Common Sense

After arriving late to my doctor’s appointment yesterday, we did a lookover of all my medication. He decided to double my Cymbalta intake to 120 mg per day, leave the nortryptolene at 50 mg and add in hydrocodone. I’m supposed to take one 60 mg Cymbalta, one 50 mg nortrytolene and a 7.5/650 mg Vicodin at 2 in the morning.

The side effect of all these drugs is drowsiness and the idea of the cocktail is that I should finally just conk out in the morning instead of laying in bed all day awake. I’ve been subsisting on just 4 hours of sleep a nigh for weeks. Every few days I would crash and sleep for 14 hours then it would start over.

Well, it seems like it worked, I was asleep before 6 AM. And I felt a little dopey when I got up and took another 60 mg Cymbalta. BTW, Doc had a bunch of free samples that he gave me. Even with my insurance, one bottle of Cymbalta costs $40.

My leg doesn’t feel any better, but the doctor did think there was some improvement in leg strength. I think it was just because I was having kind of a good day yesterday. On a good day, I can almost function.

The Vicodin was almost a Godsend. I was like ‘Yea, he’s finally giving me something for pain!’ I’m only supposed to take one of those things a day, and its so that I can go to sleep. But, I’ve already split a couple so that I can have something to help me through work. I took a half just a little while ago.

I have a hard time being positive about this. My doctor says that a lot of people recover from CRPS by gradually increasing the workload on the affected limb until normal function is restored. Part of the problem for me is that my leg will never be normal again. Every since my surgery, I’ve had a 15 degree bend in my knee that doesn’t go away. If I sit flat on the floor with my legs straight out, there’s more than enough clearance under my leg to put my cane through. Because of that, I’m probably never going to be able to get normal functioning again.

Time will tell how this turns out, I guess.