Sunday, June 10, 2007

MORE DRUGS, LESS LENGTHENING

Every morning I've been writing up a schedule for pill taking and lengthening for that day. I had been creating this schedule around the idea that I'd get about eight hours a night of sleep, but since it's turning out that I'm unable to sleep for more than an hour and a half to two hours at a time, I decided to try scheduling the lengthenings and pain medication dosages throughout the night, too.

Now instead of lengthening every four hours while I'm awake during the day, I lengthen every six hours, including once over night. I'm hoping that stretching out the lengthenings like this will alleviate some of the pain associated with them.

One limb lengthening site I read said that though bone can grow 1 mm a day, the surrounding muscles and stuff really can't grow that much a day, so apparently it's much less painfull to aim for somewhere between .66 mm and .83 mm per day of lengthening.

Since most of my pain has been in my ankle from the stretching of ligaments and whatnot, I can see how a slower lengthening schedule would really help the pain management. But my doctor has me on a 1 mm per day schedule, and since I want to get this done as soon as possible, I'm sticking with it.

And in order to stick with it, I'm allowing myself the full six vicodin per day I've been prescribed. I take one every four hours now, including throughout the night. I even set an alarm clock so I'm sure not to miss a dose, though my leg has been doing a superb job of waking me up when I'm due for one.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

yikes!

i can't believe it took you so long to get on the 'more drugs' bandwagon

just fyi, i have found tramadol (also known as ultram) to be an equally effective painkiller but with much less nausea than vicodin

welcome to the bandwagon, baby

;)

Anonymous said...

mia said: "tramadol (also known as ultram)"

...recreationally known as u-train...

right, kate? ;)

Unknown said...

hmm, is that what i've taken?

either way, i've already asked for the left-overs when she's done. (for my pain, people. if and when i have any...)

although it's sounding like there won't be too many left-overs, right allie? i'm sorry the pain is still so bad...

Cladeedah said...

Wow. All this just to be as tall as me. That's really flattering.

Annie said...

I too tried to buck the establishment about the pain stuff. It made me though my mangoes and sticky rice up. So I went back to being super drugged. It was much better. I don't even remember most of the first 2 weeks after surgrey!