Aye, to be on opioids, one must pay the price.
I am all too familiar with that.
My knee has been damaged since childhood, got a piece of glass through my patellar tendon, and ever since, its been badly imflamed and painful, the knee joint always clicks and creaks like a damn old man, I had it operated on, and had a piece of bone cut out of the joint, but all that did was leave me with nerve damage on one side of my leg.
Getting a steroid shot done this week though, which hopefully will help in a more major way.
...my girlfriend, aged 44 (I'm 24) says she is old, too old for me (not that either of us is going to complain about having the other, indeed I feel the luckiest man alive just to be able to have the pleasure of hearing her voice on the phone), yet I feel like an old man sometimes, where she is full of love for life, driven, and carries fire within her belly, despite forever being exhausted due to being unable to produce ACTH, for her, if it were the case that if only I could harness it, she would make an excellent tool for metal casting/welding, or perhaps a furnace, feed her some carbon, and a phosphate salt, and damned if she wouldn't piss flames and crap white phosphorus
Me on the other hand...I walk with a cane, my joints creak, and I have little strength in the affected leg due to having been unable to use it properly for many years.
I'm, scripted dihydrocodeine, and have been on it many years, been cutting down, using methoxetamine to artificially drive down my tolerance, and am now at the point where I can take just a single pill in the morning, before I turn in for the day to allow a proper, uninterrupted sleep, but my experience has been that being on the pain meds is an infernal luciferian pact, I must make the choice, of being a slave to my drug, forced to keep taking it throughout my waking hours, sometimes to wake up durnig the day to pop my pills, weather I am in pain, or weather I experience none, or to be in so much pain sometimes that even with my cane, I have to use solely my upper body strength to sit, or rise from the chair, or have to get lifts from someone with a car to go to the local shop.
If I pop the pills, I feel great, and can get around with just moderate difficulty, if I don't, then its hard to walk, hard to sit down, or stand from where I sit, and feel so shitty I am more or less nonfunctional, and for sure, but for the fact that I have to knock myself out with a drug that squashes adrenal function if I want to be able to get to sleep, or remain sleeping I would get no sleep at all with the withdrawals keeping me awake, leaving me sleep deprived and altogether crappy feeling.
At least though, I don't have to pay anything for my meds, thanks to the NHS, because I am on a very low income, all the money I get, coming from government disability benefits, some because of my physical difficulties, and a problem I have with severely impaired memory and executive function, and a second payment every month, although not a huge amount, because I am autistic.
Of course, the second one I can consider a permanent windfall really, I'm very glad I was born autistic, I feel sympathy, for those of us who weren't that fortunate, if I had been born neurotypical, and knew what it was like not to be, damn that would hurt psychologically, knowing what I would be missing. So getting PAID for being spesh...well damn, that is pretty sweet
Good job though that I do, because for those on certain disability benefits prescriptions are free, and I need so many different meds now, that it would be a choice of merely feed the cat, eat, and keep as healthy as I am going to get, or have neither meds nor food, but be able to actually DO things in life, such as pursue my (bio)chemistry hobby.
My doctor is pretty sweet though, he is one of that dying breed of oldschool GPs who isn't at all uptight. I went in for a repeat of my regular prescriptions as one does, I only needed two meds, tizanidine, an adrenolytic, that I take both to suppress the physical overstimulation I get from sensory overloading, and incidentally which also suppresses opiate withdrawal while I cut down, and also to allow me to sleep and as a bonus, is a damn potent muscle relaxant which goes a fair way to stopping some back pain that troubles me, some more nitrazepam, and a bottle of that fairly revolting antacid suspension gaviscon.
I just asked if I was due for anything else, as some of my meds get refilled on a different time schedule than others, the tizanidine and nitrazepam is every two weeks, whereas my antiimflammatory and pain meds I get monthly.
Wasn't due for the painkillers and other stuff, but I asked if he could check on the system and see if I was due for anything else...guy doesn't even bother, just says 'oh if you are out of tizanidine you are probably out of the rest of your meds...here you go take the lot, leaving me with a nice sized stash of free painkillers and other goodies.
And what did I find when I got back home...looked at the box of benzos, and found that without my even asking, has decided to double the number of nitrazepam tabs I get per script, that, I truly cannot complain about, most of the doctors at his surgery just do what is routinely done for me....this guy, my personal 'officially' regular GP (I see them all with about the same frequency whenever I go), knows that I know my stuff, medically speaking, and I find I can discuss whatever I need doing freely with the guy, and usually he just does it, or at the very least, looks into my suggestions and gives them a proper evaluation to see if I indeed have a good idea.
