This seems to be the key. I’ve been taking 7.5mg hydrocodone/500mg acetominophen for awhile for back and neck problems. It’s remained very effective for me because I manage to take one or two at the very most in a 24 hour period. The pain is not terrible when I wake up, and in the evening I can manage it with ice and light exercise. I take one or at the most two (four hours after the first) during the day when I simply have to work and the pain gets too distracting. The amount I take seems to be low enough that I still get a lot of relief from just one pill when I need it most.
I had lung surgery in 2009 and had a chest tube. Not fun. The IV morphine was absolutely amazing. The constipation was not.
I’ve taken vicodin after foot surgery. I still hurt…but I didn’t care. An odd feeling.
I was given a shot of demerol once for kidney stones. It left me with the most abysmal feeling of ennui for several days.
Upon my appendicitis attack in 2008, an initial dosage of this stuff did nothing for me. Appendicitis is PAINFUL! The ER doc was reluctant to give me anything more because (as he described it to me) “we have so many people come here that are drug addicts faking symptoms just to get drugs, and your symptoms don’t exactly match with all the common ones for appendicitis, which is why I ordered a CAT scan”.
Upon positive appendicitis results from CAT scan, another IV Dilaudid dose was administered. It did seem to help. The pain doesn’t really go away, but it goes someplace compartmentalized in your mind, someplace farther away to care about. I was pissed at that doc for insinuating that I was a druggie looking for a fix though. Imbibing the liquid nastiness necessary for a CAT scan and the scan itself took a couple hours, hours I was in agony.
How the hell is that legal?
When I was in college, I had to get some minor surgery from an injury that I got playing pickup basketball… I was given a script for Percocet afterwards, something ridiculous like 30 pills (for a 19 year old college male! minor surgery!). I had some reading to get done, so I was trying not to take it, but by around 8pm that evening the incision/stitches had started to really ache, so I took one. I can still vividly remember the feeling as I went to sleep that night (not that much later…!), how it felt that everything was right with the world, I was completely relaxed, and there wasn’t even a concept of “pain”.
I feel like I could get addicted to that pretty easily; I ended up throwing the rest of those away a few years later. The only strong painkiller I’ve had since is codeine, which just made me nauseous. Probably a good thing.
I don’t like vicodin at all. It does nothing for pain it only makes me nauseous and constipated.
Standing orders from the MDs who sign the order for home hospice, I assume. I’m not a hospice nurse, so I can’t tell you for sure. A verbal (phone) order is legal enough, as long as you get something signed within 24 hours, for other nursing.
But, again, no one cares much about opioid/opiate dependance in hospice. By definition, if the doc has signed an order for hospice and his staff has called the hospice company, he thinks you have less than 6 months to live.
ETA: Grandma died early this morning, by the way. The hospice nurse took the morphine and other hospice-provided medications with her when she left this morning after making the appropriate phone calls.
I absolutely love codeine. I love it so much that I’ve been in and out of detox-rehab more times than I care to talk about. Now I make it a practice to notify all medical personnel that I am an addict so don’t give me any of that stuff. But I still love it and would happily eat it by the tablespoon, given the opportunity.
Yes, I agree, Vicodin is awesome. A lot better than Percocet for me. Sounds like you’re on a nice dosage of it, from your description!
Huh. I have never experienced the “life is beautiful” effect with any narcotics. Nor, fortunately, the bad reactions either. They make me a little woozy, and help the pain somewhat. And the woozy effect can be longer-lasting than I’d like - for example my first experience with Percodan was 30ish years ago after my wisdom teeth were removed. Surgery Friday. Last dose of Percocet Sunday afternoon. Went to work Monday, sat there staring vaguely at my computer monitor for a bit, then decided I should probably go home.
Tylenol 3, same thing. Had it when I broke my foot last fall. Tried to work from home, spent several hours staring at the computer and occasionally doing something work-ish on it, gave it all up. It probably helped the pain a bit more than plain old Tylenol.
IV morphine, same thing. No euphoria, helped pain a bit, not enough to make it all go away.
All this is why I tend to have a small stash of old pain pills. They don’t take away enough of the pain to make me want to keep using them for pain purposes, they don’t make me feel lalalalabeautifulhappywheeeeeeeee, and the wooziness makes me waste time when I could be surfing the web or watching TV. So I’ll use them for a couple of days and put the leftovers in the back of the closet until I remember them and throw them out a couple years later.
And apparently I don’t give off “drug-seeking” vibes, as evidenced by the ER doc in Arizona who gave me a scrip for Vicodin a few years back, when I showed up in the ER at midnight with what he diagnosed as a sprain (but later turned out to be a broken elbow). I didn’t even ask for the stuff, the doctor actually offered it, to which my response was something like “huh? Oh, sure, might as well”. So I guess the takeaway lesson from that is, if I ever do decide to get hooked on narcotics and start surfing the ERs to score a fix: do it at a time where I can sit quietly for a while without whining about being in AAAAAAAAgooooneeeeee.
The only times I’ve had a pleasant experience with any kind of drugs, aside from feeling a little loopy on booze, have been when they’re knocking me out for medical stuff. There’s that brief moment of “room tilting”, then a brief mental “huh, cool”, then Lights Out.
Feeling that good from something I could self-administer would be a bit scary.
“It was positively delicious. NOW IST DER TIME ON SHPROCKETS VEN VE DANCE!”
I’m always a bit perplexed to see the raves for Demerol. I’ve only had the oral form, but it gave me a lot more nausea and a weirded-out/“brain fog” feeling that I never got from hydro/oxycodone or codeine. It felt very… synthetic, somehow. Reminded me a lot of propoxyphene (aka Darvocet), which isn’t a good thing.
And I seem to recall that “Demerol? Shit!” was Matt Dillon’s reaction in Drugstore Cowboy when he broke into a hospital in search of drugs and that’s all he found.