What a title - may send the DEA after me - but my drugs are all legal. Anyway, I was driving around yesterday (not aimlessly but on my way to a doctor appointment) thinking about my current medications and how they are balanced around each other to keep me pain free, cancer free, and semi-sane/normal.
When I first started down this delightful medical path, I didn't want drugs for anything. I was a advil every six months or so if needed girl, other than the pesky thyroid pills because of that other cancer diagnosis. Then the surgeries caused pain which did go away, but cancer causes stress, chemotherapy causes side effects, blah, blah, blah. I have no idea of how many rounds of antibiotics or other pills I have ingested. After surgery or procedure, they give you a prescription for pain meds that I take until I don't need them any more.
Every six months or so here they have a 'turn in your old prescriptions day' around here. I dutifully go through my little bottles and find the ones I stopped taking a while ago and there is no chance that I will need them again because they expired group and put them in a bag and bring them in. A much better solution than flushing or putting them in the trash. They get destroyed in some environmentally friendly way. The sad thing is I can produce a bag of expired and useless medications every six months.
My doctors put me on medications and then take me off them or tell me to take these until this time and then take these and here are a few extra so you don't run out. Then another doctor says if you are taking this, you shouldn't take that, take these instead. They aren't drug pushers. They are trying to balance my medications. Unfortunately the balance is complicated in that back pain drugs can also work as anti depressants which causes two doctors to battle over which is which. Treating back pain has a quicker up time than treating depression issues. You canjust think of me as the ping pong ball going back and forth, trying to feel better. Currently my back is slightly better, but my tennis elbow is speaking up and my depression meds aren't balanced. Other than that I feel fine. Did I mention how my ankle feels these days?
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