What Tiggers do best.

My sister chided me today for not posting anything since Monday and there's a reason for that, I just didn't feel like it. In fact, I didn't feel like much of anything Tuesday and much of Wednesday. I just felt like crap to the point where I couldn't get the motivation to do anything. I didn't feel like posting to Facebook, or even reading it for that matter. I didn't feel like checking my email or watching TV, much less doing any work. All I really felt like doing was sleeping whenever the pain didn't prevent it. I hit a new low point and I broke down. My wife broke down too as she confessed as to how much this has all been weighing her down. She didn't want to admit it because she didn't want to "put that on me" with all else that I'm dealing with, but I look at it more as something that I've put on her. I told her that I feel like she's effectively become a single mother in recent weeks as I've either been incapable or unmotivated to help her out as much as I should. I've spent a lot of time in bed over the last week or so, getting sick of being sick. We both cried over it all and got it out of our systems. Sometimes that's what is needed to turn things around, to hit bottom, or at least seemingly so, because then all you can do is look up.

I woke up Wednesday morning still feeling awful, with a touch of nausea, but I also realized that I was dehydrated. I woke up with my mouth feeling dry and as I drank a glass of water, my nausea turned to stomach cramps. I thought this was strange as I had had quite a bit to drink the night before. I still didn't feel like eating anything, but I managed to down a couple of glasses of water before going to my radiation treatment. After I came home from the treatment I was ready to call my boss and tell him that I was going to need to take some time off because I couldn't do this any more. I felt like I was ready to throw in the towel. My wife convinced me to wait until after I'd had a chance to meet with the pain management specialist to see what he had to say. So as she took the girls off to a pre-arranged play date, I lay on the couch trying to find the motivation to get up.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but during the time they were out, I somehow got a second wind. I managed to get myself up off the couch and login to work to see what needed to be done. I wasn't expecting to do anything but read through my email and then go to bed, but somehow I was able to get things done. I had a handful of things that had a deadline for that day and I couldn't let them go unfinished. I guess that I had finally drank enough to hydrate myself because my appetite also came back and I ate perhaps a little more than I should. At my wife's insistence I had been making an effort to drink more than I felt I needed to and I guess that did the trick. By the end of the day, I had completed most of the work that I needed to get done and felt much better. I was even able to interact with the girls for a while before they went to bed.

This morning I woke up feeling fine, or as fine as I can these days. I had my usual morning pains, which went away once the morning Vicodin kicked in, but I didn't have any of the sour feelings in my gut. My stomach felt fine and I was able to eat breakfast, and though I woke up with a little dry mouth, I didn't feel dehydrated. The feeling stayed with me all day and it was as normal of a day as I've felt in a while. I don't know what happened. Perhaps I had a bug that finally worked its way out of my system? Did it cause the dehydration or did the dehydration cause the ick? Did I just have to get to the bottom before I could bounce back? I don't know what the answer is, but somehow I did bounce back today and hopefully tomorrow will be more of the same.

I had my meeting with the pain management doctor this afternoon. After describing my pain and experience to him, he agreed that it sounds like some of my pain may be more neurological and he gave me prescriptions for all new medications which I'll pick up tomorrow after my radiation treatment. I'll be ditching the Fentanyl patches, the Miralax and the stool softeners in favor of a regimen of Methodone, Neurontin, and Lacfulose. He gave me his cell number and told me to call if I have any adverse reactions or other issues, and asked me to call him on Monday to tell him how things are going. Hopefully, these will get me to where I need to be, only time will tell, but he did caution that it may take a little adjustment here and there to get the dosages right, so the waters could still be a little rough ahead. I'm always a little nervous starting a new medication on a Friday because it usually means that if something goes wrong, Urgent Care is your only option until Monday rolls around, but at least I have the doctor's cell if something does go wrong. I'm cautiously optimistic that these new meds will work. The proof will be in the pudding.


On a side note, when I picked up my Vicodin refill the other day. It was the first time I had to pay for it. My previous prescriptions had been in December and we were up against the annual out of pocket maximum defined by our health plan, so insurance had covered them in full. Now that the new year has rolled around, all of that starts over, so we pay more "out of pocket" for now until that maximum is reached for this year. As I picked up my prescription for 100 pills of Vicodin, the cost was almost $250. That's $2.50 per pill. I was struck by this because Vicodin has been around for a long time. This isn't some new drug fresh off the clinical trials and on to the FDA approved list. Surely by now the patent has expired on this stuff and whoever held the patent has recouped their development costs as well as their costs to bring it to market. So it begs the question, why the hell is this stuff $2.50 per pill? From what I can tell doing a quick web search, it looks like this stuff has been around since the 1920's. I'm sure that I won't like the answer to that question, whatever it is.