Trying to be a good sickie

On Friday I wrote and said I might take a break.

I’ve been posting on all my sites at a crazy pace since October when I started with Pay/perp0st. I need to do that because I’ve been off work due to my Crohn’s disease since December 2005. I have no money coming in.

Well I didn’t really, until I came across pay/perp0st, and a few other companies that pay me to write posts for them. I also added text-link-ads to my sites, and Google Adsense to my new sites (I’d had Adsense and Amazon on my two established websites for years prior to this).

Finally I was making some money and it felt good.

Trouble was .. I’m at home sick for a reason. I’m too sick to work at my job as a nurse where I stand on my feet for my whole 12 hour shift and often run around like a chicken with my head cut off. I guess I thought posting sometimes as many as 20 posts a day on all my sites combined wouldn’t be as hard on me.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been if I wasn’t doing it 7 days a week. You know … if I actually gave myself a day off every now and then?

I haven’t been though and I think I’m really paying for it now.

In mid-December I saw my gastrointernologist and he took me off my Crohn’s meds (not the pain killers although he’s not thrilled with those) to prepare for the camera endoscopy that I’m going to have on the 24th of this month. I get to go totally digital and swallow a camera pill. Oh Joy!

Yeah- no anti-inflammatory meds for some with an inflamed bowel. Not a good situation. Crohn’s doesn’t only affect the bowel. It can affect the joints and eyes and a lot of other things too. Well .. today my knees are killing me too.

Complain, complain, complain.

Actually I’m writing this to tell you that for the most part I was a good sickie yesterday. For the first time I took my pain meds properly.

I have one heavy duty pain killer (morphine if you’d like to know) that is time released over 12 hours. When my pain doctor first started me on them she suggested that I take it in the evening since that’s when I have most of my pain, and if it worked maybe my pain levels would be low enough that I could go to sleep at a decent time. I was also being prescribed a pain killer called Tramacet as well – it’s kind of like Tylenol #3’s but it has a synthetic morphine derivative in it rather than codeine since I’m allergic to codeine.

For a little while I was going to bed by maybe 2 a.m. but my messed up sleep and pain cycle continued, and before long I was up all night again. Part of the reason for that is that I don’t digest things well and uhm … that pill that was supposed to do me so much good wasn’t being absorbed by my system. Don’t ask me to explain how I know that- use your imagination if you must.

So when I told the doctor that the pill was passing through me sometimes as often as three times a week she started me on a Fentanyl patch as well. That’s a patch that delivers yet another painkiller 24 hours a day through my skin. That helped a bit. Oh and I also have percocet to take for break through pain as well.

Even with all those heavy duty meds – 4 different types, I was still in terrible pain. Abdominal pain is very hard to manage obviously. At least when your body doesn’t co-operate and actually digest the medicine. So, she instructed me to take the morphine pill twice a day.

I really didn’t want to do that, and I didn’t up until yesterday.

Yep. Yesterday when I got up I took the medicine that I normally only allowed myself to take at night. I then lazed around in bed reading a novel for a couple of hours. When I got up again I was in pain but no where near as much as I’ve been in all week.

The pain increased as it usually does in the evening once I’d gotten a couple of meals into my system. Even though I had pain it was still less than it’s been most of this past week. So I followed my usual pattern of taking a couple of Tramacet, and once I hit the 12 hour mark from the time I’d taken the morphine pill earlier that day, I took another. Just as my pill bottle has instructed me to do for the last 4 or 5 months, but which I’d never done before.

Unfortunately I’m still in pain. It’s the middle of the night – or rather it’s early Sunday morning. You’d think I’d be asleep having increased my meds but it doesn’t seem to work that way with me. Maybe if I took my medications as should more often I’d start to feel better.

I know I’ve mentioned a lot of heavy duty pain pills here, oh and the patch too. I don’t take any of the medicine as prescribed though. Ok, I can’t alter the patch so I do take that one properly. I’m allowed to take two Tramacet at a time, but I usually only take one at a time. The percocet? I take that two or three times a week, but I often only take half a pill because it hits me too hard and makes me nauseated. The morphine pill I can take twice a day and up until yesterday I only ever took one a day.

Guess I am the perfect person to be writing the Watching House blog eh? I understand his pain – but I don’t pop pills quite like he does!

Anyway, I think I’ll continue my experiment today and take my morphine pill when I’m due for another one. Maybe if I can get on top of this pain by treating it aggressively for a few days I’ll begin to feel a bit better.

I’m not sure yet whether I’ll write any extra posts today for pay/perp0st. It would be nice to just try to sleep and relax. That is what I should do, but I might be compelled to write a post or two if a good paying opportunity comes up. I’m going to try not to though.

Oh just to show you an example of how much my posting has increased just on this blog alone (add in As the garden Grows and Celebrity scoop with similar posting totals to see what I’ve really been up to, plus my photoblog with at least 5 posts a week) :

# January 2007 (49)
# December 2006 (126)
# November 2006 (143)
# October 2006 (120)
# September 2006 (32)
# August 2006 (26)
# July 2006 (31)

You can see that I was writing almost daily before October, then once October and my earning discovery came along my posting quadrupled!

No wonder I’m not getting any better.