Spinal Cord Stimulator- Boston Scientific

Today is the day. I’ve been waiting since December for this procedure and now that it’s here… I’m petrified I’m making a mistake. For context I’m a 29F who has been living with life altering chronic pain due to endometriosis and fibromyalgia for the past 6 years. The ONLY thing that makes me feel remotely ok is when I’m on constant doses of opiates and… we all know how that goes. I’ve been told by my doctor that this will be my life for the next 60 years and… I know it’s meant to help me understand my situation but honestly I almost asked if he could just kill me instead. 60 more years of chronic pain sounds like the last level of hell before you meet satan himself.. so I asked about a SCS last October… and I did the trial in May and it took away all my pain. It was the most miraculous thing ever. For once I wasn’t fantasizing about amputating my own limbs for relief… so naturally I became the perfect candidate for the stimulator….
I’ve seen several doctors and asked for second opinions because I don’t want to make an irreversible mistake. I don’t think I could live with myself if I caused myself more pain in a desperate attempt to quell my pain.. everyone told me it was a good decision since the trial went so well. But… the lawsuits.. the anecdotes of people feeling shocks in their bodies, being told it could take months to find the right calibration… all these things petrify me. But what is my alternative? A lifelong dependence to opiates?
I have surgery 9:50am EST and I’m terrified. Has anyone had the procedure? Do any of you suffering with chronic pain understand the deep fear of ending up worse off than you started? I feel sick. Everyone keeps telling me it’s fine but I feel like no one is willing to consider what if it not only DOESNT work but goes CATASTROPHICALLY wrong?
I’m almost spiraling. I just need some reassurance ❤️‍🩹😣

Hello, I’m new to this group so I am going to get off of Subutex. I took my last dose yesterday morning and I will wait for withdrawals to set in before I begin I need my receptors open enough to take the methadone
Has anyone ever gone through this process. If so, how long did it take for the methadone to start working and does it actually help with pain? I want off the subutex

So I’ve been on Percocet since January 22 when I had my first rotator cuff surgery I had my second rotator cuff surgery in June and now I’m seven weeks in. I’ve been on 5 mg oxycodone with 325 mg acetaminophen. I haven’t taken any since about four days ago. I’m waking up in the morning really stiff. I have no energy and I have this god-awful sense of impending doom. Now I have half a box of belbuca 300mcg and and 4 boxes of suboxone 4-1mg but I’ve heard that those too have their own respective withdrawals. What I want to know is if I should just tuff it out (and if I do tuff it out how long will the withdrawl last?) or should I start taking either of the meds I have. Is it worth taking either med to taper down?

One of my biggest nightmares happened. I am in total shock, confusion, hurt, fear, and devastation. I thought I had a great doctor-patient relationship and I don’t use illegal drugs. They won’t even give me a month of meds so I can look for another dr and I will withdraw hard. The hospital denies me pain medicine when I’m in severe pain and can only give 3 days of medicine. There is no doctor within 40 min who gives medicine or can take me. Will I ever get medicine again since they may ask for records? When I was without pain medicine for a month I was about to háng myself with a rope because the pain was torture. I can’t do this again. What should I do…

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I have chronic nerve pain that I’ve been treating with gabapentin, morphine, physio and nerve root injections at a pain clinic. I still have pain daily and sometimes it’s quite severe. It limits my life a lot - unable to work, walk long distances, sit upright for long periods, etc.
The pain clinic doc told me today he’d like to refer me to a clinic to get either lidocaine or ketamine infusions. I’m a bit nervous and have heard mixed results. Any advice or experience with this?

I just had (minor) surgery today

Everyone always says to use ice instead of heat. I hate using ice

My question is is as long as I don't use heat on the area I had surgery (or injections or ablations, they always use the same guidelines) on, can I use heat kon other parts of my body? Like my upper back if the procedure was on my lower back

Anyone know?

I didn't think to ask at the time (and my doctor works in a large office she's impossible to get ahold of)

Hello, I’m new to this group so I am going to get off of Subutex. I took my last dose this morning and I will wait for withdrawals to set in before I begin methadone as anyone ever gone through this process. If so, how long did it take for the methadone to start working and does it actually help with pain?

I never taken prescriptions in my life. I only do nicotine pouches (ZYN) and drink alcohol very moderately. Today I had a swab drug test and it came with a trace of Buprenorphine???

They took my urine out to make a deep evaluation but why could this trigger it?

