Health Fitness and Beauty

It’s gotta be the pills

March 22, 2007 by Tricia

I tried that new medication again on Friday night. Between trying it Monday night for the first time, and then again on Friday evening I’ve spent just about the whole week feeling wiped out.

I fell asleep on the couch Friday night. I got up in the middle of the night – my eyes so blurry and dry I could barely see. The medication had made me feel so dizzy, woozy and nauseated. It was terrible. I went back to sleep in my bedroom this time round and didn’t wake up until two in the afternoon.

I managed to get up, check my email and spend a bit of time with my husband before I had to lie down on the couch again. My head was just spinning. I almost wished that I’d partied too hard the night before because at least I’d have done something perhaps worth feeling so awful for. Geez … take a pill and feel awful for 24 or more hours? No thanks!

Chris and I watched a movie and then I fell asleep on the couch again by seven thirty in the evening. Wow, I was up for a just a bit more than 5 hours!

I woke up at about 10 pm and we had a very late dinner.

Of course I wasn’t so tired anymore but I still felt dragged out, and I’d get waves of nausea every now and then.

Chris’ mom must have called sometime while I was passed out on the couch Saturday evening. He must have told her I had taken a marijuana pill. I guess he didn’t mention, or she didn’t hear him say that it’s a synthetic form of the drug because he later told me that she was really happy that i was on a “natural” medication. Well … good for her for being so supportive and progressive, but I think if it was natural I wouldn’t have felt so bad for such a long time!

As you can see I haven’t spent much time posting on this site this week. I think the medicine wore off by Sunday but I’ve just had a bad week. Topped it off with yet another medical test Wednesday morning! I’m so tired of medical tests.

I’m really not sure that I want to give this medication a third try.

Has anyone else tried Nabilone? The synthetic marijuana capsule? If so, did it make you feel so dragged out?

Trying Nabilone again

March 17, 2007 by Tricia

So I’m trying my new medication again. The one that I told you about on Wednesday. Yeah, that stuff, the Nabilone.

I took the capsule about two hours ago and so far it doesn’t seem to be hitting me quite as hard as it did the first time I tried the medication.

I didn’t take another earlier in the week because the one I took on Monday seemed to have hung around making me feel dragged out until at least Wednesday or Thursday. Maybe it was just a coincidence that I felt so tired out? I mean maybe I was fighting something and that’s why I was so wiped?

Either way, so far so good with this try of the new medication. Now, if I end up feeling hung over and dragged out all weekend I’ll know it was the medication again.

I do hope it helps my pain and my sleep though. It’s supposed to do both.

Wish me luck?

Managing money when you aren’t able to work

March 15, 2007 by Tricia

It’s unfortunate that while I’ve been sick at home that I’ve had to spend a good portion of my time worrying about money. I was getting sick pay when I was first off work, and then when that ran out I was able to get medical leave pay from our provincial government but that ran out too. So for the last 8 months or so I’ve been on my own, trying to figure out how to pay our loans, home insurance and other bills.

As many of you know I have found some ways to make money on the internet but we still have to watch our spending. At least we won’t have to go in for Debt Advice thanks to the income that I’m getting from our various websites.

All of that money, what would be “extra money” to most folks, ends up going into our current accounts. We then pay our bills online using those accounts.

We never used our credit Cards much, and we use them even less these days. Still, I’m happy that we do have credit cards in case any big expenses come up.

We also re-negotiated our mortgage last summer with a broker who specializes in getting the best deals on Mortgages. We’ve been very lucky ever since we bought this house. We got it when the interest rates were at an all time low and actual ended up with 0% interest for the first 6 months! We had a variable mortgage so the rate did go up as the interest rates climbed but we never did end up paying any more than 4% interest in the first five years we owned our home. Now, since we renewed our mortgage our interest rate is a little higher, but we renewed just as the interest rates were about to go up again, so once more we lucked out and got a good deal. I think we’re paying 4.5% interest now.

All in all, considering that I’ve been stuck at home, sick, with little to no income for the last 14 going on 15 months we’ve been pretty lucky money wise. However, I do know that if I hadn’t found a way to start making some income off my websites I’d be sitting here telling you a vastly different story right now.

My Tips –

You never know when something might happen that could cause you to lose your job or have to take extended sick leave like I’ve had to do.

My advice to all is to try to set as much as 20 to 25% of your income aside in case something happens. If you don’t end up using that money it’ll make a nice retirement income someday.

Also, stay on top of your bills – don’t let them build up. Once you start to get into debt everything just seems to have that snowball effect and the situation will get worse. Trust me on this one – I’ve been there too!

Aerocare Air Ambulance service

March 14, 2007 by Tricia

As a nurse working in a busy emergency room I can’t begin to tell you how important medevac services can be.

In case you aren’t aware – a company such as aerocare.com, provides air ambulance services, and air evacuation medical flight services. It’s a valuable service, as sometimes an air ambulance is the only way to rescue someone from a remote area, or pick up a patient from a multi-vehicle accident on a highway. They can get to a patient quickly and get them to a hospital faster than a ground ambulance in many cases.

A number of the nurses that I’ve worked with in the past have worked for air ambulance services. Perhaps even Aerocare. I’ve heard stories of stressful trips bringing a patient back home from one country to another. Often the patients my fellow nurses have cared for are critically ill and these patients sometimes become even sicker as they travel to a hospital in their own country or via air to a trauma hospital.

The nurses and other medical staff that work for Aerocare have to be sharp and on the ball. Certainly if I ever needed the services of Aerocare I’d feel secure in knowing how professional the medical staff would be, just because of my own experience working in the ER with some of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with who’ve done medivac work in the past.

Why am I talking about Aerocare? Well, it’s March break. People often take vacations at this time of year and sometimes they get sick while they are away from home. It’s always good to know about an air ambulance service that could bring your sick father or mother home if they became critically ill while vacationing in another country.

If you needed the services of Aerocare you’d appreciate the fact that competent medical staff would accompany your loved on either on a regular flight home, or via special air transport. Medical staff would monitor your loved one’s condition all the way home and care for them as needed to make sure that they made it safely back to a hospital in their home Country.

Aerocare offers 24 hour worldwide service, with a flight nurse and staff medic on each mission. Considering that they provide their service worldwide they have extensive domestic and international experience. Their medical equipment is state of the art.

As I alluded to earlier, they also provide commercial airline medical escort services.

The pricing for the services they provide is reasonable as well.

I hope that people don’t end up needing the services of an air ambulance service anytime soon, but it’s good to know about service such as this isn’t it?

I finally tried my new medicine

March 14, 2007 by Tricia

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.

It’s gotta be the pills

Trying Nabilone again

Managing money when you aren’t able to work

Aerocare Air Ambulance service

I finally tried my new medicine

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