New member

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

This is my first day here. My name is and I live in central

California. I am 60 years old and have both diabetes and some rather

serious heart problems with multiple angioplasties etc and also

Atrial Fibrillation. As if I was not in enough of a mess with all

that I have developed arthritis also and have some rather serious

pain in both my right shoulder and left hip and in addition the

right shoulder thing is added to with a case of bad tendonitis. I

also have some pretty bad pains in the feet from the diabetes.

Getting the doctors to come up with anything to help me has been a

nightmare of futility at best. As if all this was not good enough I

also seem to be a real lucky person (dripping sarcasm) in that most

pain medications do little to nothing to help me. All the aspirin

and ibuprophen and several other NSAIDs they have given me do zero

to help anything. I also seem to be resistant to things like codeine

and vicodin and those types of drugs in that " normal " doses are

almost worthless to me. Things like Tylenol codeine #3 and vicodin

etc I have to take anywhere from 4 to 6 of them at once before they

will even start to give any pain relief and that amount of Tylenol

at one shot is probably doing seriously bad things to me. The

doctors seem to either think I am lying or an idiot or God knows

what else. At long last my family doctor did give me a referral to

a pain management specialist so MAYBE???? I will finally find

something to help with this mess when they call and I go in.

Fortunately the really bad pain, in the 6-8 range only sets in like

two days a week and the rest is down around the 4 range which I have

learned to live with.

I know this is a way long winded introduction but was hoping

something in all this would be something that some other people on

here might have experience with and have some sage advice on what I

am dealing with. My main question I guess that so far no doctor has

given me an answer to is why in the world would my body not respond

to normal pain medications? Is there anything anybody knows of that

would cause a person to be resistant to pain medication? Even when

I am in the hospital and they give me IV Morphine and Demerol etc it

only helps slightly, there is a slight reduction but only like going

from an 8 down to a 6 even after multiple morphine injections. So

far the only thing that has worked at all for me is something I

think they said was fentenol or something like that. It really

seriously removed the pain but only lasts like 30 min and then it is

business as usual again. Also everybody I have talked to talks

about being wiped out to the point of barely being able to stay

awake on those drugs and aside from that fentenol I stay fully awake

and functional and even with the fentenol it only slightly sedates

me but I am still totally functional.

Okay, again I apologize for the length of this tirade but hopefully

somebody out there can give me some pointers on what is happening

and what course of action I might want to look into.

Thank you all for sitting though all this.

Rp