Four years ago, I would have left the hospital with a prescription for 120, enough for 20 days. That I was getting 42, to my mind an extraordinary number, was itself the result of stricter regulation. In 2016, New York State passed a law limiting a practitioner’s initial opioid prescription, for acute pain, to a seven-day supply.

I realized, of course, that many, many people legitimately struggle with debilitating pain, particularly after joint-replacement surgery, and should not be left to martyr themselves to suffering. And yet it still seemed hard to imagine that deep into a national opioid crisis that claimed more than 47,000 lives in a single year, it was possible to get this much of a dangerous controlled substance you felt fairly certain you could live without.

Just as surprising as the prescription itself was the fact that presumably anyone with knowledge of my date of birth could pick it up. I would be unable to walk to the pharmacy myself, obviously, but that wouldn’t be a problem because my husband or father-in-law, or second cousin, all of whom could have been godchildren of Pablo Escobar, would be able to get the oxycodone for me.

What if I had been an addict once myself? What if I had overcome a big problem with painkillers? That would not exclude me from the population of patients receiving them after surgery. It meant that I would be monitored more closely, given minimized doses and sent home with Naloxone in the event of an overdose.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, doctors wrote opioid prescriptions at a rate of 37.8 per 100 people in New York in 2017. That figure may seem astonishing until you discover how conservative it is compared with other states. The ratio in Maine exceeds 55; in Tennessee it is 94. Of the approximately 3,200 deaths involving opioid overdose in New York State that same year, more than a third were attributable to prescription painkillers. And far from being in decline, deaths in which prescription opioids were complicit increased by 17 percent between 2013 and 2017.

Most people who misuse prescription opioid pills get them from friends or family members, the data tell us, meaning that relatively few of the pills in orbit are coming from illicit manufacturers or stolen from pharmacies. The problem with having an untouched bottle of oxycodone in your house is that you are now a potential agent of illicit delivery. You are possibly the root, however inadvertently, of someone else’s addiction.

Amid all the logistics of recovering at home — physical therapy, the constant icing of your joints, standing up and walking around every 20 minutes, scheduling appointments with visiting nurses — you must accept the added burden of keeping vigilant watch of your oxycodone.