More than just a bag lady

I’ve been home now for by almost 2 weeks and I’m loving it! Since getting out of hospital I’ve been able to start doing all the things that I wanted to do with Hubby and the kids; just boring, mundane, everyday things but things that make me really happy. I’ve been able to do the school runs, help the kids with their homework, get their rooms tidy and even managed to help them set up online banking. We’ve been able to sit down as a family each evening for dinner which is really lovely as now the kids are older it’s pretty much the only time we get together as a family.  Big Girl has been poorly this last week with really bad tonsillitis and a cold and has been off school. She is the worst patient! She’s been extremely demanding and has had me up and down to her every 5 minutes! But she’s hardly ever ill so I can’t really complain and it’s actually nice to be needed. Although it has wore me out! Big Fella has had mock exams so a lot of my time in the evenings  has been spent t...

Last Thursday I had an outpatient appointment with the Community Pain Team (CPT). Believe it or not there is no long term, chronic pain management service within the hospital, which to me is crazy, but probably a result of them not having the budgets for one. As a result when I came out of hospital in the summer I had to go and see my GP and get a referral into the CPT.  While in hospital I am visited a couple of times a week by the pain nurses from the chronic pain team so they can keep an eye on my ketamine and morphine doses. They advised me to attend the outpatient appointment if I possibly could so that when I went home there would be some provisions in place to help manage my pain. One of the things I’ve been looking into and talking about with the doctors and pain nurses is Narcotic Bowel Syndrome. This is a relatively newly recognised condition where the bowel can be damaged due to long term opiate use. It’s becoming more widely recognised and studied as a result of the opi...