Another very difficult evening and night of sleeping. Sleep wasn’t too bad, but I woke up too early. I skipped the medication last night and this morning. I’m starting to feel better this morning. I woke up with a strong sense of horror. I noticed I was solely focused on my breathing right when I woke up. A lot of these management tools have become automatic for me over so many years of dealing with this. I was a total zombie for the first 2 hours, but I’m starting to come around now. I think that medication is wearing off more and more as I go. I really don’t know what to do about that stuff. It consistently makes the fibromyalgia worse, which it’s supposed to do at first. But it’s so much worse, and it never ends. It’s supposed to go in cycles that end, have a reprieve and recovery, start again, but not as bad. For me it’s just been 2 weeks of pure hell. At least it’s consistent. Nothing with this disease has ever been consistent.
I need to take about a week off this medication. I’ll keep trying it because it seems to be working as intended. I just need a break between these cycles. If it’s not cycling itself, maybe I can control the cycles by doing something like 4 days on, 4 days off. That’s super optimistic, and these things never work out, so I fear this is more of my copium addiction. I still also fear this is a miracle-cure that is nothing more than snake oil. Whatever it is, I just need a fucking break. My brain is fully toasted. I need recovery before anything else happens. When I go back on, I’ll stay at a very low dose. I think my disease has progressed far more than the average person. Because of that, it’s a lot harder to go through these clearing cycles. I have more to clear than most people, so it’s more painful. Maybe I can manually cycle it for a while to get to an average person’s baseline, then go onto a normal routine. (Not to belittle anyone else’s experience with this disease.) Just trying to work through the logic with a disease that defies all logic. This is the copium cycle.
3 trips to the pharmacy and I now have about 30% of my prescriptions taken care of from Thursday. Ultimately the doctor put in the prescription incorrectly for the Lyrica. She’s trying to titrate me up, so she prescribed 2 per day for 5 days, then 4 per day. The insurance won’t cover more than 3 per day! How fucking stupid. They filled it anyway and told me it was $600! Tey were able to give me the 5 days worth, then told me to call my doctor and have them write a new prescription for 2x50mg per day instead of 4x25mg, and that would go through OK. I still have to deal with them putting in a different prescription for capsules instead of tablets, because insurance doesn’t cover capsules, nor do pharmacies stock them. So I’m making very slow progress. Add in the fact that the doctor’s office doesn’t answer their phones and doesn’t return calls if a message is left, and the rest of the steps I need to perform become much more difficult. Also add in that this happens 100% of the time I go to the doctor. It’s a never ending nightmare for a person who can’t manage to do things for themself. There has to be a better way, right? There has to be competent doctors out there and insurance companies that aren’t this ridiculous right? I haven’t found one yet. And I won’t dare start the Lyrica because I don’t have any faith that this will all work out in time, and I don’t want to have to go through painful Lyrica withdrawals because of the incompetence of my doctor’s office. This all right here is a big reason I’m not doing better than I am right now.
I’m feeling better as the day goes on. I don’t think I actually feel good, just in comparison with the last 2 weeks, anything feels better. I’m wondering if that’s the point of this medication. It makes you feel so much worse that your better days seem like really good days. Except I can’t function on the bad days, and I can’t even recover on the good days. Maybe if I take Lyrica while I’m going through the worse of the clearing cycles, that can carry me through. Usually adding more medications to the mix is not the right answer.