I've just finished doing the job I hate more than anything else. No, it's not the washing up. It's not the ironing. It's not cleaning the bathroom. It's sorting out my medication.
I take 13 tablets every morning and 15 at bedtime, not mentioning the ones in between. I used to count out my tablets every single day from my medicine box but I used to find it the most depressing experience ever. So instead I now count a weeks worth in one go, so that I only have to see the huge storage box that is my personal, mobile pharmacy, once a week.
It also makes it much easier if I'm in a rush getting the kids ready for school in the morning, or so exhausted that I practically collapse in the evening. AlI I have to do is grab a pot, shove the tablets in, drink, swallow, job done. Down in one!
Although I'm very grateful that I'm kept alive by the medicinal cocktail I down each day, the actual counting them out, morning, noon, and night (oh, and tea-time!) didn't make me feel thankful. I was just angry and upset that this was what I had been reduced to. That without all the tablets and patches and liquids I would be in pain, unable to lead a normal life. Hang on though- that's the case even with the meds! 😉
There are some people that believe that the medication is what's making me ill, or the side effects and the interactions of one drug with another is actually causing me to be more unwell than I need to be.
Roughly about a year or so ago I was speaking to my psychic friend who suggested this. She said she felt that one or more of my medications was doing the opposite of what it should do and it was actually making me ill. At the time I was in a lot of pain, an in-patient on the IFU ward at St Marks and desperate for answers as to what was wrong with me and why I wasn't getting any better. Her remarks weren't part of a formal reading, she didn't charge me or anything, they were just part of a text conversation.
But me being desperate grabbed hold of her remark and it confirmed what I had already been mulling over in my mind-I was going to stop taking all my medication. What's the worse that could happen, I remember thinking. The worst had already happened and I had survived it!
So when Dr8 did his rounds that day I decided to have a chat to him about it all. He was there with all the other doctors, senior nurses, dieticians etc and the conversation went a little like this:
Me: all this medication can't be good for me.
Dr8: it's not. That's why we aim to reduce it once we have stabilised your pain and done some more tests.
Me: I was thinking of stopping it
Dr8: Stopping what?
Me: It all
Dr8: All what?
Me: All my medication.
Dr8: Why?
Me: Because my psychic told me that one of the tablets is making me ill.
Dietician: I don't suppose she told you which one (with a smart arse look on her face)
Me: Nope. That's why I'm going to stop them all.
Dr8: Mmmmm. That's a very, er, interesting idea. Why don't you have a think about it, see if she can shed any more light on which one it is and then we can have another talk when I finish my ward round.
To be fair to him, he didn't ridicule me or try to make me look stupid like the dietician did but he must have found it pretty funny listening to me, stoned off my head on morphine, saying I had spoken to a psychic and was now going to stop all my medication. You can imagine him going home, his wife asking him how his day was and him saying "you will not believe what one of my patients said to me today!"
Anyway. I hate counting out my medication. Always have. Probably always will. As you can see from the photo I never did stop taking my tablets. And I've been back to see my physic friend who has been scarily accurate on lots of other things. Who knows. Maybe one day it will turn out that she was right all along about the medication. But for now I will keep taking it in the hope that it's doing me some good.
NB x
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