Tag Archives for Pain Medication

Now My Knees!

I woke up around 4:00 AM this morning because of excruciating pain in both my knees. The pain was sharp and burning. I tried bending then straightening my legs to see if the pain was brought on by the position in which I’d fallen asleep, but that wasn’t it. My knees were full with pain. I had to go to the bathroom and the walk there was unbearable. As I bent to sit on the toilet, I had to fight the urge to cry out because the pain intensified as I lowered myself to sit. While sitting on the toilet I grabbed both knees and tried to rub the pain out of them. The rubbing didn’t help.

After sitting on the toilet longer than I needed to, I gently raised myself up and pulled my pajama bottoms on. I stood looking at myself in the mirror for a moment unbelieving of the pain I was feeling. I’ve had sore knees before, but this wasn’t that. There was fire in this pain that separated it from the pain I typically feel in my legs. It almost felt like it was announcing itself. Telling me it had arrived.

I gingerly walked my way back to bed, which is currently the couch in my living room – I do that from time to time: turn my couch into my bed. I hadn’t taken a breakthrough dose of my pain medication before falling asleep, so I decided to take a half dose because I was only two hours away from starting my pain medication cycle for today. I also took a dose of my anti-anxiety medication to calm myself because in my early morning haze I couldn’t understand this pain and the intensity made my whole body tense; I couldn’t grasp what was happening to my knees.

I tried everything I could think of to make myself comfortable. I settled on elevating my legs with pillows and rubbing my slightly bent knees. I also begged for sleep, which finally came; and must have been very deep because I didn’t hear the alarm for my morning dose of medications at 6:00 AM. In a small way, I’m grateful for that because it meant I probably slept through the worst of the knee pain.

Now the pain is not as bad as it was at 4:00 AM, but my knees are still sore. I don’t understand what’s happening to my body. No matter the medical explanations or speculations, I can’t understand why I suffer with leg, back, hip, and now knee pain because of something that started in my lower abdomen. I can’t understand why, now that the mass is out of my pelvis, I’m having as much, and – as this morning demonstrates – sometimes more pain than I did before surgery. My brain has absorbed all the information thrown at me by my doctors, but emotionally, intuitively, not an ounce of this is making sense.

What the hell is going on inside my body!

 

Counting Crows – Sullivan Street

Constant Exhaustion and Missing Meds

Lately, I’ve been constantly exhausted. A part of it is my messed up sleep schedule. The other part of it is my pain medication level. However, this constant exhaustion is causing a problem: I’m missing some of my pain medication alarms or falling back asleep before I take a dose of my medications – as I did this afternoon.

Missing some of my scheduled medication times is causing my pain levels to fluctuate, and my goal to taper my pain medications to a lower dose is not going very smoothly. I know that I only had surgery a month ago and my body is still healing, but this constant exhaustion is making it hard for me to develop a normal routine and it’s frustrating me.

I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions about how I can cope with this.

 

In The Not So Still Night

In the early hours of this morning – when I woke up for maybe the third time in what should have been a full night’s sleep – the strangest questions crept into my half-drowsy mind: What if the high dose of pain medication I’ve been taking since my surgery is the dose I should have taken all along? What if I’ve been looking at this all wrong? What if I kept landing in the emergency room as often as I did before was because I wasn’t prescribed the correct level of pain medication? After all, the doctors at the pain clinic had expressed a fear of not being able to manage my post-surgery pain if they prescribed a higher dose of pain medications before my surgery.

That had been the point of the nerve block – to give me more pain relief without prescribing more oral opioid pain medications. But what if my nervous system is so damaged by whatever underlying illness caused the pain to begin with that I needed more pain medication or possibly a different kind to manage my pain? Instead of feeling this high level of anxiety about taking more pain medication, shouldn’t I think about how many times in the past two years I landed in the emergency room for extra pain relief or the countless sleepless nights I had because of the pain? Shouldn’t I feel more positive that the pain specialists recognize the need for better treatment for me?

I just stopped writing and thought about those things for a moment. I haven’t landed in the emergency room since surgery, but I’m still having the sleepless nights because of pain even with the higher dose of pain medications. I still can’t travel in a vehicle without feeling pain afterward that forces me to rest to recover from what shouldn’t be an ordeal; and walking any significant distance is out of the question. Unfortunately, stopping to think raised more questions. The main ones being, what if pain medication isn’t the answer for me or what if I need an alternative method of pain management that hasn’t been tried yet? And worst of all what if I am as unusual a case as they think that doesn’t come with a straightforward cure.

So why am I awake in the wee hours of the morning ruminating over these torturous questions? Do I or don’t I need more pain medication? Should I have had this higher dose sooner? How long should I take it at this high dose? Should I focus on lowering the dose – if the higher is what I need – so significantly so soon after surgery, and if not, how much harm will extended use cause me?

How many more days and nights will I wake to find these types of questions pouring out of me in small trickles or gushing as if busting through a dam? Maybe what’s doing more harm is my inability to just allow myself to be sick and count on my body to do what it needs to do to heal itself, instead of forcing my mind to hold all my pain.

Kim Carnes – Crazy In the Night