MIRAPEX: A CURE FOR ALCOHOLISM!

I used to have such a thirst for alcohol that I would get drunk on Thursdays and always be horribly hungover at work on Fridays because I had stayed up until the wee hours the night before because it took me quite a while to get drunk.

In my search for a way to ease my fibro I ended up on Mirapex, and about a month into taking mega-doses I no longer wanted to drink.

...Well, I wouldn't be shaking for 5:30 to come on Fridays, anyway.

Today I have swallowed about three liters of wine just to see if I can, in fact, get drunk. It would seem I cannot. ...And I'm not even weird on it, though it's matched with 50mg oxycodone (through Percocet) and 4mg Klonopin.

I didn't sign up for this... Apparently Mirapex changed my brain and did so, perhaps, for the rest of my life. I haven't taken the stuff for months, but still have no thirst for the drink. Last week when I was in such pain that all I wanted to do was die I couldn't even make myself swallow enough vodka to make a difference. Maybe there isn't an amount of vodka that would make a difference.

I simply slept well the night I drank vodka... And woke the next to find two fingers in the bottom of a fifth.

Strange thoughts on this strange day...

...If you think you have a problem with the bottle, ask your doc about Mirapex. I believe it's supposed to allow your brain to produce more dopamine... Or somehow make more dopamine available to your dope-loving brain. Either/or/and.

All I have now is a headache because it's been a while since I've taken a Percocet, and I'm going to have to take 50mg of Trazodone and a Sonata to get to sleep just so I can get the sleeping over with, it can be another day, and I can have more Percocet... I only get five a day and make myself stick to it.

...But what about Tylenol etc and liver damage (I take five Percs a day, 10mg oxycodone/325mg APAP)? Three-twenty-and-five multiplied by five is 1,625mg of Tylenol. Four grams is an overdose. And the wine must be taxing my liver like Paul did Jews before he had a seizure and founded christianity.

...I've been taking a multivitamin and a strong B-complex tab ever since I was put on legal dopes at eighteen years old, and I get a liver enzyme test at least once a year, and my largest internal organ is just fine. Pristine. Begging for more.

And now I have pared down my drug diet to three meds I know and love, which should save my delicious liver some trouble: I take only Prozac, Klonopin and Percocet. I need nothing else (well, except for Trazodone and Sonata so I can get to sleep)... In fact, if Prozac wasn't available in a generic formulation, I'd drop that too. But the drug reminds me of my college years, is relatively cheap, and so it stays.

...When my rationality and my sentimentality collide, the latter wins almost every time.

...I will forever keep a quilt that was my older brother's that has bled all its stuffing and a brain that spews dopamine like a busted fire hydrant... But I'm unable to splash in the middle of the road in the late-July of a humid Washington D.C.

I'm unable to get drunk.

Mixx it!

SMILE THAT BRUISE UPSIDE DOWN!

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Gawd a'mighty I miss skating (source of the above). Not the bleeding under the skin so much as the me being able to do it meant I was able to use my legs quite well. I really liked using my legs. And if I have my way, we're oh so far from done.

Regarding the bruise, above: I never realized that it takes certain and special circumstances, like presenting with a bruise as above for a doctor to believe you're in a lot of pain.

And I didn't know it's far from guaranteed that they'll do anything about your pain.

Can you imagine a doctor telling me to my face, after looking at the bruise on my leg (let's say I have it right now):

"It's just a bruise. It'll be gone in a month. Hang in there. Stay positive. You can't let yourself think about it."

"You need to separate the bruise from your self. You can't let it take over."

"The first thing we need to do is worry about your migraines."

"Take your pain [doc makes fist, holds to leg] and just put it right over here [holds fist in mid-air]."

Well, I used to have that bruise and I have fibro now. The bruise hurt a lot, as far as pre-fibro pain goes. Still, it didn't bother me much. I couldn't bend my leg much at the knee or hip, but the pain, as it always used to be for me, was annoying, and not anything that felt... personal. I could always rationalize it away as my self's way of reminding me (in this case) "Hey buddy, leave the freaking leg alone for a while. One, you're too old to be skating. Two, when moving this appendage stops being annoying, you can move this appendage."

Ug. It's late here. Better get to it. If any one of us had a doctor who told us any of the above when we presented with the bruise, we would be at a loss for words at best and swearing like me when I'm drunk at worst (for the record, I don't drink. Mirapex changed my brain chemistry, and now I haven't the slightest taste for beer or wine, when I used to have to pair dinner with the right red or ale).

I should explain "The first thing we need to do is worry about your migraines."

