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ProfessorTomoe

Changing Medications (Level of Trust Required)

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Good luck.  Really dude you are getting the short end of the body problems stick.  Hope they can fix some of them

Thanks. You know, what I should do is create a new CD with the viewer software directories duplicated, but with all the images replaced by cat pictures of the same size.

I'd do it, too, if my appointment was on April 1st.

(The appointment is actually Friday morning. Not today. I have a hard time telling what day it is with all the drugs they're pumping into me.)

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Just went back and checked—I'm four days shy of a month of coming down with the sinusitis that started me coughing. The infection appears to be gone, with no fever and no swollen glands, but I just can't get myself to stop coughing for more than about 15 minutes at a time. I'll go that long, then hit a jag that'll have me coughing for almost a few minutes, off and on. It might be allergies, in which case it's about to get a lot worse. The huge live oak tree in front of my house is about to start spewing pollen.

The good news is I think I found an alcohol-free source of dextromethorphan HBr (i.e., cough suppressant) on Amazon. It's in gel caps, and it's definitely not available from CVS. Until it arrives from Amazon, I've got to put up with Mrs. Prof's CVS menthol lozenges which taste terrible (I swear that woman has cross-wired taste buds sometimes) and only help a bit for a couple of hours at a time.

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Unfortunately, at this point it's extremely possible that you're coughing because your throat is irritated from coughing. And of course the coughing irritates your throat...

If that's what is happening, any temporary reduction in your coughing is a good thing: it gives your throat at least a little time to heal. But a longer break would be better, of course.

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1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

Unfortunately, at this point it's extremely possible that you're coughing because your throat is irritated from coughing. And of course the coughing irritates your throat...

If that's what is happening, any temporary reduction in your coughing is a good thing: it gives your throat at least a little time to heal. But a longer break would be better, of course.

Vicious circle (cycle? I could never tell). Sounds logical. I hope what I've ordered will give my throat a long enough break, because this 2-hour menthol stuff isn't really doing the trick.

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Just about time to get ready to go to the spine doctor. Gotta take my pills, shower, get dressed, and then fight traffic and construction to get to his office. I have two fears:

  1. I'll get there and discover I forgot the MRI disc.
  2. He'll study the MRI results, come into the exam room, and say, "Well, I'm not really seeing anything ..."

It's enough to trigger an anxiety attack, either way.

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Guess what? Item #2 above happened, in essence. Just my luck. He saw spots of arthritis and *maybe* a spot where there *might* have been and old compression of less than a tenth of an inch, but otherwise the MRI didn't help him much.

A manual exam, however, DID help. He pushed areas on my back that hurt so bad they made me forget who won the Super Bowl this year. My pain level jumped from a 5 up to a 7.5 after his exam.

End result: he's scheduled a procedure on March 30 of "diagnostic shots" along both sides of the four vertebra above the area where it becomes solid (whatever that is - I haven't looked it up yet). I'm supposed to go home and unload our dishwasher afterward, noting if and how much pain relief I have. I report that back to his physician's assistant later. If the relief is sufficient, he'll perform what is basically a cauterization of those same nerves. That, he said, should give me 6 to 18 months of relief, in conjunction with 12 physical therapy appointments.

If, on the other hand, the diagnostic shots don't provide much or any relief, he'll try again in a lower area. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Mix in an electrophysiologist appointment on April 4th and I don't know what the fark you get.

Oh, and he also wants me to talk to my primary care doctor about getting off of the hydrocodone and back onto the Tramadol. I've called and e-mailed him about that. The pain is bad enough with an every-eight-hour hydrocodone dose, so I don't know how it's going to be on Tramadol, whatever dosage he prescribes. Guess I'll find out eventually.

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Just got a call from my primary care doctor's nurse. He wants me to switch from hydrocodone back to Tramadol, post haste. I warned them that I'll probably be doing three pills a day (my average prior to the back flareup was two). The nurse didn't seem to have any objections, but we'll see about what the doctor thinks about it once refill time rolls around.