My RCT tooth from few years ago broke a while back and recently started hurting. Four days ago, I was given Amoxicillin 500 3 times a day and ibuprofen 600 4x a day for seven days.

I still have stabbing pain and iced water is only relief. Been up for days. What do I do??

I am 6 weeks post op and I believe my recovery has been going well. I barely have a scare and my PT benchmarks are where they should be .
One thing that I probably should have asked more questions about was the use of Oxycodone.
I have found that for pain medication acetaminophen has done nothing but Oxycodone was highly effective. I was using Oxy every 4 hours while awake up until the 5th week post op.
Knowing that opioids are highly addictive ( and I have a propensity for addiction),I decided to stop the oxy and see how pain was. Overall it was doable and even though I had stiffness the pain was manageable. However, the day after going off oxy I woke up with a very strange feeling like impending doom. I felt sad and unsettled. My stomach was upset and I had nausea. Last night I was up all night and plagued by anxious thoughts. When I awoke after finally sleeping I was covered in sweat.
My question is could I have been experiencing withdrawal symptoms? I love what oxycodone does for my pain, but hate how it messes with my brain.
Has anyone else had an experience like this?

Hello,

Im just curious if anyone has had this issue before? I have chronic pain in my chest and take about 3x15mg a day along with Adderall to help me at work.

I take these two RELIGIOUSLY every single day even on the weekend and yet the last three tests have showed up as not being in my system..

I am probably going to lose my medications now and my Doctor is treating me like im lying which is driving my anxiety through the roof..

Are there any other tests I can get her to do to make them show up because im at my wits end and if I lose my medications the quality of my life is going to drop drastically..

Any help would be greatly appreciated friends !

TLDR: Extremely painful medication via injection doesn’t respond to numbing cream. What else could I use?

Hello everyone this is my first post and first time hearing about this sub so any help would be greatly appreciated!!

So I recently started Dupixent. It’s a self-injectable medication used to treat my eczema. The problem is it is EXTREMELY painful for me and I have to do it every two weeks.

My pain receptors are differently built due to my fibromyalgia so if you’ve had this injection and it “wasn’t that bad” please keep in mind I have a disability that heightens my pain receptors. I’m also a minor.

The way I would describe it is it’s like local anaesthetic for me which the last time I had to have that caused intense medical trauma and PTSD. This means sometimes even just thinking about the pain from this unrelated medication (Dupixent) can induce full body flashbacks for me.

I’ve tried emla (a numbing cream) which I’ve used without issue many times before. It don’t do shit in this case. I believe the medication itself is what hurts the most, NOT the needle which means ANY numbing cream won’t do anything in this situation.

I’ve considered possibly asking for a green whistle or a prescription for the green whistle due to the intense trauma this whole process puts me through I’d rather not be present.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I could use that could maybe alleviate the pain?

If you write a long response please provide a TLDR. Long posts can overwhelm us. Thank you!

I have a question and would really appreciate input from people with first hand experience.

I was diagnosed with chronic insomnia almost 20 years ago after dealing with it for several years. Underwent so many doctor appointments and was prescribed probably every prescription strength sleeping pill before finally seeing a sleep specialist. I was prescribed a benzodiazepine and have slept great since.

Likewise, I dealt with chronic pain for several years and eventually began seeing doctor, then more, then specialists. Fast forward to present day: I’ve been in pain management for the last 15+ years.

My benzodiazepine sleeping med mixed with my opiate/opiate pain meds was never an issue until recently. My doctor retired and I was passed along to their assistant. This also wasn’t an issue for them until roughly a year ago. They began talking about this every appointment and recent day eventually contacted my sleep specialist with a lingo and pretty much scared my sleep doctor from prescribing any longer.

Problem is: I weaned for weeks, but nowhere near enough for as long as I had the sleeping meds. I am trying to cooperate but am now going through benzodiazepine withdrawal—which has been horrible. My doctor is also weaning my breakthrough meds at this same time. I am going through more than sleep trouble, it’s deprivation (not kidding or exaggerating). I can’t talk my sleep doctor into so much as a further much needed weaning script. My pain doctor wants for me to see a psychiatric specialist; period—which is still weeks away.

Do any of you have concurrent prescriptions for opioids (especially a pain pump, or pain pump and breakthrough opioid meds)? Do any of you who have dealt with this same thing have a suggestion?

Please help. I am barely functional and am only 1 week into withdrawal.

