He's run out of painkillers again....

DH normally takes oxycodone for his pain (from fibromyalgia). He is only allowed enough medication to last a month at his appropriate dose (which we will be increasing next week).

When DH runs out of his normal painkillers we have two issues: unmitigated pain and opiate withdrawal symptoms.

The unmitigated pain causes him to become extremely depressed. I have rung his GP to get a script for an alternative pain killer (tramadol) which does not require authorisation from the government; of course, it also doesn't work as well as the oxycontin he normally has, but it's much better than anything else we can get until Tuesday when we see the GP.

From Wikipedia:

The symptoms of oxycodone withdrawal are the same as for other opiate based painkillers and may include "anxiety, nausea, insomnia, muscle pain, fevers, and other flu like symptoms."

Well at the moment, as well as depression, he also has anxiety, nausea and flu like symptoms. Fortunately, these are manageable with the tramadol.

I hope the higher dose is more effective so he can stop running out before he is supposed to. And my depression / anxiety are now very manageable, so I think it's time I took the drugs back and dole them out to him. And keep track of how long each pack should be lasting. We'll get there!

Introducing me

Hello readers

I'm really writing this blog for myself, as an online journal. But I find I'm learning so many life lessons along my journey that I would like to share them with others.

For example, I've only recently realised that I've had Generalized Anxiety Disorder at least since I was pregnant with my daughter. Not surprising, considering my husband's ADHD and anxiety issues were not diagnosed back then. Oh, and he was used to his chronic pain, so didn't realize it was helping make him depressed. (I didn't list depression, as it is part of the Fibromyalgia, which also wasn't diagnosed back then.) I treated it once with Lexapro and a counselling psychologist, thought that was it, but it came back...

I don't have time to tell you all about my family's history in this post. I'll write our story another day.

Conventions
I'll use the following terms in this forum alot: DD (Darling Daughter), DS (Darling Son), and DH (Darling Husband); I want this to be anonymous except for those very few people that know both my anonymous and real names. For relatives, friends, neighbours, etc... I'll come up with something and come back here later.