My Battle Has Been Won (Update Photo Of My Car After Crash)

[Flatulo]

32. Thanks for the tune, and I'm so glad you were able to wean yourself off the meds.

As you know, they come with their own set of side-effects, most notably raging constipation.

Just last month a buddy of mine tried to end his life by taking 40 Oxy, but his wife found him and they saved him. He was pretty pissed, as he had reached the end of his rope, and no amount of meds could ease his pain. He has ankylosing spondylitis, another nasty degenerative condition. His entire spine is turning into a calcified pretzel.

Considering that you've got bad cervical AND lumbar problems, I can only imagine the suffering you've been through. Thankfully my cervical and thoracic spine are still relatively healthy, but then again, I'm only 58, and the disk degeneration can be expected to continue.

One treatment that I've found somewhat effective is Radio Frequency Neuroablation, where they cook the nerve roots using radio energy. It's a tough procedure, but it helped a lot. I get it repeated every year or so, as the nerves do grow back. Have you looked into that?

Also, there's a relatively new treatment in the horizon called blood packing, where they extract a protein from your blood and inject it into the disk, causing it to inflate somewhat. I'm not a good candidate for it, as there's just not enough disk material left, but you might look into it.

But yeah, there is a real gap in the treatment of chronic pain, and it sucks feeling like you have to do a little dance every month to get your scrips refilled. My own sister-in-law is a nurse, and she is a cold-blooded viper. She claims all her pain patients are malingerers, and I have no doubt she says the same thing about me when my back is turned. I wish she could feel what I feel for just 5 minutes.

On edit: I never got a high from my meds either. I take extended release morphine, and that has worked much better for me than a Percocet every 4 hours.