Once again I apologize for not blogging sooner. I’ve pretty much been asleep for the last 3 weeks, and I found that seemed to conflict with typing anything.
I’m currently on 11 medications for my illness; yes, I did say 11. There are actually a few more I could add to that list, but I only use them as needed, so I think just mentioning the one’s I take daily gives you some idea of what I deal with.
I’ve arrived at these 11 over a period of several years involving a lot, and I do mean a lot, of trial and error. I’d say for every one of the 11 I’m on now, I’ve tried 3 before I found the one that worked. In other words, I’ve been my pharmacist’s best friend for a while now.
However, in my overall therapy, I’ve still got some holes. I especially struggle with medications for my Fibromyalgia and the depression that comes as a result of the weird chemical imbalances my RA causes. So I’m still experimenting with finding meds for those areas, and especially looking at medications that do both.
Unfortunately, the best one I found for helping both, Savella, worked great for several months and then started giving me such debilitating headaches I just couldn’t stand it any longer. My doc and I tried several ways to trick my body into accepting the Savella, but we finally had to throw in the towel when I started screaming for my mommy and crying like a baby about the headaches.
(By the way, if you suffer from Fibromyalgia, you should talk to your doc about Savella. I don’t make any money from them, so I’m not a spokesman, and I no longer use the medication, but, and it’s a big but, while I was on the stuff my pain levels were consistently at their lowest point since being diagnosed. I’m telling you, I had a little hissy-fit when I realized the most effective medication was out of my reach just because of a side-effect.)
So, last month, when I saw my rheumatologist, we picked another medication for me to try adding. Intriguing enough, my doc’s fear of suggesting this particular medication was because it is known to have an “energizing” effect, and since I often struggle with insomnia, my doc was hesitant to prescribe something that would “amp” me up.
However, in hindsight, he had nothing to worry about. I really don’t know why I’m so weird, but the medication had the exact opposite effect of what we expected. The titration was to start off with a low dose, and then double it after a week, and then again after another week.
About the second week I fell asleep. And I’ve pretty much been asleep since then.
Okay, so I’m exaggerating a tiny bit, but I swear, that’s very close to how it worked. Even when I was awake, all I wanted to do was sleep. I would sleep for 12 to 14 hours, wake up to take my pills, stare at the tv until it went out of focus after a couple of hours, and go back to sleep for another 12 hours. One day I slept for 21 hours.
Now I’ve mentioned in other posts that Fibro likes sleep, but too much sleep really ticks RA off, so you can imagine, or maybe you can’t, that by sleeping that much I really, really, really ticked my RA off. So basically, I’d sleep while writhing in pain and dreaming about being tortured.
Here’s the kicker though: when I was awake, I was very relaxed, laid-back even, and my family agreed they loved that about the new medication (I mean, come on, was I that bad before?). I admit, I was indeed laid-back, because the only thing I really cared about over the last month was going back to sleep, pain and all.
So, tomorrow I go back to see my RA doc, and have to explain to him how the medication that causes “excitability” actually put me to sleep for a month. That ought to be a fun conversation. Plus, we will start the whole process again, because I really do need something more for the pain I deal with each day.
So, I apologize for not blogging, and all I can do is entreat you to enjoy the silence while you can, because next he might prescribe a “sedative” and I’ll be so amped-up that I blog ten or twelve times a day.
No comments:
Post a Comment