The "little b" Kind of Better

It can be tough to keep track of time especially when I find myself losing sleep. One strange time distortion is that days seem to crawl by but every other day seems to be Sunday when I fill my medication containers for the week. Sometimes, it seems as if I go to the pain doc once a week and not once a month. My own personal study into the subject suggests that we humans require markers in order to measure time accurately. If each day is just like the one before it except for medication filling day, you're likely to feel as if every day is medication filling day.

For a long time, pain doc days had become mind numbing routine. I list the same symptoms with the same intensity because it averages out that way in truth. The thing about pain doc day is that I tend to want it to be routine because I am at the upper limits of opioid pain medicine and because I fear change. Therefore, I was just about flattened with panic when one of my pain docs hit me with a statement that seemed out of left field. I won't get to ask her about it because she's on vacation during my next appointment so I expected to feel somewhat queasy in anticipation of potential change.

Changes have been dreadful things during the last year or so. The start of my major health disruptions dates back to a trip to visit my New York family in May of 2013. Things got much worse with the plumbing issues that followed but today would mark the one year point in this pain spike. Things have only changed health wise by getting worse during this time. Therefore, my favorite pain doc made a comment about taking me off my most effective pain medication. It sounded like the worst idea in the world since it was supposed to be my breakthrough pain medicine and I had started taking it on a schedule at the pain doc's suggestion. I insisted that the pain meds are helping and they have been at least by some definitions of "help."

After I took a week recovering from the physical and mental stress of pain doc day, I thought about what she might have meant. When you're taking all your breakthrough pain meds on a regular schedule that doesn't even cover most of the breakthrough pain, something has to give. I decided to take a small risk and went "off schedule" for the breakthrough meds so that I could take them as needed again.

Miracle of miracles, it worked at least a little. Okay. It just plain worked. I have to remember that no one ever said that taking fewer pills would cure me of anything. The goal was to be able to take my pain medication when I was in pain so that I would feel little "b" better.