Sunday, June 17, 2007

And, oxycodone isn’t working

For the last six months, my life has just been a pain pill rollercoaster!  I can’t seem to find a pain medication which works, and if I do, it either buries me in side-effects or costs a small fortune.  I could have a nice new car for what I spend on pain meds every month.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go back to just oxycodone, because an entire month’s worth of medication (being really medicated, too), cost just $85.  It seemed like a sensible idea, but I quickly realized it wasn’t going to work when I started to wake up in excrutiating pain.  Oxycodone only lasts about four hours, so unless I woke up in the middle of the night to take a pill, I’d end up with no pain meds in me after eight hours of sleep.  I tried it for a week—I’d wake up, hobble to the medicine chest and to a granola bar, and wait 90 minutes to feel normal again - but there was a residual effect which lingered throughout the day.  I had a hard time staying ahead of the pain when I had to medicate every four hours, and I had a hard time determining how much to take to ward off pain but to avoid nausea.  After about ten days, I called Uncle, and went back to my leftover oxycontin.  What a relief it was to have a steady release of medication over the course of eight to twelve hours!  It made me appreciate oxycontin again, and I seem to have found a good schedule for it.  I take one 10 mg oxycontin every eight hours, and I take one 5mg oxycodone at the same time.  If I start to feel like I’m faltering at the four hour mark, I can “top up” with another 5mg of oxycodone, but I seem to only need to do that about once a day.  I’ve actually felt not to badly for the past week, although I’ve been rather fatigued.  Still, I’d rather be tired and pain-free than tired and painful.  This new discovery of mine means I have to go back on oxycontin, and I guess it will be about $200 per month.  I just don’t know what else to do.

My partner, Flippy tried a bold new experiment for her pain medication this month—she’s on methadone.  Her oxycontin dose was getting pretty high and she was having a lot of break-through pain.  To top it off, she’s already used up her pharmacy benefit for her health insurance this year, so all her meds are out of pocket, too.  From her research, she knew that methadone was an effective and low-cost medication to help with her FMS and low-back pain, so the doctor wrote her a prescription.  The cost for one month of methadone, paying cash, was just $13.  Stunning.  Even more stunning is the fact that it seems to be working.  For the first two weeks she had some break-through pain, and took oxycodone for that, but since then the pain has evened out and she’s mostly pain-free.  The worst part of the methadone for her was initially nausea, but it’s starting to ease off after a couple of weeks (and Vistaril helps with it as well).  An unexpected side-effect popped up after the nausea—Flippy’s overactive bladder medication stopped working, which made it very uncomfortable for her to work for long hours or drive in the car.  At first she was in a bit of a panic, assuming she’d have to quit the methadone, but she’s increased the dosage of her bladder meds and so far, it seems to have resolved the problem.  If it’s not one thing, it’s another… now the bladder meds will cost twice as much every month, even though we’re saving on pain medication expenses :p

I’d love to live a life without pain medication.  I’d also like to be able to afford to try a higher dose of the Duragesic patch, or to try the new pain medication like Opana, but without health insurance (or more cash), I’m stuck with what I’ve got.  I realize that I’m lucky to be able to afford what I’ve got, and to have a doctor who will prescribe it for me, but it’s not the way I want to live.  I hate that the cost of being sort of/occasionally pain-free is constipation, reflux, urinary retention, and poverty.  Those all contribute to stress, which make my FMS worse, which causes me to need more pain medication.  Stop the ride, I want off!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/17 at 04:18 AM
FMS medications • (7) Comments • Permalink
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