No Good Meds II

I'm home after a two and a half month sentence at the Comprehensive Pain Program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore MD.  I call my visit to Hopkins a sentence because my pain (sounds like my soul?) so completely racked the body that the mind became unbalanced and I had no choice but to surrender myself for interment to save my family from the demon of me.  Souls and demons?  You betcha and an Irish Catholic priest patiently wait to hear ardent confessions of sin.  And God is good, I completed that hellish program, was released, and after hair-raising dash for a train arrived home to cheering.

The great minds at Hopkins hold an idea that traditional pain med's fail to adequately relieve pain over time.They say that opiods, the class of pharmaceuticals commonly refereed to as narcotics, are ineffective because these drugs are rapidly assimilated in humans; bodies become tolerant to their affect.  And while they continue to erase brain cells, these drugs become antagonistic to neuropathy. They become agents of pain after their effectiveness is done, so sufferers of chronic nerve pain experience a daily "withdrawal" from narcotics.  So we demand ever increasing doses.  The stigmatization of chronic pain patients is complete.  We are all hopeless drug fiends insisting to our doctors that we need more relief.  Doctors become afraid to prescribe doses that would kill an elephant.  So the pain sufferer is in a horrible predicament:  if I'm tolerant to high doses of narcotics and my current high dose causes incrementally higher pain I must ultimately be dosed to death.  A scorpion in the shoe. What a life.

What to do?  Am I condemned to a life of unrelenting nerve splitting pain?  My brain hurts.

Well, at Hopkins I was admitted to a hospital bed for three weeks.  On admittance my daily dose was 60 mg. of methadone, up to 1600 mcg. of Fentanyl and a boatload of Kepra.  With all this, I still felt debilitating pain.  I was primed for change by the disastrous catalyst of my home life; I was a somnolent wrecking ball, a catastrophe seeking victims.  And I found them in my family.  My wife and children were engulfed in my constant stuporous pain spikes.  Something had to be done, and pronto.

So there I was...(?).  More follows!!!!

My spleen is vented for now. I'll continue my saga in the next few days.  At this pace, I won't finish in a month.

Next:  The medieval adjust of med's, No Good Meds III.

 

Comments

[valri]

Welcome home my friend. I hope the program works and your quality of life improves. At the very least your wife can put away the cast iron skillet. :D

[Anne]

God bless you Colin, I'm so glad you're home. Take care of yourself as you get back to your life.

[Kathleen Clohessy]

I hope that no matter what you fared well at Hopkins. Their's is a popular philosophy in Australia and some parts of Europe but for my money it's BS. Some degree of tolerance always develops-true. However, I for example, have had chronic pain for 10 years and my dose of methadone has gone from 30mg/day to 120mg/day...A rate of increase that I can easily tolerate without my being "dosed to death"before I die of old age. ( I have not had a dose increase in over a year either ). The key is to use other non-narcotic agents to potentiate the effects of the opiates.

The whole issue of narcotics is such a load of nonsense. If we were not living in the good old Puritanical USA ( not that GB and Australia are any better) with all of our antiquated prejudices, I am firmly convinced that the uproar against narcotics for chronic pain would not exist. For all of the medical community's ranting about "tolerance" the fact is that used appropriately under reasonable amounts of medical supervision opiates are some of the safest medications around. Check out the side-effects and toxicities of methadone (at NORMAL doses-not 450mg/day), then take a look at the recent literature about NSAIDS. Which would you rather be taking?

Anyway-I just needed to vent, too. Good luck and whatever they did for you I hope it worked.

[BO]

Anne,
I was surfing for a bed for chronic pain suffers and your link came up. Your articles rang so true to me that I quickly saved it to favorites, before I lost the link. I want you to know that today I read my own story in your words and will follow up with everything else that I can find on this site. Thank you so much for writing for and to people like me when there are so many other things you could be spending your "good moments" on. BO

[clayton shiu]

Hi Buddy,
I just read your comments and I am glad I did. I am sorry we somehow fell out of touch and wish to reconnect with you and catch up. I am glad you are at a better place.

-Clay