A doctor’s guess

Hello everyone, first off I want to thank you all for your well wishes, words of encouragement, condolences, advice, and most of all your thoughts on my last post. Your input means the world to me and I want to thank each of you for that.

Life goes on, and so on we go!

An important lesson that we learned concerning medication in the last couple of months I want to share with you. Cindy's Dad Ray has been referred to a pain management doctor to help control his chronic pain, this doctor has run Ray through the mill on his medications. And in an attempt to lower the dosages (because the State says so…) adjustments have to be made.

Ray’s medications have been flip flopped so much that we have lost track, and Ray’s pain level has increased to the point where it was unbearable for him. Cindy suggested to the doctor that he should return Ray’s medications back to the original dosages, because at those dosages the pain was at least tolerable. The doctor had a better idea instead “We will just add this many milligrams of drug XYZ to his regimen, this will help with the pain” he said. This should have been our first clue of potential problems arising because Ray was already on drug XYZ!

The doctor's solution to this was prescribing another medication that he felt would help, he checked Ray’s medication list and called the new prescription into our pharmacy. Cindy picked up the prescription and began giving it to Ray as prescribed three times a day, and at the end of day one Ray said he was feeling a bit better, the morning of day two we found that he had slept all night long, Cindy woke Ray up after lunch and gave him the mid day dose.

After supper Ray fell asleep in his chair and at bedtime we attempted to wake him for his nightly pill regimen and to get him into bed, it took literally an hour just to get him out of his chair and into bed. (Ray is a big man so needless to say this was not easy!) We decided that either his condition was declining so rapidly that we were losing him, or the medication change was affecting him negatively.

We withheld the new medication and monitored him throughout the night. Ray began improving and upon investigating the new drug we found that Ray had been prescribed a very high dose of a muscle relaxer, needless to say we stopped giving this medication and the first words out of Ray’s mouth when we got into see the pain management doctor was “You know Doc, if I was able to get out of this wheelchair I'd be kicking your Ass right now!”

The moral to this story is that you should always have your Doctor explain what each new medication is, and to read the description of each one before beginning to take it. Funny thing now is the doctor has adjusted all of Ray’s medications back to where they were at the beginning.

The not so funny thing is that Ray is not so trustworthy of medication time now, we almost have Ray convinced that this was really not an evil plot that we came up with to kill him…

Cindy tells him “I promise we weren’t trying to kill you Dad”, as he begins to question each one of his pills at each and every one of the times she gives out his medications.

Can't say I blame him though, and I have found myself counting my own pills when I dump them into my hand from the pillbox. It doesn't hurt to keep an eye on her because we have been married for a long time now…

Have you had any medication mishaps like this?