Still Learning
Being a cancer patient continues to teach me new things as a physician. The general level of discomfort that I described last week just kept getting worse. As bad as the general feeling of ill ease was the relentlessness of it all. I just could not get comfortable, no matter what I tried. This resulted in early doses of OxyContin on Thursday and Friday last week, which completely took away the feeling of unease. So Saturday I started taking the OxyContin twice a day and have felt remarkably better ever since.
I spoke to my oncologist about it yesterday and he feels that I was actually experiencing opiate withdrawal during the day because I was only taking OxyContin at night and that taking the OxyContin as it is intended to be dosed, twice a day, I have taken care of that little problem. I feel sort of stupid, but long-acting narcotics have not been part of my practice since before OxyContin came on the market, so I’ll try to forgive myself. I have been so skittish about the narcotics that I caused myself more trouble than I needed by trying to keep the dose as small as possible. Now my pain is more than adequately controlled on the lowest possible dose of OxyContin and I am not taking scheduled Ibuprofen any more.
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