Bugger the drugs, I'm changing my attitude!

Being in constant pain is not fun. I've started to feel like a victim. The pain battered away at my defences until it broke through and beat me down. I had begun to feel so fragile I was afraid to sneeze in case I put my neck out of alignment again.

The cocktail of drugs I blogged about a week ago has been my doctor's answer to pretty much everything. As I said last week, I decided to take myself off the codeine because of the nightmares and the hallucinations (not to mention the constipation!), so on Sunday night I chucked them out and went cold turkey.

There are some pretty unpleasant stories out there in Google-land about taking oneself off morphine-derivatives - but they're generally from people who've been self-medicating for years, taking up to 100 tabs a day. Crikey! My six a day for a month didn't come close... Even for the worst cases the come-down only lasts a week or so, so I suppose all-told it wasn't too bad, but psychologically it wasn't that great.

This week I hit rock bottom. I had my second osteopathic treatment on Monday, and on Tuesday I felt pretty bloody awful. The osteo had changed the pains, from the incredibly aggravating zizzy pain in my arm, to sharp shooting pains in my neck, shoulder blade, shoulder, elbow, arm and hand. I was happy that the zizzy stuff had gone, but I wasn't too keen on what had replaced it! And because I'd taken myself off the codeine, I was pretty much on my own for the first day or so.

On Wednesday I asked my doctor for a different pain-killer that wasn't morphine-based, and she suggested Acupan (2 x 30mg of Nefopam hydrochloride, three times a day). Off the codeine, onto the Acupan. Problem is, one of the side-effects of Acupan is feelings of nervousness or anxiety, which are quite rare, just as the nightmares and hallucinations are a rare side-effect of codeine - but guess what, I got them.

They'd start with a feeling of fear in my tummy, that swiftly rose up my body towards my throat, and which I'd have to push away by breathing deeply to calm myself down. It was horrible - like the feeling you get when you've drunk waaay too much coffee, only much worse. It was strongest at night when I was trying to get to sleep, and for the past few nights I've tossed and turned in my bed, desperate to fall asleep, but being unable to because of the waves of anxiety continually flowing through me.

It felt as though the Acupan was fighting with the sleeping pills I've been taking, particularly because another side-effect of the Acupan is insomnia. Doh!

So I've decided I'm getting off Acupan too, seeing as it doesn't actually help much with the pain (this weekend I got up latelatelate, missed a dose of painkillers and didn't really notice any difference in pain levels), and I really don't like the anxiety thing. So I've given up the Acupan. Today was my first day without it.

After a month of taking the "sleeping pills" I decided belatedly to Google those too, which I did last night. To my surprise, the Amitrip I've been taking isn't actually a sleeping pill, it's an anti-depressant. Fuck me! Apparently doctors often prescribe anti-depressants as a first-step sleeping pill, because they're not as strong as the real thing.

Anyway, I've decided I'm not really into taking anti-depressants, particularly as they haven't been working particularly effectively as sleeping pills since I came off the codeine and onto the Acupan. Googling has also opened my eyes to the fact that many people lose the ability to go to sleep naturally once they start using sleeping pills, and I really really don't want to go there, so... tossing out the Amitrip!

And while I'm at it, I've decided to give up the anti-inflammatories too. Well I figure after a month my body must be un-inflamed, surely... Which means I also get to give up the drugs to protect my tummy from the anti-inflammatories. Excellent!

I can also chuck out the laxatives I was prescribed to combat the constipation caused by the codeine... and voila!

From what feels like a dozen different drugs to just one - good old Neurofen. I know it works (it always fixes my headaches, even though it couldn't cope with the severe pain I was in at the start of this whole mess), and it doesn't feel like it's fighting with my body like every single pill I've been prescribed so far.

But what's really important is that at the same time as giving up (almost) all the drugs, I've also decided to change my attitude to what's been happening to me for the last month.