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I don't want to say that my muscle twitches are back because this current set is different than the last.  They don't last as long but are stronger and more focused on the legs and sometimes the arms than the last set.  Shrink day is about three weeks away so unless they get appalling will wait until then to say something about them.

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2 hours ago, mlooney said:

I don't want to say that my muscle twitches are back because this current set is different than the last.  They don't last as long but are stronger and more focused on the legs and sometimes the arms than the last set.  Shrink day is about three weeks away so unless they get appalling will wait until then to say something about them.

No butt twitches this time around? No auto-twerking?

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4 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

No butt twitches this time around? No auto-twerking?

Nope, just the both legs (or one arm) doing "the spaz"

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Good news: first day off the hydrocodone and back on the Tramadol was relatively low-pain, if not pain-free.

Not-so-good news: waking up the second say was a bit of an experience. The Tramadol hasn't reached a steady serum level yet, so all the aches and pains are back. I had to creak into the kitchen for tea, with which I could take a Tramadol and a couple of cough-suppressant pills.

Yes, the coughing is still going on. I'm pretty sure that it's due to the oak pollen which coats my truck, my wife's micro-van, and just about everything else outside.

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2 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Yes, the coughing is still going on. I'm pretty sure that it's due to the oak pollen which coats my truck, my wife's micro-van, and just about everything else outside.

I'm sorry to hear. Somebody really ought to have a word with Treebeard about that sometime.

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2 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

...oak pollen which coats my truck, my wife's micro-van, and just about everything else outside.

If I did that, they would put me in jail or a psychiatric ward.  If a dog did that, they would neuter the SOB.  Why should we let trees get away with that behavior?

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On 3/16/2017 at 2:39 PM, ProfessorTomoe said:

Vicious circle (cycle? I could never tell).

The usual term is "vicious cycle", in my experience, but functionally either one works.

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1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

The usual term is "vicious cycle", in my experience, but functionally either one works.

Thank you for clearing that up. I probably should have looked in my Chicago Manual of Style for it, but it might not have been there.

Man, the Tramadol is taking forever to build that damned serum level. The Topamax is more-or-less helping with the nerve on my lower right back since it's been at serum levels (200mg) for at least a week now. The Tramadol eventually gets around to numbing some of the rest of my chronic pain spots (ankles, lower left back, knees), but when it wears off, it's like if falls off of a cliff. Medicine times are 7am, 1pm, and 7pm, and my body looks forward to them.

Meanwhile, I've done little beyond sleep on my sofa today because of the pain. Not much else I can do, except for brief excursions into the internet (current AP Style Guide case :D ).

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18 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Yes, the coughing is still going on. I'm pretty sure that it's due to the oak pollen which coats my truck, my wife's micro-van, and just about everything else outside.

Hmm, if pollen levels are that bad, have you tried wearing one of those surgical face masks when going outside to filter it out? My mother does that when pollen is bad here.

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2 hours ago, ijuin said:

Hmm, if pollen levels are that bad, have you tried wearing one of those surgical face masks when going outside to filter it out? My mother does that when pollen is bad here.

Wouldn't work. This is a 1970's era house. Pollen seeps through the microcracks in the walls, ventilation system, and attic. I'm doomed, even with an allergen filter on my air conditioner.

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Well I went to get the results of the sleep study.

The physician who has a job of treating patients with sleep apnea has diagnosed me with sleep apnea.  I never saw that one coming.

Turns out that I snore more than 3,900 times per night and my breathing is fully or partially stopped eighteen times an hour.

This may be a contributing factor in some of my medical problems.

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2 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Turns out that I snore more than 3,900 times per night and my breathing is fully or partially stopped eighteen times an hour.

This may be a contributing factor in some of my medical problems.

I would say that's a significant statistic, regardless of the doctor's possible bias. Git yerself treated.

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