When I began seeing Dr 9 I stressed that pain everywhere is my problem. Because pain everywhere is almost the definition of fibromyalgia. So he said the above.

The worst thing? The migraines are still all he cares about. I could have understood if that was all he cared about the first or second week... But fibro isn't a migraine. And I know he knows this. If I thought about this for too long I would get too angry to continue seeing Dr 9, I'm sure. And so I try to maintain a certain safe ignorance.

He stopped prescribing Vicodin for me to use over the weekend when he found out (because I told him outright, without him asking) that I used the pills, as well as for headache pain, to try to improve my sleep quality and duration.

Goddam it, the bottle said "Take as needed for pain"! He's lucky I know 4 grams of Tylenol is an overdose or I could have taken the whole bottle (20 pills, 750mg Tylenol each, 15 grams Tylenol total) in a day waiting for Godot (read: my pain to go away)!

Dr 9 is fine with me having any and every pain but headache pain. I cannot understand, but only hope the psychologist I saw last week will pull through for me and let Dr 9 know that when I describe my back and limb pain as excruciating in excruciating detail Monday through Thursday I am not doing so because I love the word arrangements: "red hot pokers, six on each side of my spine, in through my back, halfway through the torso," "arms swelled with ache to what feel like Popeye-like proportions," and"My legs always feel as though I just finished sprinting as hard as I could for as long as I possibly could."

These are the descriptions I find most apt. And I repeat them often to Dr 9 in the hope that they will allow him to imagine how I feel enough to allow him to fathom the pain I am in. Because I want --need -- him to exactly comprehend the pain I am in so he will treat it accordingly!

Perhaps what we have here is a failure of adjectives...

Sprain? Ice and Advil. Break? Ice, shot of Demerol, cast, Tylenol-3 to take home. Red-hot motherfucking pokers in your back?! I need you to wear a smile for me every day, and you'll be better before you know it!

Fuck you Patch Adams!

...Crap. I thought I was going to get to the point.

...The bruise above looks like an 8/10. I felt it then, when I had it, as a 5/10. In the state I am in now it would feel like a hand job.

Were I to see a doctor for it, the bruise likely would be treated with high doses of NSAIDS in an attempt to reduce the inflammation, and any patient with a bruise like this wouldn't be fucking condescended to. The doctor would do his/her best to relieve the pain -- treating its cause and the symptom together with Motrin, most likely -- in stark contrast to the standard treatment given to fibromyalgians to relieve their pain.

The following may be the only treatment, or it may be used in conjunction with trigger-point injections, etc.): the doctor runs a catheter straight from his dick/her urethra and makes you drink his/her piss straight from the plastic tube while it's warm. (From a catheter and not directly because, although the good Dr may be a sick, sadistic fuck he/she nevertheless has a fetish for sterility.)

If any pain can be set aside, it's the one I didn't bother going to a doctor for, because it was only a bruise, because it did only hang about for a month, and because it was minor enough that I could take my mind off it.

It is not possible to set aside fibro pain -- the pain I have described above. This pain is forever, just like the fact that diamond commercials will always make me want to throw my TV out a window. And if pain made your biceps feel like balloons inflated with agony-oxide (ug, that wordplay was substandard), could you think about anything else? If your head throbbed every time you moved it, could you ignore that? If your back was so tender to the touch that you could not so much as sit back in a chair, could you whistle Dixie? If someone poured petrol on your thighs and lit them up while you were reading a newspaper, would it take the paper, itself, catching fire to make you aware of the burning on and in your thighs?

If you did not answer yes to all of the above, don't get fibro. Urine and smiles really aren't that great as painkillers.

But wait -- who could forget Lyrica! It won't reduce your pain, but it will make you fat! I think the average person would be lucky to experience a decrease of 2 points out of 10 in their baseline pain, and the weight isn't going to be worth it. Anything more than two points? Enjoy the placebo effect. A hypnotist would be cheaper. Or take a 25 cent Percocet and drop five points.

The only bad thing is you have to keep taking it because you become an addict when you say Percocet three times fast. Or whatever -- moot point. A fibromyalgian always will be in pain, so why would he or she ever not want to take whatever narc works best for him/her?

But you build up a tolerance and then nothing can help you. If I had my druthers I'd be on 80mg of oxycodone per day, starting today. I'd be able to stay at this dose for at lease a year, probably five. By the time I'm eating 160mg of OxyContin twice a day I'll be... For fuck's sake, I'm not going to live that fucking long.

