a little bit of background before this goes anywhere....
for several years now i have been battling my psychiatric and physical demons namely bipolar disorder and what some say is fibromyalgia and what others havent bothered trying to diagnose that bsically consists of a combination of debilitating fatigue and lack of motivation, chronic sometimes very severe pain, and a lack of ability to process thought and emotion like i could before this started affecting me. the ADD and bipolar go back to about age 12, the whateverthefuck they want to call it goes back to somewhere around mid to late 05 or possibly sometime in 06 it was a gradual onset at first so i dont really have a set point i can identify as to when it started.
it initially started out as just severe lower back pain.. but as the days and months went on the pain kept getting more intense more frequent more severe and more wide spread. the pain would move.. one day this hurt, the next that hurt, and another it was all of the above and then some...
i spent the better part of a year on the duragesic patch (fentanyl) for the pain with norco's by the boatload for breakthrough.. great you think.. but there is a catch that i have had to live with as far back as i can remember, i have the opiate tolerance of an elephant and have to take 3-4x whats prescribed to really get relief from almost everything i have ever tried that was an opiate. So given that the break through meds were efficient, but only if i took half of my whole days supply at one time, so great i get to take a med scripted for every 4 hrs every 12.. and thats what i did.. i chose a lot of relief for a little bit of time so i could have bits of quality here and there as i needed/wanted them for some reason instead of lessening the pain to a loud hum from an average scream.. that worked for a while but tolerances build, brain chemistry changes and things start affecting you differently.
there came a point where the duragesic would cause me narcoleptic episodes even when (Actually especially when) i would first wake up.. these got to a point that i could pass out in mid conversation with something in my hand and be sound asleep 30-45 min before i woke up like nothing had happened so we stopped that med and my dr referred me to a pain clinic...
i wont bore you with all the details of all the things we have tried and all the things that have failed miserably to give me some quality of life... but lets just say that i started going to the pain clinic well over a year ago.. maybe almost 18months ago, and we just now have figured something out that *MIGHT* actually prove to work out based on what we have seen so far... if that option doesnt work, then we are going to be left in a situation where i might be able to go off and on this that or the other thing till they stop helping at all but if the current idea we have fails me i doubt that, until there are new classes of pain drugs developed, that i will ever have more than minimal relief from the pain that i still have right now as i write this. However my current change of situation has drastically reduced the pain and made it closer to bearable than ever before and the fact that someone found something that could do that gives me hope we can fix it all still.
over the years of all this experimentation and trial and error, all of the pain and brain function issues gradually but steadily kept worsening, to a point that over the last 6mo especially but even as far back as 1.5 years ago my condition was to a point that my quality of life was gone, i couldnt go out because i barely had the energy and motivation to get to my car and drive all the way to the club.. much less find downtown parking, walk to the club, stand around several hours or more, walk back to the car and go home.. there was no way in hell, and the handfull of times i did try i might make it to the club last an hour, maybe 2 if i waaaay overdid it on my pain meds so that i was buzzed enough to not care how bad i was hurting and how tired i felt. Of course i cant do that without having to cut back on another day to make up for taking too many cause i so desperately missed going out. fuck, not only could i not go to the club for any worthwhile amount of time seeing as i have always lived in far north or nw austin or in cedar park, i had to plan my activities carefully so that i could manage to do our grocery shopping and just keep us and our cats fed and make sure we had the things we needed to get by. It finally reached a point where i wasnt doing it for myself anymore, i was doing it for jenn because i know that she couldnt either cause of her concussion and post concussive syndrome. i finally over recent history reached a point where i was sleeping 16+ hrs a day most days, if i got out of bed at all. eating morphine and whatever breakthrough i was on like candy, and fighting not to make it day by day but more fighting to make it just a few more hours. If it werent for jenn and more recently one other person that knows who they are, i would have just started downing pill bottles and called it a day, i was done, i didnt want to live the way i was, i didnt want to be so fucking miserable and fatigued that i couldnt even drag myself to the shower more than once a week... i didnt want to live with no hope that anything would ever come along to make me better because we had been trying for what felt like an eternity and nothing was working and we were running out of ideas. running out of drugs to try, running out of steps to take and i was miserable and hopeless, but i refused to put jenn through my suicide so i kept going little bits at a time here and there however the fuck i could without turning to something like a coke habit (which would have just accelerated my decline anyways)
i was at a point where i was so fatigued and tired and depressed and hopeless that i stopped even trying to process my thoughts and feelings and emotions, i had convinced myself not to have hopes and dreams anymore.I truly believed that for what ever reason i was being taught a cruel lesson on how bad life can get for some reason.
and up until tues afternoon thats where i was, fighting to convince myself that even with our problems jenn still meant enough to me to suffer through and keep trying as best i could.
