Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Raising the patch

Just like a vessel on a long voyage needs to refuel, my body, on it's journey, needs more pain medicine. Specifically, Fentanyl. For a few months now my pain level has been creeping up. It happens so slowly that I don't realize it. I don't have a fuel meter with an indicator light on my dashboard.
Eventually, though, my brain does flip on the light of realization: low on pain medicine.

That happened today in Dr. Z's office. Now I once again am reminded how nice it is to have less pain! It doesn't take long for the higher dose to kick in. I put on the new patch at around 3pm, and later that night (this evening) I started noticing that I had less pain. It's actually the *absence* of pain which catches me by surprise more than the pain itself does. Interesting.

The dosage went from 37.5mmg (micromilligrams) up to 50mmg. This also means that I get to go from two patches to one, which I like as well. The skin under the patch often itches, so having only one patch to deal with is nicer.

I am enjoying the relief of less pain. I realize that it's far from ideal to need higher doses of strong medicines (Fentanyl is stronger than Morphine), but as the shrink said a while ago, "none of this is ideal". If that's the case, than I'd rather be out of pain.

Out of curiosity, Robert was interested to know how much Fentanyl our friend who passed away from cancer last year was taking. We went onto her blog. She had breast cancer metastasis, all over her body, and in her bones. Pain was a big problem.
As it turns out, she was taking 50mmg also. I had thought it was much higher.

It was a poignant point of reference.

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The other medical update for me today is that I got a call from Prof Meller's office that my next consult has been scheduled. It is with Dr. Rot (the Israeli way of spelling and saying the name "Roth") who was on the team of surgeons who did my PVNS excision surgery. It is scheduled for this coming Sunday morning at 8:30am... in Tel Aviv!!! That means I will have to leave here at 6:30am. They couldn't make it later, and, if I didn't accept the date, it would be another few months before I got to see him. Once these appointments with the famous doctors are scheduled, there isn't much room to move around.
When they say "jump", "how high" is the general idea. However, my mind sasses back to me "if I could jump, I wouldn't need this appointment, would I."


1 comment :

  1. I hope things go well with this upcoming appointment. I'm glad you have some relief from the pain, and this may not be forever, at that dosage. I only pray for good things for you this coming year.
    Hugs, Jackie

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