And I can try taking my oxy with naloxone and/or naltrexone, which prevents tolerance in 50 percent of people. If I'm not one of the luck half, I will spend decades increasing my dose of oxy, then spend a year weaning myself off it to reduce my tolerance. It will be a bad year. You want to know what, though? I've already been through 2006 and this far into 2008 -- more than a year of having this killing pain, with nothing to relieve the agony. And I've survived.

For spite.

Trigger-point injections also can be used, but I'm already beginning to find, after less than one month of TPI therapy, of being stuck like a pin cushion -- usually three (rarely two) needles w/ marcaine four times per week -- that they may have hit the wall as far as their utility. Just as we are making progress with my back's trigger points -- I have regained most of the feeling (albeit almost all that feeling is PAIN, any sensation is better than none at all. The way someone being indifferent toward you is worse than them hating you. But not really) in my left leg and foot -- my shoulder and TMJ trigger points are causing me tear-my-teeth-out migraines. Since there's only so much marcaine one can have injected in a 24 hour period, there is only a certain amount of relief I can get per day.

And trigger points fight back. You don't get a nasty reputation as a lifelong disorder unless you're an annoying (at the very least) lifelong disease. I could be an HPV carrier. I won't know unless I get tested, and I probably won't because it doesn't give men symptoms.

So fuck the needles, here's all I need: Klonopin for generalized anxiety disorder, and oxycodone and my own e-stim for fibromyalgia.

I plan to buy the e-stim with the help of my rehabber, Cassatt, so most of it should be paid for by insurance (esp. since I have met my deductible for the year already). And, once I finally move to wherever I'm going next, I hope to find a doctor who will simply write me maintenance scripts for Klonopin and oxy. It should be a lot easier anywhere but here (Lummox, Jesusland).

Right now I take Prozac for my GAD, too, but that's just so I don't have to take as much Klonopin (theoretically. Probably bullshit). Klonopin is in another vilified class of drugs, the benzodiazepines. Therefore, doctors try all they can to keep you off them. Dr Douchebag, my former shrink, reduced my Klonopin dosage from 6mg to 4mg practically as a way of introducing himself when we first met. He earned his nickname immediately.

So no more Prozac. Klonopin has been around longer and is known to be safer. Plus it's a lot cheaper. And I'm on a slew of meds for fibro that, I'm sure, do no good at all (because I don't feel any better at all), but that Dr 9 and all the rest must believe that, if they're good little doctors all year long, or if they say the right incantation over will do what they know oxy does.

The sad -- no -- the disgusting, reprehensible, stomach-churning and unforgivable truth is that I'm on the "fibro" meds I'm on because it makes it look like Dr 9 is doing absolutely everything he can. In fact, he's doing the least possible. He's playing it as safe as he can. The word hasn't reached Jesusland that Ashcroft no longer is attorney general. And when the wagon trains arrive, that word isn't going to make a ripple in the mud puddle.

(Aside: There's a huge illegal drug problem in Jesusland, in part, because people aren't prescribed strong enough or, simply, adequate amounts of legal medications they need for legitimate reasons. Something I'll come back to later is that the way to win the WAR ON DRUGS is to stop fighting it. Maybe then we can let South America have a few democracies...)

OK, so fuck all this shit.

All I need is my own e-stim, Klonopin, and oxy. Insurance: $160/mo. Dr's visit: $25 copay/mo. Stim: paid (will be). Klonopin: about $10/mo. Oxy: about $20/mo.

Total health care costs per month = $215.

Things as they are now are too much, in terms of what it will cost me when I repay my parents, in terms of running around to the doctors (full-time goddam job) and getting barely a goddam return on my goddam investment!

Goddam it it would just be so amazing not to need doctors at all.

...Wow did this post get lost in the woods. I guess this will be my weekends now, without painkillers: complete inability to sleep, total insomnia, writing nonsense but completely immersed in it, obsessed, mind shot, ability to form connections and make associations locked in a trigger point, chain smoking, hurting everywhere, squinting against the light, desperately trying to milk the venom from all 26 letters.

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NOTE:

Please see "SEE THE MAGICAL HORSE PUSH THE MAGICAL CART!"... again. I added another anecdote to it. I was editing the post, as I often do when I re-read previous ones, but somehow ended up tacking on a story that didn't really have anything to do with anything. And I got trapped working on it for hours somehow. All the sleep deprivation is definitely getting to me. Please notify me when I have gone completely insane. (Read: crazy enough that it isn't fun or funny any more.)

Whatever I spent all that time on, it's there for your reading pleasure.

...As long as I'm just throwing stuff out here: feedback. Please give any and all you'd care to. Especially re the format of the site. I think I need to tweak things. I want to make this blog as easy to read as possible, of course, yet not boring. If you have any ideas re what I can do, I will be Jack's attentively reading eyes.
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Mixx it!

