Day 17

Over the last week I have slowly been getting back to normal life. Which feels great! Tiresome, but great! I am about 90% back to normal. I have gotten on the treadmill to walk 4 of the last 7 days for at least 20 mins. Today I did 40 mins! It helped that I had a good book to read, James Patterson's "W". Finished reading that in less than a week. Then had to download "The Gift" onto my Nook so I can read what happens next in the series. The Nook is a great reading tool to have while on the treadmill. Instead of turning pages, I just press the screen to get to the next page. LOVE IT!

I am still having those weird brain tingly sensations throughout the day which still freak me out. But I haven't had a huge emotional outbreak in a few days so that's good. I have pretty good energy throughout the day, but still get tired around 5pm.

My fibromyalgia pain decided in the middle of last night to return :(. Not sure why...maybe the chicken broth I used in my soup? Maybe the return of cold, damp weather? I also got hit pretty bad with pain while we were at the beach on Sunday. It was sunny but windy and cold. We left after only an hour.

I am hoping this pain goes away soon. Today I am just pissed off at it and mentally ready to fight it. I was crying in bed this morning when WH left to drop of DD at preschool because of the pain. Then I just got plain pissed off at it. I was NOT going to let it ruin and take control over my whole day. I had things to do..mainly homeschool my son. So out of bed I went and put on my workout clothes. 40 minutes of walking and sweating on the treadmill. Take that Fibro pain! Now go the hell away! Unfortunately it's still lingering, but only a level 3 which is much better than the level 7 it was all night long!

Now off to Sports Authority to reward myself by buying a new Exercise Ball and some new workout clothes. Yay! I fit back into my size Medium workout clothes. Haven't even worn them in about 2 years. Between the 28 day cleanse I did in January and my opiate detox/getting back onto my mostly veggie diet, I have lost almost 10 lbs! Woohoo!

In the last week I have also gotten 2 1 1/2 hr massages and been to my chiropractor twice. Massage is really good for helping your body to release toxins and other yucky stuff that creates inflammation in your body. If you can afford it, you should definitely get a good massage once every other month. And the chiropractor helps by keeping your spine in alignment, which keeps your muscles and organs aligned in the right place thus helping them to work more efficiently. It also helps to relieve tension and stress in key areas like the neck and shoulders and lower back. And we all know tension and stress directly affects our Fibromyalgia pain. Thankfully WH's job offers insurance for chiropractic and acupunture care.

Things I am looking forward to doing this week:
1- finishing "The Gift" and reading what happens
2- taking my DD shopping for goody bag items for her upcoming birthday party
3- going grocery shopping with my best friend (we do our weekly grocery shopping together...mommy time + grocery shopping= fun times). Haven't felt up to grocery shopping in almost a month.
4- Easter celebrations at church on Saturday and get together with friends on Sunday for our annual Easter picnic.

What fun and positive things are you looking forward to doing this week? Let's keep focusing on the positive things to help get us through the pain. Would love to hear how my blogger friends are doing.

Sandra

Day 8

This morning was terrible! I was an emotional wreck! Crying, nauseated, and more crying. BUT I did do three things successfully today. 1- went with the family for a short hike up a moderate hill. Felt like Sh** the whole time and felt light headed on the walk down from the exercise, but I made it! 2- cut my WH's hair this afternoon. The boys in our house get basic buzz cuts every few weeks from the $25 hair cutting kit I bought from Target a couple years ago after my son kept cutting his own hair and I kept having to pay out $20 to the barber to fix it. Mommy said "Forget this. Why am I paying someone else to buzz off all his hair when I can do it myself at home." 3- Flushed all my left over Vicodin, Percocet, Tylenol with Codeine, and Ambien down the toilet. I have been taking Ambien the last week to help me sleep at night during my withdrawals from the opiates. But WH is very good at tracking all my symptoms and he asked me this morning if I had any idea why I was much more emotional during the morning hours and felt better in the afternoons. So when my head cleared out a bit about an hour, I googled Ambien side effects and read through countless personal stories of people who were addicted to Ambien. Holy Cow! Like I need my body to become addicted to another drug! And many of the people said that Ambien made them depressed and very emotional...hello..ding ding ding! That's me! Hopefully this is what was causing most of my depressive states over the last week. And hopefully I will be able to sleep well in a few days using the all natural supplements that I have that encourage natural serotonin levels and my depressive states will stop and my emotions will return to normal. I kept wondering why it was taking me soooooo long to go through the opiate withdrawals. WH did some research for me the other night and said that from what he read, most people going throug opiate withdrawals start to feel better within 7-14 days. I figured that since I wasn't on them much for a long time, my withdrawal symptoms wouldn't last so long. And I kept wondering why I was getting so depressed and panicky. So, down the toilet it all went. Kind of empowering to finally do something productive. Also very scary to know that I don't have any backup in case my Fibro pain flares up so much that I can't walk. But like I have told many of my friends, "sometimes you just have to jump". You can research and pray about things until you are blue in the face (I am a total believer in Faith, God and Jesus Christ), but even God says that you must also ACT. Which in some cases that means you have to jump in faith even when it's scary. So I am JUMPING! Please keep praying for me and my family.