tuesday though, it all began to change and i would have never imagined how suddenly... I'll start a new post now so i can reference where the good part of this story starts without having to dredge all this up again once i get past it. and no i dont wanna hear tl;dr or outline please. this journal is for my needs not yours and my letting you be a part of it means that in some way you have earned my trust and/or respect please dont make me doubt my judgement on the first post :)
it initially started out as just severe lower back pain.. but as the days and months went on the pain kept getting more intense more frequent more severe and more wide spread. the pain would move.. one day this hurt, the next that hurt, and another it was all of the above and then some...
i spent the better part of a year on the duragesic patch (fentanyl) for the pain with norco's by the boatload for breakthrough.. great you think.. but there is a catch that i have had to live with as far back as i can remember, i have the opiate tolerance of an elephant and have to take 3-4x whats prescribed to really get relief from almost everything i have ever tried that was an opiate. So given that the break through meds were efficient, but only if i took half of my whole days supply at one time, so great i get to take a med scripted for every 4 hrs every 12.. and thats what i did.. i chose a lot of relief for a little bit of time so i could have bits of quality here and there as i needed/wanted them for some reason instead of lessening the pain to a loud hum from an average scream.. that worked for a while but tolerances build, brain chemistry changes and things start affecting you differently.
there came a point where the duragesic would cause me narcoleptic episodes even when (Actually especially when) i would first wake up.. these got to a point that i could pass out in mid conversation with something in my hand and be sound asleep 30-45 min before i woke up like nothing had happened so we stopped that med and my dr referred me to a pain clinic...
i wont bore you with all the details of all the things we have tried and all the things that have failed miserably to give me some quality of life... but lets just say that i started going to the pain clinic well over a year ago.. maybe almost 18months ago, and we just now have figured something out that *MIGHT* actually prove to work out based on what we have seen so far... if that option doesnt work, then we are going to be left in a situation where i might be able to go off and on this that or the other thing till they stop helping at all but if the current idea we have fails me i doubt that, until there are new classes of pain drugs developed, that i will ever have more than minimal relief from the pain that i still have right now as i write this. However my current change of situation has drastically reduced the pain and made it closer to bearable than ever before and the fact that someone found something that could do that gives me hope we can fix it all still.
over the years of all this experimentation and trial and error, all of the pain and brain function issues gradually but steadily kept worsening, to a point that over the last 6mo especially but even as far back as 1.5 years ago my condition was to a point that my quality of life was gone, i couldnt go out because i barely had the energy and motivation to get to my car and drive all the way to the club.. much less find downtown parking, walk to the club, stand around several hours or more, walk back to the car and go home.. there was no way in hell, and the handfull of times i did try i might make it to the club last an hour, maybe 2 if i waaaay overdid it on my pain meds so that i was buzzed enough to not care how bad i was hurting and how tired i felt. Of course i cant do that without having to cut back on another day to make up for taking too many cause i so desperately missed going out. fuck, not only could i not go to the club for any worthwhile amount of time seeing as i have always lived in far north or nw austin or in cedar park, i had to plan my activities carefully so that i could manage to do our grocery shopping and just keep us and our cats fed and make sure we had the things we needed to get by. It finally reached a point where i wasnt doing it for myself anymore, i was doing it for jenn because i know that she couldnt either cause of her concussion and post concussive syndrome. i finally over recent history reached a point where i was sleeping 16+ hrs a day most days, if i got out of bed at all. eating morphine and whatever breakthrough i was on like candy, and fighting not to make it day by day but more fighting to make it just a few more hours. If it werent for jenn and more recently one other person that knows who they are, i would have just started downing pill bottles and called it a day, i was done, i didnt want to live the way i was, i didnt want to be so fucking miserable and fatigued that i couldnt even drag myself to the shower more than once a week... i didnt want to live with no hope that anything would ever come along to make me better because we had been trying for what felt like an eternity and nothing was working and we were running out of ideas. running out of drugs to try, running out of steps to take and i was miserable and hopeless, but i refused to put jenn through my suicide so i kept going little bits at a time here and there however the fuck i could without turning to something like a coke habit (which would have just accelerated my decline anyways)
i was at a point where i was so fatigued and tired and depressed and hopeless that i stopped even trying to process my thoughts and feelings and emotions, i had convinced myself not to have hopes and dreams anymore.I truly believed that for what ever reason i was being taught a cruel lesson on how bad life can get for some reason.
and up until tues afternoon thats where i was, fighting to convince myself that even with our problems jenn still meant enough to me to suffer through and keep trying as best i could.
tuesday though, it all began to change and i would have never imagined how suddenly... I'll start a new post now so i can reference where the good part of this story starts without having to dredge all this up again once i get past it. and no i dont wanna hear tl;dr or outline please. this journal is for my needs not yours and my letting you be a part of it means that in some way you have earned my trust and/or respect please dont make me doubt my judgement on the first post :)