THIS TITLE ISN'T MORRISSEY-RELATED!

...though he and The Smiths are the best thing to listen to when you're down. Nothing else (and I like The Cure, too) allows you to wallow deep deep down in your own misery.

Moving on!

It seems (with crossed toes) that I may have been granted a reprieve. This happens to fibro patients -- the agony waxes and wanes. I think the more popular term is that we fibromyalgians (I prefer this term to "fibromyalgics." A fibromyalgian sounds like an alien, and to most people and most doctors we're the closest they'll get to seeing one) have flares, and I think this term is wrongly and stupidly applied to us. A flare would be an exacerbation of what is our normal, baseline pain. And we wish. The truth is that the so-called flare is the norm and the very limited relief of very limited duration --maybe a month out of a year -- is our reality.

The truth, like everything else, fucking hurts.

My reprieve happens to occur just as I'm coming off Percocet -- had my last one yesterday -- and the parents are making hay into gold on that score. Mom especially. I reminded her that it's an amazingly impossible thing for my cessation of taking pain relieving medications (I'm getting off Effexor and Mirapex too) to cause pain relief. And I've also reminded my parents that their pleas to allow me to "let the new meds work" and their reminders that the increase in Prozac and Lyrica, plus the addition of Cymbalta in about two weeks need a couple months to work are likely to have a downside:

In about six months (if I'm still in Lummox, so help me and my too-kind parents -- had to get that plug in because I have one trifle with them maybe once a month. Maybe. ...That, and they're keeping me alive) whatever the Effexor and Mirapex did for me is going to end, and they may have an entirely different animal on their hands. I've gone off my anti-anxiety meds before -- they work, ergo you're not weird, ergo you don't need meds -- and it has always been almost exactly six months before I found myself in an ER, thinking I was having a heart attack, knowing differently, but having a king-hell panic attack and in need of sedation, a referral to a doctor, and relief from the 49 percent of me that believed I really was having a heart attack.

The thing about having panic and generalized anxiety disorders? If I have an actual heart attack, I'll likely be older and more accustomed to the king-hell panic attacks I wake up with every morning. So if I wake up with a real heart attack, that should pretty well do me in. I'll just take a Klonopin and brush it off.

I hope I'm not the only one who finds that hilarious.

[Pain (the scales are back!): 7.5/10 -- It's not a big improvement, but it's still an improvement... However temporary.

Anxiety: 8/10 -- Good as gold!

Self-negating title: You read it, You can't un-read it!]

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WITHDRAWAL!

I'm detoxing for the holidays. Stepping down off Percocet 10/325s by increments of one pill every five days. Right now I'm taking four per day instead of the normal five... Well, normal was six, which barely masked my pain enough for me to walk three blocks in a day... A day that would ensure that I would be on bed rest for the following two days.

So five wasn't enough, but was all I could get from the GP I had. He dropped me because he didn't want to deal with a fibromyalgian. And he didn't want to deal with a fibromyalgian who is seeing a pain clinic that is horribly averse to writing scripts themselves. If they had their way, a GP would write all their prescriptions.

Have I made the point that the pain (no "management") clinic I'm seeing is totally fucked up?
And I know it isn't fair -- I haven't described my dealings with my GP in enough detail yet. I assure you such will follow... Perhaps when I don't want to tear my teeth out...

Anyway, the posts may have more time between them. Or maybe not. Writing -- getting things out -- can be therapeutic. In fact, I'm surprised the good people at QPC didn't prescribe it.
OH -- and sorry this is going to be an aside, basically -- I also am in the process of getting off Mirapex and Effexor and dear sweet Klonopin because all QPC will prescribe me is Lyrica. Lyrica Lyrica Lyrica by the mouthful. So how does 900mg of Lyrica stand up to Percocet 10/325s times five? It's a knockout in the first 10 seconds of round one... The winner? You're aware.

No segue -- I'm thinking about taking five Percocets a day until they run out. Why stretch out the misery? I know I'm experiencing less of it because of the (all too brief) step-down I'm doing, but am becoming convinced it would be better to go cold turkey (or turkee, if you prefer) from five. I've always preferred ripping off the Band-aid instead of trying to be gentle and taking five minutes and experiencing each individual hair being ripped out as separate events.

Will keep you, dear reader, up to date on any such decision. Until next time, I write you from Purgatory.

(My own, since the Holy Catholic Church decided there isn't one any longer...)

[Pain: from 10/10.

Anxiety: 10/10.

Self-righteousness: set to 10/10 and stuck there.]

Mixx it!