Sunday, November 07, 2010

late evening

Wow, Michelle Branch is Back

Geez, we saw her open for the Dixie Chicks when she was like 16, and she’s probably close to 30 now or something.  Oh my, I was just joking, but she really is 27 now.  Anyway, she’s finally released a new EP.  I can’t recommend it highly yet, as I’ve just started listening to it with my free 25 listens on Rhapsody, but so far, so good.  I’ve missed her, and I’m glad she’s back, even if she’s old now.  I guess she was probably off living some sort of life while I was waiting for her to come back.  Okay, not actively waiting, but passively.  Two songs in now, I approve.  Those of you with money, buy it and make Michelle feel loved.

I apologize for the “weaning week”, as I was very, very, very grumpy.  It was a pretty terrible week, even without my (LOL!) “addiction”.  I really did think that I’d lost all semblance of a sense of humor, except every so often, the lines from “Airplane” kept popping into my head.  You know, “I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue”, et al?  It always made me chuckle a bit to myself, so I knew that beneath the stress of the dogs getting out, having to empty our stuff out of storage, the unexpected rain (hello, what the heck does ZERO PERCENT chance of rain mean to you, Pahrump???) on our stuff in our side yard, getting my period unexpectedly (look, I’m NOT going to have kids, I’m 46 and know this, so please tell my body to quit bleeding randomly), on top of the weaning was just, well, to put it midly, kinda crappy.

Hey, I really like this Michelle Branch EP.  I would totally buy it if I had any money.  I’m sorry, Michelle, I’ll try to make up for my free listening by asking other people to buy it.  If you liked old Michelle, The Wreckers Michelle, you’ll like the new EP just as much, I would think.  Especially you hardcore Buffy fans.  I mean, what’s Willow/Tara without Michelle Branch?  It certainly doesn’t make you want to cry as much, does it?  No sirree, Bob.

This part of my blog entry is for those of you on pain meds.  Last night I had the weirdest dream - I dreamt about an Asian guy (why Asian?) wearing a bright pink t-shirt, and he was using a blender to mix up something he was calling “Master Bind”.  Kinda funny, no?  Seriously, is it common to dream about side effects when you’re weaning off meds?  I know people talk about brain zaps from weaning off anti-depressants, but I’ve never really been on anti-depressants, except to try them for pain relief.  Cymbalta helps lots of people with Fibromyalgia - it didn’t help me at all.  I took it for a month, then quit cold turkey.  When you’re able to quit lots of things cold turkey without weaning, you get kind of cocky.  “Hey, I’m superhuman, I can quit any med and not feel a thing.”  Well, silly me, I just kinda sorta expected a pain mgt doctor and his fee and the cost of the meds to appear out of thin air, so I didn’t plan my wean too well.  Since my dosage is none of your business (actually, I’ll tell anyone who asks and cares, but not those people who thought they saved my life by trying to get me stop taking my pain meds…I didn’t stop then, and I wouldn’t have stopped now, if I could’ve afforded the very pricey first doctor’s fee plus the meds), let’s just leave it at, I develop a tolerance for meds very easily, so my dosage was fairly high.  On the bright side, it also usually means that I don’t suffer from the same side effects that other people do, like being able to quit Cymbalta cold turkey without even noticing.  Now, what was I talking about again?  Oh yeah, not planning my wean.  I did great going from Oxycodone to Methadone, but Methadone’s half-life is a pretty crappy thing when you want to just be done with it.  I’d never had any problems going back and forth and adjusting my dose on the fly, but quitting altogether was another thing apparently.  Instead of doing it in itty bitty increments (like Leigh-Ann would have told me to do if I’d maybe consulted her - I admit it, she’s smarter than I am), I thought it would be as easy as dropping from, let’s just pick an outrageous number for the looky-loos (you know who you are…and so do I, with your repeated IPs) and say that my Oxycodone dose was 1000mg/day.  It wasn’t, but it’s a nice round number that means nothing to people who don’t take pain meds.  Anyway, let’s say it was 1000mg.  So, I effectively went from 1000mg of Oxycodone plus 60 mg of Methadone to just 60mg of Methadone, then after a week, I went to 30mg, then 10mg, then nothing.  That was dumb.  Don’t do that with Methadone, unless you have enough to spare in case you start feeling really lousy.  I thought it was super easy to drop my Oxycodone completely, and it was, it really was, and even though it wasn’t 1000mg, it also wasn’t like, uh, say 30mg.  I still had pain, so I was huffing Advil, but that’s besides the point.  Droppng the Oxycodone was nothing at all.  I didn’t even notice it.  No half-life, or very little if there is any.  I’d never previously had any reason to really comprehend half-lives, but now they’re very very clear to me.  Heh.  Anyway, the FM pain sucks, but hey, now I’m a cheap Oxycodone date.  Those of you “worried” about my “drug addiction”, no need to fear anything, my intention is to get back on my meds as soon as I can afford it.  Now that I’m past the worst of the side effects (blech, upset stomach), I can honestly and sincerely STILL say that I need pain meds.  It’ll be a little cheaper for a while, until my tolerance does what it does, I’m sure.

