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Sep. 6th, 2006 10:24 amI haven't babbled about back and hip pain for a while and, while I dislike being all "woe is me" here, I thought an updatey thing might be appropriate seeing as I saw the doctor again last night.
The main headline news? This is as good as it's likely to get :-( Between the horse pills and the acupuncture, I'm now at a bearable level most of the time and the docs all agree that it's not going to get better than that. And the bad days are just going to be bad. Gah.
The doc has reviewed my medication and deemed that it's not killing or damaging me, so I'm probably safe to continue doing what I'm doing. We could change to a different med if it was producing side-effects, but there's no way to know whether a different one would work as well and I'm feeling fine. He suggested a low-dose anti-depressant to possibly improve my sleep, but then checked my records and decided that we won't pursue that due to the severe side-effects whenever we've tried that before :-) His only concern is that I could develop resistance to the meds - a particular concern when I'm so young and could need them for many years - but we'll deal with that when it happens.
For now, I'm doing everything that he could have suggested so we'll see how things go and monitor me. I discussed non-drug methods of pain control, in particular whether I'd get any benefit from a TENS machine. Although he doesn't think it could replace what I'm on, he thinks it could be useful for additional pain-relief on the bad days and he'll apparently be interested to know how I get on with it. He's never had a chronic pain patient use one so this could be an interesting experiment. Mom and I are now researching in hopes of finding something suitable before the Canada trip.
And I am now a chronic pain patient on my medical notes. Yay me :-)
Guess it's time to look into registering as disabled for Peg Two next year.
The main headline news? This is as good as it's likely to get :-( Between the horse pills and the acupuncture, I'm now at a bearable level most of the time and the docs all agree that it's not going to get better than that. And the bad days are just going to be bad. Gah.
The doc has reviewed my medication and deemed that it's not killing or damaging me, so I'm probably safe to continue doing what I'm doing. We could change to a different med if it was producing side-effects, but there's no way to know whether a different one would work as well and I'm feeling fine. He suggested a low-dose anti-depressant to possibly improve my sleep, but then checked my records and decided that we won't pursue that due to the severe side-effects whenever we've tried that before :-) His only concern is that I could develop resistance to the meds - a particular concern when I'm so young and could need them for many years - but we'll deal with that when it happens.
For now, I'm doing everything that he could have suggested so we'll see how things go and monitor me. I discussed non-drug methods of pain control, in particular whether I'd get any benefit from a TENS machine. Although he doesn't think it could replace what I'm on, he thinks it could be useful for additional pain-relief on the bad days and he'll apparently be interested to know how I get on with it. He's never had a chronic pain patient use one so this could be an interesting experiment. Mom and I are now researching in hopes of finding something suitable before the Canada trip.
And I am now a chronic pain patient on my medical notes. Yay me :-)
Guess it's time to look into registering as disabled for Peg Two next year.