One Day At A Time

Normally people use their first post to introduce themselves, but I will get to that later. For now, I will give you this...my name is Sandra, I am a Mom of 2 wonderful kiddos, I have an awesome hubby, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia 3 years ago, and am now on Day 6 of detoxing from Opiate use to deal with the Fibro pain. I know many Fibromyalgia patients use opiates (primarily Vicodin or Percocet) to deal with the constant and daily pain along with a variety of other meds to try to get a hold on this crazy chronic pain disease. I don't know about the rest of you, but I always feel like I am at least 2 steps behind in catching up to controlling my pain. Over the last 3+ years I have radically changed my diet, taken all sorts of holistic supplements and herbs, changed my activity level backwards and forwards, and when I finally feel like things are "normal" again, my Fibro takes me for a HUGE downward spiral leaving me totally physically and mentally drained. Then it's back to the drawing board again to see what can be changed or eliminated and what triggered the massive pain this time. And each time, it's a totally new trigger. SO FRICKING FRUSTRATING! And that's an understatement! The latest issue is that the Vicodin that normally worked for my pain for last 3 years has become pretty ineffective. I used to take 1-2 pills at night about 3 times a week for severe pain. The rest of the time I could bear it through the day as I didn't want to take them while caring for my 6 and 4 year old munchkins because it made me loopy. Then about 3 weeks ago, I would get really nauseated whenever I took a Vicodin. So I tried some Percocet that I had in my medicine cabinet left over from one of my 8 surgeries. The first week it was 1 pill a day. The second week it increased to me needing 2 pills a day to control my pain. The third week it dramatically increased to 2 pills 2 to 3 times a day just to function! Then I met with my Integrative Specialist (a trained MD also trained in Holistic Medicine) because things were soooooo bad. She ran some tests and it came back that my liver enzymes were slightly elevated so she told me to get off the Percocet. That was last Friday. Saturday morning I got up at 1am in severe pain. I am not a wuss when it comes to pain and I can say this ranked about 3rd in my severest of pains ever. The first was my bowel obstruction 7 days after I delivered my daughter by c-section (I totally thought I was going to die that time cuz I was in so much pain). They gave me 5 cc's of Morphine every 10 minutes in the hospital and after 5 minutes I was screaming uncontrollably in pain that's how bad it was. The second was the severe cramping/hemorraging pain I was in for about a week when I was miscarrying our first son at 14 weeks gestation. My WF (Wonderful Hubby) said "We are going to the ER". So to the ER we went. They gave me a shot of Dilaudid that took the edge off and some Zofran for my nausea and sent me home with a prescription for Tramadol (non-narcotic and non-acetaminophen pain med), Zofran for nausea, and Percocet (just in case the Tramadol didn't work for me). They also explained what the narcotics detox will look like...it didn't sound like a fun weekend for me :(. Saturday was the last time I took any form of narcotics. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were kind of a blur. Good thing WF was able to stay home and take care of the kiddos while I wasted the days away in bed in pain. The Tramadol helped, but after a few days I noticed I felt very weird while taking it. Increased heartbeat and my brain felt like someone was taking a needle and poking me from the inside of my brain. I stopped taking Tramadol on Wednesday. The symptoms went away to make way for a new one.... Thursday I spent all day in a bad depression and uncontrollable crying. WF was at work and I had my 6 yo home with me. The good news is that I had very little pain, except low back pain from my recent muscle pull about 6months ago. Probably from all my lying around, slouching, and couch laying the last week. But man, I could feel my body craving for the Percocet! It was all I could do to NOT take one! In my brain I felt like a total junkie and it scared me. Thankfully when I was totally at my breaking point, WH came home from work and talked me down from the ledge so to speak. Also forgot to mention that all week my WF has been making me eat a vegetarian diet because in January we did a 28 day mostly veggie diet with the first week being all veggie and nothing else. For that entire week I had very little pain and didn't have to take any pain meds. So all week it's been veggies and a serving or two of meat or fish, all home cooked. Well, okay, yesterday in my moment of weakness I somehow drove my 6yo down the street to Carls Jr and got a small coke, a chicken salad and 2 plain hamburger patties (so still somewhat healthy, right?). It's also been over a week since I have had any caffeine in my system, not that I am a big caffeine addict or anything. I maybe drink a total of 1 full 16 oz bottle of Coke a week and have an Icee Coke from Burger King once a week (man, those are my faves especially on a hot day..actually on any day). So my brain LOVED having that little bit of caffeine in it! That's what helped me get through the rest of the day until I caffeine crashed at 4pm and started with the uncontrollable crying again. Guess my brain was using that little bit of caffeine to replace the opiates. Last night was pretty rough for me. My body was craving the Percocet again. I spent another 1 hr or so crying uncontrollably. WH sat with me and rubbed my back the whole time. I was trying not to take a sleeping pill (been taking them all week so I could sleep). But at 1230am, I took one. It's now 1050am on Friday morning. Hopefully today will be better. Sandra