If your doctor thought. . .
now imagine if your doctor could feel

My sincerest apologies for adulterating your post. Nightshade. It's never been my intention to adulterate anything for strictly illicit purposes. I've been taking 2400mg of ibuprophen a day for the past two years, overlaid with a 6 month stay on MSContin and a some sparse 30-40 count scripts for 5mg hydrocrap and 5mg percocet. Just enough to keep me right there on the bench of "opiate tolerant".

So I have a surgery, which is part of the treatment for which those sparse scripts have been coming for the past 4 months. Just a part, mind you. Scraping out one joint and replacing one toe. There are 4 others, and an ankle. Week one I get 40 percocet. Week 2 I get 30. The following weekend I fall several times, wind up in emergency, x-rays show a fracture. Sucks for me. The next day I ask the resident on call to call in a script for me. . .talwin, I'm hoping a low scheduled partial opiate-agonist will do what I doubt his other offer (tylenol 3) will. Of course I'm unable to pick up the script myself, so I get a surprise. #30 Tylenol 3 with the instructions: Take one as needed for pain. One very 6 hours? Every 4 hours? Every 5 minutes? I'm a good patient, I scour the web to find the proper prescribing info for tylenol 3. 1-2 every 4-6 hours. This is not psychological. They do nothing. I'm a bad patient. I take 4. They do nothing.

The next day I go to my EMERGENCY appointment that is 2 weeks early because I was on the phone with the on-call doc all weekend, first because of a bad wrapping that turned my foot purple and made me cry for 2 days, then because of that silly fracture thing.

The surgeon tells me to start wearing shoes and stop using my crutches, gives me a script for PT (which starts Aug 19th) and, when I tell him that the T3s are literally useless, he tells me "THIS FAR OUT FROM SURGERY WE DON"T GIVE NARCOTICS" or some such Best if kept off the board. Not understanding that all I want is something that will work. And please no more tylenol. He did explain the cryptic prescription to me, though. Apparently, they left off a word.

A DAY AS NEEDED FOR PAIN >>

Apparently, when my prescription is "up" he will be willing to write a prescription for ultram. What a gentle god of a man.

I've been taking 2400mg of ibuprophen almost every day for the past 2 years. Except March 27 of this year, when I went into complete renal failure, and the 10 days that followed and created that conditions above.

Heck, I'll take all the tylenol you want, as long as it's compounded with an actual painkiller. . . that I'm not allergic to. Instead I'm stuck just taking a killer. Nice. All you people moaning about acetominophen need to do a little research into the hepatic toxicity of oxycodone. . .the renal toxicity of morphine and methadone. . .(just off the top of my head) and everyone cheering over the advent of vicoprophen, start asking your family members to test now.

It's truly a shame that we have to be in such pain, damned if we do and damned if we don't. I guess I really don't know what my position on this is, other than I sure wish there were a way to kill the pain without killing ourselves.

Oh, and one other thing. I took one look at that script for those T3's and got out my bottle of ACA's and dumped about 80 of 'em in a cup of water. I'm not stupid enough to take that much tylenol and at that point I still had some hope that the equivalent of a couple of T4s might provide some analgesia. Because I still has some faith that "IF THE DOCTOR THOUGHT. . ." tylenol 3 might help, maybe he wasn't too far off. Sue me. Ban me. I'm tired of fighting.