It’s been a rough couple of months as my doctors lowered the dose of my pain meds. I’ve been done with the withdrawal process for a few weeks now, but as you may expect my baseline pain is higher now.
I’m trying to adjust to the higher pain levels, but it hasn’t been easy and I haven’t had much success so far. As a result I’m getting much less sleep and it is badly fractured, I have much less energy to do stuff, and I have to put a lot more energy into holding the line against my depression.
The silver lining is that I should be done with tinkering with my meds for the foreseeable future. (Potential exception: My Cluster headaches have been consistently more intense and frequent for a while now, so that may require some intervention if it does not let up.) We’ve been trying new meds, adjusting doses, and whatnot for the past year straight which has been brutal. (Pro: new anti-depressant is working out well; Con: less pain meds.)
My body is so glad that it is getting a chance to rest, and my mind is finally able to stop the constant intense monitoring that’s required with all of the adjustments. That’s particularly important as one of the main techniques I use to manage my pain is to ignore it, but the careful monitoring required me to pay consistent attention to it.
I would greatly appreciate any love, encouragement, gifts, pictures, stories, and empathy anyone has to spare.
2 responses to “Health Update”
When I was in high school, I had a major bike wipeout, and scraped a lot of the skin from my entire left side. I couldn’t sleep that night, and the hospital gave me codeine, which worked to let me sleep. The next morning, no codeine (just the one dose, I guess), I had to take a shower. Imagining the pain, I somehow thought “I’ll just turn the pain off!”. Oddly that worked. Its a very strange mental twist, and I haven’t been able to get it to work on headaches, so this might be pointless for you, but I thought I’d toss it out to see if maybe you were different. Maybe worth trying. Maybe you have already?
I think a key point is to turn the pain OFF, not just ignore or endure it.
Also, it occurs to me just now that (serious) meditation of the right sort could help?
Sorry if I didn’t give any actually new ideas.
I do lots of meditation already. It’s pretty helpful for me. I’ve tried to turn off the pain before. Not so helpful, but maybe I’ll give it another shot.