Some days, I need this handy Pain Troubleshooting Guide. Today is one of those days.
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Some days, I need this handy Pain Troubleshooting Guide. Today is one of those days.
In other news:
Hoyden About Town 
Ah yes. On a less serious level, my own day looked up after I instructed myself to take a couple of painkillers, because, as it turns out, a headachey virally feeling can often be fixed (at least temporarily) by panadol. No idea why it took me so long to figure it out.
Went to the doctor the other day with cold-y, flu-ey, meh feelings. She asked “have you taken anything for it?” I said, no, I didn’t want to disguise any symptoms before being seen… she just sighed and said “never make yourself more miserable than you have to be!”
Words to live by.
True, true.
If you aren’t willing to self-medicate, there’s no-one else who’ll do it for you. You’ve got to do it by yourself…
[hums “Lonesome Valley”]
Thank-you.
Sometimes I need this reminder my stubborn self.
That is all.
OuyangDan’s last blog post..The Pope is a self righteous Ass Hole.
It’s the bad luck one that is so scarey. Hope that’s not where you are today.
M-H: Happily, I was in the forgetting square today. W00T!
Glad to hear that the drug option was still available today. Personally, I’m quite fond of drugs – Sudafed is my friend! It’s taken me years to get over the idea that I should just endure pain, and stuffy noses, and general miserableness. Having said that, I do try to manage when I can; I don’t like to add too much of a load to my liver and kidneys. I would rather keep that in reserve for alcohol. 🙂
I’ve always attributed this idea that “bearing pain is good” to my Catholic childhood, and all those nuns urging me to offer my pain up to God so I could get another soul out of Purgatory. But maybe it’s more general thing…
Deborah’s last blog post..Sceptical housewifery
I think for me Deborah it’s more that I got out of the habit of pharmacological assistance when I was pregnant and breastfeeding (aside from asthma stuff that was prescribed and checked with the pharmacist) and trying to take anything made me throw up when I was pregnant (including the stuff that was supposed to stop me from throwing up). Before the pregnancy there was a couple of years with a prescribed drug that didn’t interact well with over the counter hayfever stuff, so I’ve been living with a stuffy nose for half the year for the last five years. It’s quite a relief to know that next spring I will be able to knock back some drugs.
I love the shirt medicine is the best medicine. My dad may complain about the evils of taking ‘too much medicine’, but my calmer disposition, and the fact that I did not stay up all night tonight coughing until I puked is a good idea.
Oh, medication. You make my life so much easier. I ❤ you.
I like my medicine.
Kirsten’s last blog post..Online activism.
I remember feeling guilty because I took my son to the doctor with a temperature and when the doctor asked why I hadn’t given him panadol I said because I wanted the doctor to be able to see he had a temperature. The doc explained that all I had to do was tell him and he would, generally, be able to see what was causing it. I felt a right idiot. But I think it is something that we often do, we need to prove that we, or our child, really are sick and are not malingering.
I just got that shirt the other day! Woo!
i used to pop aspirin, analgesic etc. for about a year. Now I do not and I want to tell anybody how I did it. It took only an idea I got from being able to talk myself to sleep. All one needs is a good imagination and the ability to concentrate for about a minute or two. And there is no need to close your eyes or be in quiet surroundings.It goes like this:
1) clear you mind
2) imagine a syringe full of liquid in which is suspended the name of your
painkiller or whatever.
3)inject slowly tothe location of pain.
4)pull the syringe out slowly. And that is about it.
5)the pain will diminish within few seconds.
The trick is to visualise the procedure, possibly even imagine someone else doing it to you, or only just hands giving you the needle where you would be out of reach. I had luck with pretend aspirin, analgesics and morphine. After about a week my neck pain, which , from being almost constant, only flared once and that was not much pain, either. I had trained my brain not to take much notice of it, apparently. It did not work 100% but pretty close to. I sleep well now.
I would be elated if somebody tried it, it worked and then let me know.
Good luck and tread your own path!
Walter.
[re: in mod] Srsly, how can someone read this post and think that it’s a great place to tell me about Teh Visualisation Cure? *headdesk*
Maybe I should put a link to the Open Letter to Those Without CFS/Fibro in every disability post.
Lauredhel, I’ll buy you that shirt if you’ll buy me that shirt.
Missing a dose is awful. If I go too long without the meds I will actually have to take some time to recover — half a day or more sometimes. My body does not respond well. And these are the non habit-forming ones I’m talking about. Just experiencing that pain too long, I can’t just instantly be rid of it by taking the missed dose… I’ve put myself in a really bad spot a few times because of this.
I left this thread because I wondered whether my feelings about it were being unreasonably pissy. Now, nearly a month later, I’ve decided they weren’t.
So here it is: When I tag a post “disability”, which is right up top there, would able-bodied (AFAIK) people please not centre their concerns by talking about how they had a runny nose or a headache once, please? Treat this as you would any other post about being in an oppressed group of which you are not a member. You’re welcome to comment, but just keep in mind what we’re actually talking about, eh? Stops you looking like a numpty.