By the end of this week I'd really had enough of being beaten down by the pain, and for a couple of days, I just gave up and let it win. I didn't go to work on Thursday or Friday, I just stayed in bed half the day, and slept, and dozed, and did nothing much, and felt sorry for myself, and focused on every little twinge, every pain, every ache, every sense of someone's-sticking-a-knife-in-my-back. Too.much.pain. It was no fun at all.

And then, for no apparent reason, I decided yesterday I was absolutely sick of feeling like a victim. I was fed up with feeling so fragile that I was afraid to sneeze. I had had enough of holding myself so carefully that I was tensing up all the time. And I was over feeling sorry for myself.

So now I've decided that I'm absolutely fine, and that my body is healthy and whole - with the occasional (or even constant) sharp ache in my neck, shoulder and arm. That's how I'm looking at it now, instead of seeing myself as a big mass of pain with a person hidden somewhere inside.

Over the past couple of weeks I've had three osteopathic treatments, and I think the focus on natural healing that you get with osteo is important too. It goes well with the acupuncture I've been having, and goes very well with the whole getting off the drugs thing.

Last Sunday I went to Batucada practice for the first time in about 6 weeks. I didn't go to play - there's no way I was ready for drumming, but I went to listen and to hang out with the gang. Thing is, the vibrations from the 50-odd drums in the room set my arm off something horrible, and I was in mad pain for the whole of the rest of the day and into the night.

This week I went again, with my new attitude, and without that hideous zizzy pain in my arm that had got so badly set off last week. We had a caixa sectional practice before the full rehearsal, but we couldn't get into the rehearsal room because we didn't have a key. Instead of hanging around waiting for a key to turn up we decided to practise the rhythms by singing them, and tapping them out on our legs and bodies with our hands. Hey! I can do this! I thought. So I did. My right arm is very weak, and it got pretty tired, but I did OK, and the pain really wasn't so bad.

Once the key turned up and we started our full rehearsal, I planned to sit it out and just listen like I did last week - but the rhythm was so infectious, and I felt so good, I got up and joined the caixa line and practiced stepping and drumming with my hands on my legs like we'd done in the sectional. Wow! Really not much pain at all!

Went to the pub afterwards, felt fine, came home, felt even better, and now I'm sitting here on the sofa typing this with BOTH HANDS for the first time in a month - ands there's virtually no pain at all, just a little bit of discomfort now and again.

OK this is so weird. How did I go from being at rock bottom less than a week ago, to feeling like I'm almost recovered today?

I have noticed that over the last few days the numbness in my fingers and hand has been diminishing. (I think it's the osteo doing its thing). This is the primary symptom that showed the specialist I'd trapped a nerve around C6 (not C2 and C3 as I thought when I blogged last week). So I guess that the stretching of my spine by my osteopath is freeing up the nerve again...

I think the reason why I feel so great today is due to a perfect storm of good things all coming together at once.

Osteo beginning to work. Come off all those nasty drugs that have been fighting with my body and with each other. Change my attitude to the pain. Change my attitude to the way I cope with the pain. Go do something I really enjoy with people I really like. Stop feeling sorry for myself.

How cool.

One thing I have learned over this past month, which I will try very hard to keep in the forefront of my mind, is that you should never ever take your good health and fitness for granted. It can be gone in an instant, and illness or hurt can take over your life and change it drasically - and for the worse.

The other thing that I have learned is that if the bad stuff does happen, there's a huge amount you can do to make it as bad as it can be - and there's a huge amount you can do to make it as good as it can be. It all depends upon your attitude, your point of view, and your inner strength.

I know that there were many times over the past four or five weeks where I definitely did not have the inner strength to combat how bad I was feeling, and where I was pretty much powerless to help myself. That's what happens when you're being attacked by never-ending pain, and there's not always anything you can do about that.

But I also know that somehow, once the pain was at a low enough level for me to deal with it better, some part of me came bouncing back up and said "Bugger the drugs, I'm changing my attitude!"

And by golly - it works!


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