pain management

Happy Weekend.

Recently 'The Pain', the on-going-for-months-never-right-since-the-operations-new-tumours-in-the-spleenetic-bed pain has now turned into a full time presence.

Where we were at before was a sudden and horrendous pain attack, that a few months go, had me taking hot baths, almost crying and clutching myself in foetal positions.

More recently, I was given Oxycodon. Somewhat optimistically I was started on 5mg, 4 times a day. I accidentally started 'doubling-up' from the off, as I habitally take two of everything. So I was on 40mg a day. My nurses were cool.

This worked fine until the latest stage on The Pain. It is now a full-time background thing. It now feels like someone has punched me in the kidneys, about 5 minutes ago - a dull ache speads out from the side and comes all around the front. This is it's 'normal background state'. Then it escalates - normally every 4 hours. Other things can bring on attacks - like sitting at my work desk for a few hours without getting up and then moving and walking for a short while.

The bottom line is that just to get through the day that 10mg hit has become 20mg and I'm still in pain. I spoke to my pain-specialist and pharmacist today and she gave me some 'slow release' Oxycodone to take - 40mg in the morning and 40mg at night. They will apparently slowly release the Oxy into my body through the day. I'm them to take the fast release stuff as normal.

So I'm suddenly taking up to 160mg of Oxy a day.

I was sick this morning. The doubling-up has made me quite nauseous - I'll get used to it - but i'm now expecting another wave of it, as I've just taken my 4 x 10mg slow release evening tablets and a 10mg faster dose because, well, i'm in pain again.

Christ this stuff can make you drowsy. Proper 'fall asleep with my blackberry in my hand' stuff. And also, although I can't find this documented, for some reason, all savoury cooked food tastes like shit to me at the moment.

I got a curry in last night and threw it all away. I "made" a simple Fish Pie tonight and although I ate most of it, it had the same dead taste. I first discovered this when I got out of hospital, I warmed up a tin of baked beans to go with a pie (check out my healthy diet) and thought the beans were somehow off, so threw them out whilst cooking ... then got to the pie and threw that away too. Everything tastes really 'not right'.

Things I do like are ice-cream, Coco Pops (sugar cereals), milk and er, that's about it - oh, a tomato salad if I can get some and I did have a some nice seafood the other day. But loads of stuff just tastes rubbish - it must be something to do with the Oxy, It's the only big change in my system recently.

I've got a studio day tomorrow, off to see family Sunday (oh, my car is back - mint condition - all washed and valeted), going to stay with Simon-On-Sea (as he shall now be know) until Wednesday evening, where I am lucky enough to have a ticket to see Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) play Inter Milan in a Champions League match. Really excited. Spurs are kinda my 'second team' but to get to see Inter play and hear the ol' Champs League music, will be great.

If you're American, you will have no idea what I'm talking about. Soccer. Biggest 'club' tourney where all the top teams in Europe compete. Trust me, it's a big deal over here. Your World Series. What a bloody misnomer 'World' is in that title, by the way.

Anyway, I'm boring myself now. Opiates and football.

I'm not going to stay awake much longer, although as I type this I'm in a mini-world of pain again. I still hate the nights - pain and sweating. Lots of sweating. As in, I go to bed with two towels. I have a really good air-blower heater in my en-suite bathroom. Comes in very handy at 3.00am, blasting with my cold damp body with warm air. Anyway ...

... see you in the morning ... night.

zzzzz

so, what's next ... ?

I spent a few hours at the hospital today. Like you do. I may as well start renting a room over there, it would make life easier and save me a fucking fortune on parking fees.

Here's the short-term plan. Let's use a few more bullet-points. I like bullet-points. To be honest, after the week I've had, I feel like using real bullets.

• On Sunday, I will be pissing into a plastic petrol-can for 24 hours. Not continuously, obviously, that would be absurd and dehydrating. But each time I need to go, I shall go into the plastic-petrol can. I will then take my plastic-can of piss and deliver it to a nice female nurse at the hospital on Monday morning. Another chip away at my crumbling wall of dignity.
• On Monday night I will be packing my overnight bag, for a stop-over at the delightful Watford General Hospital.
• On Tuesday morning, after getting no fucking sleep whatsoever due to the bedlam that exists on the ward, I will be taken to 'theatre' and have a Hickman line inserted into me. It's a plastic tube thing that's drilled into my upper chest area, so my chemo drugs can be pumped into me in the following weeks - a bit like my previous PICC line, but not in my arm, but up near my increasingly blackening heart. I've started reading about the procedure but gave up midway through the second paragraph as it was total depressing and sounds like a hideous procedure.
  
  If you want to read about it, read about it here. I clearly have the kind of sick readership that would probably still go to Victorian freak shows if they had the chance, so knock yourself out reading the finer details of the misery I have coming up.
• On the following Sunday night, I will return back to the hospital to prepare for my first 5 days of chemo-carpet-bombing treatment starting on the Monday morning. I'm staying in a shitty dump of a ward (I've been there before) and I'm just praying for a 'side-room' so I'm not staring at a collection of 80-somethings with tubes hanging out of their noses and who shit into bowls after drawing a thin blue curtain around them for 'privacy'.
• Some 'good news'. I got some better pain-killers today. They are called oxycodone hydrohloride and are of the highly addictive variety that people from Liverpool would burgle your house to get hold of. I got a little bit high off them, which is to be expected as they are an opiate. At last - a slight pleasure in my world of discomfort and pain. Of course, the downside is that they will constipate me to hell and - as I think I've realised this afternoon - make me grumpy and snappy. Sorry, make me grumpier and snappier.
  
  They won't be able to knock out the worst pain, but they should make the general day-to-day shit a bit more bearable - just expect a slightly more lethargic, slower, washed-out version of myself. And even more grumpy when asked to do things. So, don't go ruining my buzz none, OK? You can read about my new toys here.

That's about it. I'm not feeling very writey today and my words are all a bit rubbish. Must be the new drugs. Anyway, I will not make more words happen as they are sounding wrongful and misunderstooding.

I wonder if I'll every have a normal day again?