Just in case anyone’s still reading this.
Hi Lauredhel, just popped by out of curiosity after reading your update. To give you my feedback, I do actually think that you are being just a little bit unreasonably pissy here. Not that visualisation-guy doesn’t deserve all the snark you can lay out, of course. But the others are being supportive of your basic message, and some are even a little self-deprecating with it.
You say “keep in mind what we’re actually talking about”, but this post, considered as a stand-alone, doesn’t actually say anything about anyone’s membership in any class. It’s just a bit of mild humour that anyone who’s ever needed a course of painkillers for any reason can relate to. A nice one for those of us who prefer evidence based medicine to quackery.
Tags aren’t enough to change that. If you did want this post to be more specific to permanent disability, then, well, sorry – it didn’t work. Your audience probably includes people who have never read that post you linked to. Not all readers are constant and remember all the context.
I don’t need this comment to be posted, BTW. It’s just a bit of personal feedback to you, meant in a friendly way. I know that what people read isn’t always what I had in my head when I wrote it. It happens, especially to experts who forget what beginners don’t know. I do enjoy your blog and learn a lot from it.
Exactly! The clues are there.
Cath, no, just no. Lauredhel just got through explaining why she is upset and you didn’t bother trying to understand her position at all. Instead you protect the privileged and tell her to mind her tone. You have got to be kidding. There are hints in the graphic too for people who are new to the site and missed the tags, painkillers generally means something stronger than an over the counter mild analgesic like tylenol or motrin. No one I know of gets out a bottle of aspirin and says, oh I must take these painkillers for my dreadful hangnail. Also “bad luck” if the motrin doesn’t work, you take another, or go lie down and rest. Bad luck is when your vicodin isn’t working and you’re only given so many and can’t take any more. You can’t just take another, and lying down isn’t going to do a damned thing either. I know because I’m in one of those “bad luck” spots right now because I have three herniated discs and my vicodin is not working.
I went back over the graphic, and I actually can’t read it as being about minor, transient pain. “Did you forget to take your last dose of painkillers” and “You should know this by now” are conspicuous pointers that it’s about chronicity and scheduled medication.
Who would sit down and do a graphic like that, in that manner, about a head cold? It just doesn’t make any sense that way. It’s crip humour – which, again, was in the tags from the start.
And?
So if someone is nominally “supportive” then we have no right to complain if they do something we find to be hurtful or bothersome in one way or another?
Right, because people presume the default experience to be the experience of those with able bodies. Whose fault is that again?
“unreasonably pissy”: stop being so angry, woman, you catch more flies with honey, this incident is wholly unimportant to me the TAB therefore it can have no importance to you, etc. etc.
I don’t know what you’ve tried and haven’t, but Synecdochic, in LJ, deals with a lot of pain. She said, sometimes lidocaine patches are the difference between being stuck in bed and being mobile that day. You may want to look into them.
StarWatcher: See the link in comment 15; point nine.
(For me, I would actually edit out the second paragraph of that point.)
My apologies. I actually considered that point, but Synecdochic’s post sounded like this method isn’t well-known. I guess the information has spread farther than she know. I’ll shut up now, and consider more carefully next time.
StarWatcher: Thanks. I get that you mean well, and that everyone who cure-talks means well. And I get that each episode might not seem like a big deal to the person dealing it out. On the other end, though, I find the constant, year-in-year-out barrage of “helpful suggestions” wearying at best.
A useful guideline might be to hold back from offering suggestions unless someone specifically asks.
Starwatcher, I agree with Lauredhel, that you shouldn’t offer meds suggestions unless asked. On the other hand…thank you for that link! LOL I use lidocaine patches and have problems with the tape I use to keep them on and that comments thread has some ideas I find helpful.
Totally love the image up there, and completely understand what you are trying to say. Also – with the CFS/Fibro link – it would help if people would also see it for any chronic fatigue and pain issue. I have Fibro, Lupus, Endometriosis and a few others – so I completely get what is being said from the view point of all of them!
And I see exactly what you were saying when you left the comment that you linked to on your other entry….
((Hugs)) just wanted to say hi and let you know I get it and I wish people could get it without dealing with our illnesses!
1. Saw the shirt, immediately bought it for my partner (Type-1 diabetic who is very … confused … by suggestions that he visualize taking his insulin). A-mazing.
2. I would like to print the chart and stick it on my fridge. Because it rocks. Trouble is, I’d need to adapt it to include prophylactics and painkillers. Also, “Can you see out of your left eye” before “Are you in pain?” Et cetera. By the time I finish adding in the options, it starts to resemble a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, and I’m not sure that I’d have the mental dexterity to actually follow it in the event that I ever needed it.
All of which goes to say … if you ever wanted to set up a sideline business in making customized, maximally efficient, user-friendly versions of the chart, I would totally be your first client. ;c)
Heh! I don’t even have flow-chart-making software; I kludged that together in Keynote.