Second listen to the Michelle Branch EP.  I really like it.  See, isn’t it nice when everything comes back full circle?

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

evening

NaBloPoMo - It’s killing me this year

Between the dogs getting out, the weaning off my meds (uh, those of you with your stupid accusations and know-it-allness about meds - well, you’re wrong, I feel like total crap off my meds.  It’s not withdrawal, it’s just plain ol’ pain and it sucks), and it being a surprise appearance of “that time of the month”, it’s combined to kick my butt.  I can’t remember feeling so worn down, sore, and just useless in quite some time.  I know that it’s the combo of both physical and mental stress, but it just doesn’t help me feel any better.  Oh yeah, and for those of you who don’t want to read about my aches & pains, stop reading.  This is my blog and I’ll whine about whatever I want to whine about.  So there.

I hope that as the days goes on, I’ll start writing some more interesting and entertaining blog entries.  For right now, I’m just trying to function, which is really the best I can do right now.  I’m hoping that when/if we sell our dining room set/bed frame, that I’ll be able to afford to see a new doctor and get some meds.  Or, I hope we’ll be able to join a medical study in Vegas and that doctor will do us a favor and write our prescriptions.  The hard part is needing to rent a car to get into Vegas because the Aztek is falling apart bit by bit, and I’m afraid to drive it back and forth to Vegas through the hill climbing portion of the drive.  I really think it would be too hard on the car.

Okay, I promise to try to find something amusing or educational for future entries.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

early evening

Uggghhh

Feeling cruddy, so I will finish this entry later.  I picked a bad time to quit taking drugs.

Oh yeah, but yay for Harry Reid.  I couldn’t have stood living in a state represented by Crazypants Angle.

Monday, May 17, 2010

late afternoon

The Move Is On

Well, it looks like Freddie Mac doesn’t want to sell our house back to us at fair market value.  They’ve even gone so far as to take it off the market.  So, we’re now looking at homes in Pahrump, NV.  It’s a smallish town about 90 minutes outside of Vegas, where most houses have an acre or more of land, and where the only big shopping to be done is at the grocery store (they have two chain stores), Wal-Mart, or Lowe’s.  Oh yeah, and they have a pet/feed/gun store, where we can get some of our pet food, and our, uh, weapons, I guess.  We’re hoping this works out, because Freddie Mac’s representatives are very unpleasant to deal with.  We’re being evicted for not paying rent…so they’re returning the rent that we last paid.  Yeah, sure, that makes sense.  They say that we didn’t cooperate with the agents trying to sell our house, yet we let them in every time they knocked at OUR door.  They said that we didn’t cooperate because either someone went to the wrong house or they were just setting us up for eviction because it’s easier to “show” a house that’s vacant.  When you have dogs that yap at every sound someone makes in front of your house, you KNOW when someone supposedly spent 30 minutes knocking on your door.  The dogs would’ve told us, plus WE WERE SITTING HERE WAITING FOR THEM!  We cleaned up for them and everything.  We wouldn’t have done that and then sat still for 90 minutes to see if the person was going to show up, if we were going to cancel.  When we wanted to change one date, we asked.  Once.  We agreed to every other date.  Funny though, they don’t want to sell the house to us.  They’d rather it sat vacant, without even renters, than sell it to us.  Why on earth would they take it off the market, if they wanted to sell it?  It’s all so very, very weird.  So, we’ll go buy a cheaper house that’s newer and has more land, and more opportunity to rescue animals.  I hear there’s a family in Pahrump that takes their goat with them wherever they go.  I like goats.

