Archives for March 2007

OMG!

I’m still wiped out.

As regular readers of this site already know, I’ve been stuck at home for the last 14 or 15 months due to illness. I have Crohn’s disease and it’s caused me some terrible pain. I take some of the strongest pain medications that are on the market – and they don’t help the pain all that much. The meds take away maybe 50% of the pain – which on a good day is great, but on a bad day not nearly enough.

So between the weird sleep cycle that the pain has caused me, and the pain and nausea that the Crohn’s has caused me I’ve had a handful of doctors caring for me. One of them, a sleep doctor, first suggested last May or April that I get in on a Sleep/pain study.

It was to test a new drug and how it might help the sleep cycle of a chronic pain patient. Unfortunately, to try to new drug, I’d have to spend at least one month off my regular pain meds. At that time I’d only been taking pain meds for about four months for the first time ever since my Crohn’s began in the early 90’s. No way was I going to give up the only relief that I’d ever had in the last 15+ years!

So I’ve been puttering along since then, and I think I’ve been worse so far this year than last. I told my pain doctor this a week ago Monday and she finally decided to try me on the drug that they were going to use in the pain/sleep study that my sleep doctor had wanted me to join. She thought that since the other pain meds aren’t working as well as we’d hoped that perhaps the synthetic marijuana pills might act on different pain receptors than the other drugs, and certainly it should help my nausea and help me get to sleep.

So now we’re up to last week. We picked up the capsules, Nabilone (Cesamet pulvule) last week, but I wanted to wait to try them until the weekend when Chris would be around, and able to stay up later so I could take my pill as directed – at bed time. His bed time that is, not mine since I don’t really have a bed time these days.

I have weird reactions to drugs. Sometimes they do almost the opposite of what they are supposed to, other times I have allergic reactions to them – once anaphylactic. So you can see why I’d want my husband around and alert when I’m trying a new drug for the first time right?

I didn’t end up taking the new medicine on the weekend. As you can see from earlier posts I got busy on the weekend redesigning one of my husbands sites and reorganizing several others. I didn’t want to be doped up while I was doing that. Plus, I probably delayed because I was nervous to try the medicine. I think I had a feeling that something might go wrong.

So switch to Monday night. Chris had to go to work for 7:30 a.m. this morning – meaning he gets up at about 5:30 am – and goes to bed at about 10 – 10:30 p.m. on the nights before he has to get up that early. So that meant I needed to take the pill at least two hours before he went to bed so that he’d be up and around if things didn’t go well.

I took the capsule at around 8:30 pm. We actually have epi-pens in the house in case of allergic reactions (I’m allergic to be stings and duh I’m a gardener! (no stings yet)) so I went so far as to set up an epi-pen nearby. Hey! I said I was nervous. Give me a break.

I took the capsule and things went well as far as not having an allergic reaction or I suppose a weird reaction. I don’t think that I really felt the Nabilone until 9:30 or 10 pm … then I started to get a bit dizzy, a bit woozy feeling.

By 11:30 I was dead tired and not feeling too bad but I STAYED UP?? Stupid. I should have taken advantage of that tiredness. Of course I still had a post or two I had to write.

Anyway, I finally went to bed at about 3 a.m. which is much earlier than it’s been in a long time. I got up at about 11 am that morning and spent the rest of the day feeling overtired and woozy.

That’s some strong medication!

That’s why I didn’t do much posting yesterday.

Hey, even though I do take other strong medicine It still hit me hard. I actually break some of my other meds in half because they are so strong. This new medication is a capsule- I can’t break it in half.

I still feel overtired today and I didn’t take any of that medicine last night. Depending on how I feel throughout the rest of the day I may try taking another capsule this evening … otherwise I’ll try it again tomorrow evening. I hope it doesn’t keep wiping me out! I mean, I’d like to try it out and see if it actually does help my pain.

I’ll keep you updated on how the synthetic marijuana is doing in future posts – shorter posts.