When you feel the next wave starting to push in from your shin, through you leg and then down into you foot, as it pushed through it forces the air out of your lungs, your teeth clenched tightly as you try and breath through the pain.
As the anew subsides you feel the next one behind it start to grow like fire spreading across you skin and then it starts to push through your leg again.
This is level 10, this is me at least twice a day, sometimes more and it can last for hours, nothing any doctor has given me if touches it, not even dulling it, yet I still take the pills just in case I’m wrong and it’s worse than this without them.
So far today I have managed to limit myself to 200mg of Tramadol 5ml of Oramorph and a couple of joints for good measure.
My pain doesn’t come from my Heart condition but rather the pain is as a result of lymphoedema or ‘wet legs’, which has caused the water to leak out through my skin in large areas, my legs also swell as they retain more water, and my left foot swells too the point where I cannot get it into any shoes even sandals some days.
I know the usual trigger points during the day when the pain is usually at its worst and I try as much as I can to pre-empt it, If I get up in the night any time past 3am then I will most likely take a couple of tramadol as I know when I get up at 4:30am and start moving around the skin which will have been mostly stable during the night will need to start moving and stretching causing to crack open where it has healed overnight, as soon as I get up I will try and get some form of lubrication onto the skin, usually E45 this cools the skin and helps it stretch.
During the day I can normally keep it at bay with constant lubrication but as I get tired towards the end of the day, this is when their real pain can come. again I will usually take tramadol at around 4:30 pm and more likely than not another dose before bed. And then I can try and keep on top of the pain with oramorph.
Cannabis for pain relief. I my opinion Cannabis should be a main stay of the doctors arsenal for long term pain relief, I just wish I could get. hold of it in a more scientific manor and ideally in pill form so I didn’t need to smoke it. Cannabis I find to be incredibly fast acting and able to take even the worst pain, but you do need be careful as sometime it can have the opposite effect, reshaping rather than reliving the pain, almost forcing your to focus on the pain.
Is I have said above there is pretty much nothing I can do physically to stop the pain, it comes and goes, sometimes its all day or all night or both, and I have felt at time like giving up, just getting it over and done with so I didn’t have to face another day of it, but then I always remember that I have far to much to live for, my beautiful and dutiful wife Anna for starters.
I do have to give our local doctors their credit whilst being very careful with dishing out high strength pain killers they have built me up on dosages a bit at a time, whilst constantly checking for any adverse side effects.
