I've been in and out of the hospital for the past month dealing with a partially obstructed bowel that just won't seem to go away. As a result of this complication, my doctor started me on Remicade as well as a high dose of prednisone. Previously I had been on a Pentasa/6mp regiment and was doing alright until the obstruction...
Anyways, while I was in the hospital they would just absolutely pound me with IV steroids and pain meds. It got to the point where I knew the different types of IV pain meds and could tell the nurses which ones worked best and which ones made me too drowsy or itchy. I would take the pain medication every time it was offered to me because I was facing pretty severe pain. To get out of the hospital, the stipulation was always that I had to be off of the IV pain meds and on to oral oxycodone instead.
So, after the doctors felt that I was well enough to go home after my most recent visit, they shipped me off with a prescription for 100 5mg oxycodone pills, to last me 12 days... A few days afterwards I saw my GI doc and he gave me a prescription for 100 more. I worked my way through the first 100 after about a week and went and got the other 100 and went through those in another week. While I did take them slightly more often than prescribed, I was only taking them when I was in pretty severe pain and took the prescribed dose, using additional pills for breakthrough pain... If averaged out, I believe I was taking about 15 pills per 24 hours, which isn't that unreasonable... Is it?
This led to me running out several days before I was able to see my doctor. Not wanting to deal with withdrawals or being in constant pain, I went in and saw a quick care doctor. He was a doctor who had looked after me in the hospital once, prescribing the pain pills in the first place... As I was talking to him he was very skeptical of me and after pulling up my prescription records and literally counting out the amount of pills I had been given, doing the math in the margins, he conceded to giving me 12 pills to last me the 5 days until my appointment...
This was quite obviously not enough, but I went home with them regardless and spaced them out throughout the next three days, taking them at 6 hour intervals during the day and dealing with withdrawals, pain and sleeplessness during the night.
On the evening that I ran out of pills I started feeling really crummy. Super restless and unmotivated, still bothered by the awful pains that I was having, so I decided to go back to the quick care office and ask if they could get me more to "hold me off" until I could see my real GI doctor. I was already nervous about going in and asking, as I had been pretty much labelled as an abuser last time I was there, but the pain discomfort I was feeling led me to give it a try. When I asked the nurse, she brought up my records and stared at them for a long, long time before saying that she would ask the doctor, but it probably wasn't going to happen. The doctor came in and talked to me shortly after, bringing a printed sheet of paper with my past 5 prescriptions, the places I had them filled and the doctors that gave them to me. She said she wouldn't be able to give me any more pills because the 200 I had gotten seemed like more than enough and because I was exhibiting behavior of abuse...
She cited that because I was getting the pills from multiple different practitioners (a result of getting them as discharge meds from whoever happened to be on call at the hospital, as well as having a prescription from my GI doc) and because I was getting them from different pharmacies (one is much closer to my house and one is closer to the doctor's office, so I often stop on my way back and pick up meds), that I must be a drug addict, fishing for my next fix...
A few miserable days later, I am still out of pain medication and still hurting pretty bad. I'm barely able to function due to withdrawals and pain from my intestines, which is still there despite taking 60mg of prednisone every day... Am I in the wrong here, asking for more pain pills because I had used them a bit more often than prescribed, because of the pain I was having? Should I be labelled as an abuser or addict? Am I an addict?
I'm really considering calling my doctor today and asking to see him to get more medication, because it's really hard to function without it. In the past he's said that he was fine with me being on the pills, so long as I'm using them to treat the pain and so long as I wean myself off of them when I was to go off of them. (which obviously didn't happen...) I don't know if I should go in and see him or not, because I hate it that I'm being treated as a drug addict, when I just needed a little bit more medication than was prescribed to me... I'm afraid that I'll be judged and ridiculed for going in there and asking for him to prescribe me more. So I guess the question is, do I go in and ask for more? Or do I just stay off of them for fear of being labelled as an addict or becoming addicted?
Anyways, while I was in the hospital they would just absolutely pound me with IV steroids and pain meds. It got to the point where I knew the different types of IV pain meds and could tell the nurses which ones worked best and which ones made me too drowsy or itchy. I would take the pain medication every time it was offered to me because I was facing pretty severe pain. To get out of the hospital, the stipulation was always that I had to be off of the IV pain meds and on to oral oxycodone instead.
So, after the doctors felt that I was well enough to go home after my most recent visit, they shipped me off with a prescription for 100 5mg oxycodone pills, to last me 12 days... A few days afterwards I saw my GI doc and he gave me a prescription for 100 more. I worked my way through the first 100 after about a week and went and got the other 100 and went through those in another week. While I did take them slightly more often than prescribed, I was only taking them when I was in pretty severe pain and took the prescribed dose, using additional pills for breakthrough pain... If averaged out, I believe I was taking about 15 pills per 24 hours, which isn't that unreasonable... Is it?
This led to me running out several days before I was able to see my doctor. Not wanting to deal with withdrawals or being in constant pain, I went in and saw a quick care doctor. He was a doctor who had looked after me in the hospital once, prescribing the pain pills in the first place... As I was talking to him he was very skeptical of me and after pulling up my prescription records and literally counting out the amount of pills I had been given, doing the math in the margins, he conceded to giving me 12 pills to last me the 5 days until my appointment...
This was quite obviously not enough, but I went home with them regardless and spaced them out throughout the next three days, taking them at 6 hour intervals during the day and dealing with withdrawals, pain and sleeplessness during the night.
On the evening that I ran out of pills I started feeling really crummy. Super restless and unmotivated, still bothered by the awful pains that I was having, so I decided to go back to the quick care office and ask if they could get me more to "hold me off" until I could see my real GI doctor. I was already nervous about going in and asking, as I had been pretty much labelled as an abuser last time I was there, but the pain discomfort I was feeling led me to give it a try. When I asked the nurse, she brought up my records and stared at them for a long, long time before saying that she would ask the doctor, but it probably wasn't going to happen. The doctor came in and talked to me shortly after, bringing a printed sheet of paper with my past 5 prescriptions, the places I had them filled and the doctors that gave them to me. She said she wouldn't be able to give me any more pills because the 200 I had gotten seemed like more than enough and because I was exhibiting behavior of abuse...
She cited that because I was getting the pills from multiple different practitioners (a result of getting them as discharge meds from whoever happened to be on call at the hospital, as well as having a prescription from my GI doc) and because I was getting them from different pharmacies (one is much closer to my house and one is closer to the doctor's office, so I often stop on my way back and pick up meds), that I must be a drug addict, fishing for my next fix...
A few miserable days later, I am still out of pain medication and still hurting pretty bad. I'm barely able to function due to withdrawals and pain from my intestines, which is still there despite taking 60mg of prednisone every day... Am I in the wrong here, asking for more pain pills because I had used them a bit more often than prescribed, because of the pain I was having? Should I be labelled as an abuser or addict? Am I an addict?
I'm really considering calling my doctor today and asking to see him to get more medication, because it's really hard to function without it. In the past he's said that he was fine with me being on the pills, so long as I'm using them to treat the pain and so long as I wean myself off of them when I was to go off of them. (which obviously didn't happen...) I don't know if I should go in and see him or not, because I hate it that I'm being treated as a drug addict, when I just needed a little bit more medication than was prescribed to me... I'm afraid that I'll be judged and ridiculed for going in there and asking for him to prescribe me more. So I guess the question is, do I go in and ask for more? Or do I just stay off of them for fear of being labelled as an addict or becoming addicted?