mid-afternoon

Study Finds Severe Chronic Pain Increases Death By 68%

While this study isn’t a big surprise to people who live with chronic pain, I’m sure it’s a surprise to those who don’t.  What I liked best about the posting of this study though, is the comments.  When you grow up being Jewish, you kind of feel like you’re a member of a small group who either knows each other or at least knows someone who knows someone else, and then somehow you feel semi-related.  It was the same when I realized I was gay.  It’s the same small group around the world who understands what your life experiences might have been.  Well, now we’re part of the chronic pain group, and the comments on the study are like comments we could’ve written ourselves.  I wouldn’t have thought that it would be so difficult to find people who could empathize with people who are in pain, day in and day out, but it really is hard to find them in your regular everyday life.  People often think you should suck it up or quit complaining or they think it can’t be that bad…and those are the people you want to magically feel that chronic pain for at least a couple of weeks, where you feel like it’s never going to go away.  Everyone knows what acute pain feels like, but most people just heal from that pain and move on, never thinking that other people are in that kind of pain every single day.  So, anyway, the commenters on the study are more of “my people”, like Jewish people and gay people and, well, people who think Joss Whedon is genius or that Siobhan Magnus should’ve won this season of American Idol.

I’m not going to quote from the study.  If you’re interested, you’ll go to the link and read it.  If you’re not interested, you’ll skip over anything I quoted anyway.  However, knowing what chronic pain (and fatigue) has done to my life, I’m not at all surprised that people with chronic pain die sooner than those without.  Some of those deaths, I’m sure, include suicide.  I’m one of the lucky ones who has found a pain management doctor who isn’t afraid of pain meds and understands that people can take opioids responsibly, without getting addicted and without getting high.  Like one of the commenters said, our pain meds DON’T make us high, they go straight to the pain receptors and work there.  I can honestly say that I’ve never been high from my opioids.  Not once.  The meds either work and relieve the pain without any sort of high or they do absolutely nothing. (Opioids Relieve Pain with Little Addiction Risk - and when they say “little addiction risk”, they mean it - .27%, yes, point two seven percent, as in way less than 1%) Oh, and the very first time I had my dosage increased, they made me incredibly nauseous and I, uh, lost those pills very shortly after I took them, if you know what I mean.  The sewer system full of anti-depressants suddenly had some pain meds added to their mix.  You know what drug made me high (for a few days anyway)?  Lyrica.  I was woozy and had to hold onto the railing when going up and down the stairs.  Lyrica also made my feet swell like balloons and made me fall asleep at the drop of a, well, anything.  And, Lyrica didn’t do diddly for my Fibromyalgia, so I quit taking it after a month or two of very unpleasant side effects.  The “high” was gone after a couple of days, and it ws also an unwelcome high.  I just wanted pain relief and I wasn’t getting it from Lyrica.  I’m glad Lyrica helps some FM sufferers, but I’m not one of them.  It just gives me Fred Flintstone feet and doesn’t allow my shoes to fit.  It was a lot of money to pay for a drug that made me sleepy and swollen.  I’m glad that I’ve found a combination of medications that help me feel somewhat better.  Unfortunately, they don’t make me feel like the old me - I’m still in pain and I’m still exhausted.  But, at least the pain is more manageable, because if I didn’t have any pain management, I wouldn’t be sticking around and hoping for an answer to both the pain and the fatigue.  I’d be one of 68%.  I know that for a while, I had high blood pressure, which had never been a problem for me.  It’s fine now, so I assume it was during an extra bad pain/fatigue period.

I still think Siobhan Magnus should’ve won American Idol.  I think she got kicked off based on some of that fine print that allows the producers to do whatever they want with the voting results.