Well, he's prescribing the Morphine SR on the insistence of my spine doctor, and with the agreement that as soon as I get on medicaid I will transfwr to a PM clinic. . . The stuent center is free and I would be billed for co-pay every visit to the pain clinic. I'm in line for SSI right now, and I get a certain level of disability medical assitance from the state for prescriptions, but it's not much. . . 115 dollars doesn't even cover my morphine, let alone my psych meds.

I take 120mg of morphine a day, but that's not really a lot. It's intended for twice a day dosing and only one notch above the average adult starting dose. Maybe my body metbolizes opiates more wastefully.

I will look into fentanyl and it's cousins and see if their are any fast acting generics out there. . .it has to be generic. I'm nore than a little concerned about his possible reaction if I were to go in and ask for fentanyl. That was one of the spine doc's suggestions (aka duragesic, along eith methadone and the morphine above I mentioned). But he is not very familiar with pain meds: when I first brought him these suggestions he said, "I think you have to go to clinic to get mehtadone."
Actiq is *defnitely* out of my price range, as was Duragesic.
And it's all one of those meds marked :cancer patients only,"

CPer's on long acting opiates, please help me!
I'd really like to know more about *breakthrough pain* its self and people's experiences with it, as someone here once posted that no doctor should prescribed a long-acting opiate without something for breakthrough. But I was think about something more traditional, like plain oxycodone or
something.

If you are on a long acting oiate analgesic can you tell me if your experiences are like mineThe knee problem is actually becoming worse than the back problem I came in for and my back still troubles me almost every day, but fentanyl seems like a big, expensive leap. . .what is commonly prescribed for chronic pain patients (without cancer) already on long-acting analgesics? Are the symptoms I described in my first post indicative of a need to change my MSCOntin dosing, need for breakthrough meds, or what? I searched this entire forum for all of history and there has never been a topic devoted to Breakthrough Pain. Let's get one going!
I have to hobble ito the other room now and take 800mg ibuprophen 60mg MSContin 10mg of flexeril and my Ca/Mg supplement so my fiancee (we are going to Toronto to get married next month) and I can watch "Brain Candy."