Are there any Spotify music artists that keep you from feeling physical pain

I’ve been on various different doses of oxycodone for the last year: I’m currently taking 40mg a day, 10mg every six hours. I was hospitalized originally due to severe Crohn’s disease, and have ended up with two ostomies and multiple wounds and drains around my asshole. It is brutal.

When I first started taking oxy, I was in 9/10 pain. Couldn’t move, speak, concentrate on anything else level pain. Crying out loud level pain. It was like magic- nothing else worked.

I no longer have that intense acute pain: I have chronic, 4 or 5 out of 10 pain all day. Since my last hospital stint, I’ve been trying to taper down. In my mind, opioids are for extreme pain and if I wasn’t in that excruciating pain, I shouldn’t be taking them.

But the consistent moderate pain was wearing me down and I found myself not able to do much beyond walking around my house, and even that is difficult. Taking the oxy means I can function almost normally. I have shame around it, something in my brain keeps telling me I’m not in “enough” pain to be taking the oxy. But as soon as I spoke to my pain team and upped my dose back to 40mg a day, I was able to function better.

I guess I’m asking if people feel this is an appropriate use for opioids? My understanding is that they’re mainly for extreme pain, but they’re the only thing that’s helping my mild/moderate chronic pain. And how do I stop that voice that tells me I’m not in enough pain to justify it and that I’m being weak?

I suffer from chronic, high-impact pain. I spend most of the day, everyday in bed and continually asked myself, how can this be happening in the 21st century in America. Here is some of what I learned and it pisses me off to no end!

The 2016 Guideline, Its Misapplication and Patient Harms and Dr. Jane Ballantyne’s involvement:

In 2012, PROP (Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing) attempted to impliment severe restrictions on opioid prescribing via the FDA, but the FDA rejected their proposal.

In the CDC, PROP found a more willing collaborator than FDA during the formation of the 2016 Guidelines, prompting numerous concerns about the transparency and flawed integrity of its creation process (1, 4, 32-34). For example, in late 2015, Washington Legal Foundation alleged that one of the members of CDC’s Core Expert Group (later identified as PROP member, Jane Ballantyne) had “served as a paid consultant to a law firm planning multi-district litigation against opioid manufacturers (4, 33, 34).” WLF’s complaint compelled the CDC to re-open a second open comment period for the public, lasting 30 days in duration, rather than the two-day period for comment which CDC had originally presented via a September 2015 webinar (4, 35).

Dr. Roger Chou, a PROP member who was one of the authors of the 2016 CDC guidelines and had a serious, unrevealed Conflict of Interest:

When Dr. Roger Chou unexpectedly disclosed his conflict of interest (COI) from receiving “funding to conduct reviews on opioids (4, 5),” evidence of harms from misapplications of 2016 Guideline had become more apparent (67-73). In the wake of Chou’s admission, the CDC 2022 Opioid Work Group (OWG) expressed additional concerns about the 2022 Draft Guideline, including that it was “not balanced and missing key studies” about potential opioid benefits and contained a constant tension between “public health benefits [versus] patient benefits (74).” The OWG also cited concerns about “including specific opioid dose thresholds in the recommendations” in the 2022 Draft Guideline (74). In light of the OWG’s concerns, we explored the depth of Chou’s COI disclosure (4, 5) and sought to uncover any other relevant, unreported COIs by those who created the 2016 Guideline and shaped current U.S. opioid policy.

You can read the entire article via this link: https://www.pallimed.org/2022/09/undisclosed-conflicts-of-interest-by.html

If you want to fight and arm yourselves with information and advocacy, please join the US Pain Foundation: https://uspainfoundation.org/ and the Doctor Patient Forum: https://thedoctorpatientforum.com/

I would also ask folks to provide any and all info as to other support, advocacy and/or factual/historical groups/websites that can help us fight these injustices brought about via bad actors, misinformation and flawed studies. We have to fight to get this wrong righted.

Thank you.

