Coping with pain

Sami

No, not the Linkin Park internal variety

The claw your eyes out holy shit it hurts so bad phyiscal variety.

I am immune to almost all pain medication. The simple procedure that was supposed to be an outpatient surgery that I had on the 1st ended up with me staying in the hospital for 4 days on a near constant morphine drip because they couldn't control my pain.

They finally sent me home with boatloads of oxycontin, vicoden, and some other "very powerful" drugs after the pain seemed to get better, while in reality it was only getting better because they upped my morphine to 10mgs on the hour every hour and put in a block on the offending shoulder.

So I am sitting here in excruciating amounts of pain with a bunch of pills that aren't helping, and my question is this: Does anyone know of any other methods of pain relief that might help me? I'm open to anything, because nothing can be worse than what I'm going through right now.

Getting drunk isn't an option, alcohol has the same effect that painkillers have on me- jack shit.

I'm off to go scream into a pillow for 10 minutes, I'll check back on this thread in a bit.

Shogun

What did they do to you at the hospital? For your tolerance to narcotics be that high already the pain you're describing would have to be extremely excruciating.

If that is the case

Doctor. Now.

Iconoclysm

Id seriously suggest getting your doctor to change your meds if they're that ineffective.
Also a TENS machine may help(didnt do much for me though). They're pretty cheap nowadays:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/conditions/tens1.shtml

lowlylowlycook

My brother does some work with pain alleviation. As far as I remember, he uses breathing exercises and meditation. Not really sure if that kind of thing would work in your extreme case but you might want to ask your doctor to recomend a psychologist that specialized in pain since it could help a bit.

Krysanthemum

Try to find meds that work better for you. If your doctor says there isn't anything better, go ask another doctor. Ask 10 other doctors if you have to. My mum had the same problem with pain-killers for dental surgery, went through agony a number of times, then found a different dental surgeon who used different meds that worked perfectly. If your doctor says there's nothing else, don't necessarily believe him.

Feral

What you really need to do is go back to your doctor, or to the ER, and get to the bottom of this. There are ton of options for pain control but you'll really need a professional to sort them out.

By the way, have you considered that maybe you're allergic to oxycodone or hydrocodone? My girlfriend has a morphine allergy - morphine will make any pain she's experiencing about ten times worse. It's an effect called "hyperalgesia" and is relatively rare but not totally unheard of.

If the pain responds to a nerve block and morphine, but not to oxycodone or hydrocodone, then one possibility is to get your doctor to switch you from Oxycontin (time-release oxycodone) to MSContin (time-release morphine) or Duragesic (fentanyl patches, which are chemically more similar to morphine than to oxycodone).

But what you really need to do is go back to the doctors or the hospital and get them to help you. From what you've described, something went wrong with whatever procedure you had done, and it's your right as a patient to get it straightened out - but it'll never happen if you don't take the initiative to go back and get help.

aesir

you know anyone who smokes pot? Go ask to borrow some from them.

If that works at all for you, you can get a perscription for medical majiuana without too much of a hassle depending if youre nearby a distribution center or not. Still requires paying a visit to your doc, so he'd probably have even better meds then that.

Sami

Thanks for all the input

I smoked some weed and that helped a bit, so I'll look into getting legit medical cannabis

As for where the tolerance came from, I don't know. I've never had anything stronger than aspirin before this, so not even the doctor's know what's going on there.

Theungry

If you can afford it, acupuncture can do wonders for pain as well as helping your bodies natural healing process. If you have good insurance, they probably even cover a number of acupuncturists in your area.

Other people here know chemicals way better than myself, so I'd consider their advice first, but if you want any mental tools to deal with pain there are a few worth exploring. The one that works best for me is to try accepting the pain instead of fighting it. This involves allowing yourself to focus on the pain, explore in your mind what it feels like, and accept that its there. If you can come to the right mind-set the sensation can change from agony to... well, something more functional. I learned this from a friend who got traditional Japanese tattoos when he was over there, where they basically carve them in with a knife instead of injecting them with a needle. Its worked fairly well for me, but I've never had to test it on anything so severe.

nexuscrawler

You migth want to look into biofeedback treatment. Basically they hook you upto a brainwave scanner and you train yourself to mentally relieve the stress of pain and such. it's similar to meditation technques but more scientific.

GoodOmens

The problem with things like biofeedback, meditation and such is that they are typically better for lower-level chronic pain. Based on what Sami said, I'm assuming this is a more severe, acute pain...really really bad but it will go away eventually on its own, which probably means not enough time to make something like biofeedback work.

lowlylowlycook

nexuscrawler wrote: »

You migth want to look into biofeedback treatment. Basically they hook you upto a brainwave scanner and you train yourself to mentally relieve the stress of pain and such. it's similar to meditation technques but more scientific.

Yea, I know my brother uses this method as well.