"; Gately keeps silently asking his heart whether just codeine would count, and gets no answer. In the serial's climactic bedside scene — a dream, revealed when Gately wakes with a start at p. 890 — sponsor Ferocious Francis pointedly refuses to make the decision for him: the refusal-to-rescue reads as Gately's internalized sponsorship speaking (see the Gehaney page's Dating notes). This sustained refusal — Abiding through the pain a second at a time, the Revere-cell "Present" doctrine (event 26) applied — is the doctrinal core of his arc.