Weight Gain!!

[Maz]

@Patricia.Ann wrote:

Still an awful lot of pain when the morphine wears off and lots of swelling.

Hi Patricia,

Just noticed you were weaning from morphine. You’re probably already aware, as you’re experiencing if first hand, but morphine withdrawal can result in horrible rebound pain. 😥 This is the downside of opiate-based drugs, which are fantastic for pain relief, but hard on the liver and also dependence-causing.

http://www.hopkins-arthritis.org/patient-corner/disease-management/opioids.html

Unfortunately, there is no really good pain relief (without some potential for side-effects) for RA. Until you can get off the morphine and pred, however, you may not really know whether the mino is working or not due to withdrawal rebound from both and breakthrough herxing. Has your doc suggested plaquenil, by any chance? This is probably one of the least toxic DMARDs but also has some nice anti-inflam and anti-microbial props.

Also, the best pain relief for me has been to do as much in the way of detoxing as I possibly can, trying different methods one at a time and seeing what works best for me. Hopefully, your naturopath can help you with this?

[Patricia.Ann]

Ah Maz you are such a sweetheart 🙂 Always there with valuable advice and no judging. You really are so very kind…

I take Oramorph twice a day – 5ml spoon which gives me 10mg each time. I have tried to keep at this dose and have managed to for about a year. Before that I was up to five or six times per day!! It doesn’t quite last the twelve hours and I start to feel an increase in pain a couple of hours before I take my next dose. I somehow feel it is my RA pain though because it feels just as it did, although a little less intense, before the morphine was prescribed.

I am in a ‘catch 22’ situation because I cannot get off the pred and morphine until my symptoms subside a little, far too much swelling and pain, but staying on these meds is causing problems and not allowing my body to heal. The positive is I am now on 7.5mg pred every day now so have coped well with that all in all. I can’t forsee me going any lower though at the moment.

I have tried plaquenil and sulfasalazine. Sulfa made me feel even more ill than I was and my bloods went haywire. Plaquenil caused a huge amount of hair loss and my eyes felt as though they were pulsing which didn’t feel good either!!! The only two things that seemed to have worked for me up to now are the pred and morphine, sad to say, but I have been grateful for them.

The mino just doesn’t seem to be able to help but that is understandable with the meds I am taking. I am also taking some homeopathic and herbal meds from my naturopath and they have given me a little more energy but swelling and pain more or less the same. I manage life on a very basic level compared to how I was, but I will never forget the pain I was in or how debilitated I was, and this keeps me positive and hopeful for the future.

I have just been reading your detoxing methods. You listed them all so well and thank you for doing that. I will keep trying to detox and hope that helps my recovery. I so don’t want to do the biologic drugs but if nothing else works then I feel I have no choice if things don’t start to improve in the next six months. Now that will make me sad 😥

I wish you well in your own recovery Maz. You are a very special person.

Take great care.

Patricia x

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