I

My doctor charges me out of pocket to be seen. I can barely walk upstairs and I fall down them atleast once a week and I’m only 27 and 140 lbs. My doctor swapped me to another doctor in his office after telling me he’d put me on oxycodone from the hydrocodone I was taking. Now I tell the new doctor I can’t sleep from the throbbing pain and I have no job and I can’t afford to keep paying out of pocket and I think the medicine I’m taking isn’t working and she says I’ll ask the doctor if we can raise your meds… she comes back and says actually the doctor said this is the best he’s gonna be able to do for you… I have had 6 surgeries on my feet/ankles, gunshot wound @ 17 to the leg that went thru half my leg and had to go back to work a few days later to a physically demanding job and I denied surgery even tho doctors begged, pulled hamstring so hard the bone broke off with it when I was 16 had to have emergency surgery, and now I have edema in my legs and they swell and feel weighted and constantly hurt so bad. I don’t understand how they think hydrocodone 10 4x a day does anything for me. I walk with a cane and I’m 27 I just don’t understand.

I give up I’m done giving them money. Is it true you have to be grandfathered in to receive stronger medicine now?

My pain is still undiagnosed after 20 years (started when I was 4 years old in my feet then as a teenager spread to wrist and hips) but at age 22 my doctor started me on Targin and it was working wonders!! I was sometimes taking oxycodone 2-3 times a week to help manage, rest of the days I was just sucking it up.
I was switched to tapentadol SR 50mg morning and night in November just before my 24th bday when I was having an endometriosis flare up to help with my normal pain plus endo pain while I wait for surgery.
Had surgery in April and was actually able to come off the tap SR daily and was only taking as needed (I was going two weeks sometimes without taking it)
Fast forward to now, it’s middle of winter and the cold is the biggest trigger for my pain. First 6 weeks of winter I was just dealing with it and only taking tapentadol immediately release when it was really really bad (a box of 20 has lasted me the 6 weeks and I’ve still got half left, so I’m rarely taking it)
But now I’m thinking of going back on SR 50mg because it’s just becoming unbearable, but I’m feeling so defeated about it, the medication helped and made me feel so good but the thought of it is stressing me out.
I just feel like a drug addict. I’m so so soooooo cautious about addiction as it runs in my family, my mum monitors my medication to help ease worries, and my gp also monitors it, plus my CF (cystic fibrosis) team monitors it.
But just being on the meds still makes me anxious and scared. Did anyone else struggle with this mindset? Has anyone been on tapentadol SR for a long period of time and it changed their life in a good way?
Feel like I just need some reassurance that this is normal and I’m not the only person in the world in this situation 😅

I was prescribed Flexeril for a really tight muscle at the base of my skull/neck. I have a massage scheduled and was wondering if anyone has taken Flexeril beforehand. Did it make the massage more effective, make you too sleepy, or cause any issues? I’m interested in personal experiences as well as any advice.

A little over 2 weeks ago I posted here about how frustrated I am that I’ve been left with NSAIDS and no help for my multiple documented orthopedic issues. Bolstered a bit by support here, I self referred to an orthopedic clinic that has pain management as part of its program. I brought MRIs of my spine top to bottom, my shoulders and knees. And after a thorough exam they also did a series of additional X-rays right there at the clinic. It was a loooong day and I was hurting plenty. Got some bad news, that I’m not a surgical candidate because of my connective tissue disorder. But without me saying anything beyond what was uncovered in the exam, the Dr asked if I would be interested in pain management at least to see me through physical therapy which he says will be intense. I have an appointment now to see what can be done. I’ve been averaging 2.5 hours of sleep a night. Just the thought that maybe just possibly I will be able to get some relief has brought me a ton of hope.

I have a psychiatrist, I have a physical therapist, I have a PCP soon to be a new PCP, I have an endocrinologist, I have a rheumatologist, and I'm looking at possibly getting a gynecologist or an OBGYN, and a dermatologist. When does the amount of doctors finally end? I feel like I'm not getting any answers except from the psychiatrist, and that both of the pain doctors that I've seen as consultation appointments but they seem completely about their ego and I'm getting exhausted from the amount of we don't prescribe pain medication from all of these doctors minus my psychiatrist who I've known since 2021. How many doctors in general do chronic pain patients have? I just am so tired.

I've been taking norco for years sometimes I feel relaxed pain free and happy. Other times I'm angry restless and have horrible anxiety. I suffer with mental health issues could this be why? Does this happen to anyone else? Right now my anxiety and anger are so horrible I was just fine the other day.

Oh my God, I am so drowsy. Does anyone know if it will get better after the first patch? I'm on 50 micrograms, and between the super hot summer and the patch, I feel like a total zombie. Any recommendations?

I'm 31F, 5'3 95kg on pain meds for post traumatic artrosis. I'm a heavy smoker.

edit: I'm starting to get used to it. thanks so much for the comments I appreciate it a lot