Going down from 3-3-3 per day by 100 mg per week. First week was 3-3-2 every day. Second week has been 3-2-2 every day. Tomorrow I start 2-2-2.
The longer this goes on the more personal it feels. I am physically super dependent, and it feels like my body has hired a bookkeeper, you know, the kind with a cigar and a clear green visor and a manual adding machine with a big hand crank.
I was handed a bill today.
(100×7)+(200×7)=2100 mg of gabapentin I'm overdue on and am now deficit and the boys will be coming around to break my kneecaps soon.
Everything hurts. I have searched out blogs and medical forums full of people calling this drug evil. A bitch to withdraw from. Hell to get off of. Worse than opiate withdrawal. The best med ever for fibromyalgia but by all that is good and holy in this world, don't start the damn thing. Ever.
The 3 I took this morning didn't solve anything. I'm now either committed to continued taper or trapped the rest of my life on at the very least 300 mg 3x per day.
This taper schedule will take 6 more weeks. I've been told by my neurologist I can taper 100 mg every 4 days. I'm not inclined to push myself faster into a pain crisis.
I had to put an ice pack at the base of my skull to sleep last night. Today I'm on heating pad for a locked up hip. I can barely walk or move.
Next month I hope to get the last cortisone shot in my shoulder and start therapy while I'm still on taper. That, I think, will help ease through.
Beyond that, I may need to figure out another back up plan for fibro flares. Personally, even though gabapentin helps tremendously with the pain, I think the flares lasted much longer than in the past, and it got me so locked up around my ribcage last year that I couldn't take a deep breath for 2 months last summer, and my allergist had me seeing a pulmonologist over it. I need to see if being back off gabapentin makes a different in how locked up fibro flares get me, because I had steady improvement for years in therapies despite the pain. Last year I backslid.
I'm such a masochist, experimenting on myself. 😂
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