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Spent two days lying down. Vicodin isn't "not enough" any more; it's "not nearly enough."
The pain comes and goes in waves, and (with Vicodin) in between peaks, I can read. I read five books. Two Robin Cooks, two Tess Gerritsen, one "filovirus gets loose". Reading medical thrillers when in pain is... unique. Still, I enjoyed them, as every one was a book I had never read before. What a treat! I do so enjoy books. :-)
Today, called Helena Women's Health Center again. I have an appointment for, well, um, some time after my next period. *sigh*
Now I'm caught up on LJ. Cool. Caught up on spam deletion; only ran out of disk quota twice. Will have to disable that account before leaving for a week.
Joe, sorry I never responded to your mail about lunch. You can guess why I didn't go.
The pain comes and goes in waves, and (with Vicodin) in between peaks, I can read. I read five books. Two Robin Cooks, two Tess Gerritsen, one "filovirus gets loose". Reading medical thrillers when in pain is... unique. Still, I enjoyed them, as every one was a book I had never read before. What a treat! I do so enjoy books. :-)
Today, called Helena Women's Health Center again. I have an appointment for, well, um, some time after my next period. *sigh*
Now I'm caught up on LJ. Cool. Caught up on spam deletion; only ran out of disk quota twice. Will have to disable that account before leaving for a week.
Joe, sorry I never responded to your mail about lunch. You can guess why I didn't go.
no subject
It should be safe to take some more. Many, many studies have shown that people in severe pain do not get addicted to their pain medication. I've taken Percocet (which is somewhat stronger than Vicodin) for about 17 years. Now I'm doing much better and use it only occasionally (tramadol (http://www.ultram.com/) is enough for me most of the time), but for over 10 years, Percocet was my regular daily pain med. Never once have I had any indications of addiction, or even physical dependence (http://www.myalgia.com/addiction%20def.htm), and virtually no build-up of tolerance.
When I had my back-to-back surgeries a couple of months ago, I was taking a Percocet every two hours (i.e., 2 every four hours but staggered) for a few days; I took less as the pain eased, and then simply stopped and went back to tramadol. I had a herniated disk several years ago, and when the pain was at its worst I was taking -- hold on to your chair, now -- 5 every four hours! That's a huge dose, but dammit, I needed it! But I didn't just take it steadily -- I varied the dose according to the level of pain, and when I finally was able to persuade someone that it wasn't "just my arthritis" (long story) and got treatment, I had no problem at all stopping altogether.
In other words, as long as you take as little as you can, you can take as much as you need to.