waking up daily in a fog from meds

I'm 30 yrs old. I have 5 herniated discs along with muscles in my neck, back and shoulders that have tightened to the point of being extremely painful from compensating for it. I am currently on hyrocodone, soma which is being switched to flexeril, naproxen and gabapentin.

Most nights I don't sleep well due to waking up every couple hrs from the pain. There are some nights that just from being so tired I do sleep through the entire night. Regardless of how well or how much sleep I get, I'm always waking up in a fog. It takes me a long time to wake up, sometimes sleeping through an alarm next to my head for 20 min. When I do finally wake up I feel as though its another hour or 2 before I feel like a normal, functioning person. I feel like my brain is cloudy and even though I'm awake, I'm not really all there for a little while.

If anyone else goes through this and has ways of getting through it quicker or any ideas of which medicine may be causing it I'd love to hear from you! Thanks!!

I have a hard time dealing with muscle relaxants. They completely incapacitate me. One, however, that I can handle is Baclofen. It makes me a bit groggy, but trivially so by comparison.

If the flexeril doesn't work out, keep it in mind.

Hi sleepymama - and Welcome to Healing Well Chronic Pain forum. I am sorry for the pain and problems your having but I am glad you found us, and I hope in time you will be glad you found us here too!

You know I have been Baclofen for many many years, and usually it has to be titrated up to its effective dose, they usually start low and slowly increase it by 5 mg up to where it is effective. I know it took over a month and a half before they got my dosage straightened out, I know that my doctor wants to maintain a certain level of it in my system so I take it every eight hours. I am on the max dosage as I take 30 mg every eight hours, and it works pretty good at contolling my muscle spasms and also as a side affect it helps with my pain control. I have taken allot of the other antispasmodics like flexeril and others, and most are not as effective, and flexeril especially makes me "dopey" and feel drugged up. I have not had any of that with the baclofen, and I don't get the drowsyness that allot of people complain of either.  So maybe taking it more often so you have a consistent level of the medication in your system, and getting your dosage titrated up to where it is effective might help you.

Has anybody suggested surgery on your neck? I understand your problem with not having insurance and all, but I was just wondering if that was considered a viable option. There are several of us here on this forum that have had multiple surgeries and fusions on there cervical spine, so we definitely can empathize with your condition, Please do be carefully with doing any thing that will put a severe strain on your upper spine. Lifting and pushing or pulling, or any thing that will put a strain on your upper spine and neck. I would also be really careful about being manipulated or anything like that from a chiropractor with the shape your in, as it really could do you some major damage!

You know sleep is so very important, and especially with the problems your having your body needs the sleep so it can rebuild and heal its self. I know it is really difficult with having a small child, do you have family or friends close by that can help you? I know that it is hard to sleep when your constantly  being woke up with pain, I live with that constantly too, I do wish I could be of more help to you. I do wish you well and hope you can get this all resolved soon,

Again I Welcome you to our forum, I hope you continue to post and keep us informed on how you are doing!

White Beard

David,
I take the 10/500 for hydrocodone. I've been at that strength for a little over two yrs. I usually take between 2 to 4 a day depending on how my pain is that day. For a long time I tried only taking 1 but I found I was only making it less effective that way. By the time I would cave and take one I was in so much pain that it didn't do as much to help the pain. On an avg day I end up having to take one an hour or two after I get up, another mid day and another in the evening, usually after dinner. On good days I don't need anything as early in the day so just the two although those days are becoming much fewer and far between. On the really bad days I have to take an extra one and it usually ends up being in the middle of the night when I keep getting up due to the pain. I'm not sure if the foggy feeling is coming from that because besides the naproxen that is the one thing I've been on from the start, just obviously difference in the strength. I'm leaning more towards it being from the gabapentin or the soma since those are the two that I've been on for the shortest amt of time. I had to stop by my dr's office today to pick up a script and explained what has been going on so they wrote me a 2 week script of baclofen to use in place of the soma for now to see if that changes anything. If not we're going to have to see what going without one of the others does and if that helps any. I guess sometimes trial and error is the only way to know for sure! I'll let you know once I see how the next few days go :)

White Beard,
We are usually quite careful about what the chiro will and won't adjust. There are a lot of visits where he only does the decompression on my next and traction on my back. Other times I have a laser treatment done. Sometimes he's able to adjust me. It seems to depend on how tight everything is that day. He also says that you have to be careful not to force anything because there are times where it will only make it worse. As of now that and the massage therapy seem to give me a little relief so hopefully it will continue to! But I do agree that you need to be careful with it. In our conditions unfortunately it only takes one wrong move to make things much worse then which we started!

Thanks again guys, I truly appreciate all of your imput and having somewhere to go that I can talk to people that know what I'm going through!

Hey sleepymama, have you tried tonic water with quinine fof the stiff muscles? Seems to really help with some of the stiffness in my leg that I'm doing most of my walking with.

denise,

your doctor told you correctly about the relationship between getting hooked and becoming addicted. If you truly don't have severe pain, then using script level meds can get you addicted quickly. If your body is in severe chronic pain, then all the meds should do is ease or eliminate the pain.

i will tell you for a fact with me, i get ZERO good feelings, or highs, or bliss, etc. off of either the fentanyl or the loratabs. i don't "feel" anything, when they hit, the only reason i knew i took something, is because the pain starts to back down in small subtle degrees at the time.

my oncologist told me to worry less about adiction issues, that the pain i suffer is far worse on the body, then any irrational fear of becoming a druggy.

then ask yourself another question. do you take the meds more than presribed? bad sign. to you keep shortening up the time between prescribed doses? bad sign if you accidently miss a dose and have to wait a couple of hours, aside from feeling your pain increase - do you feel antzy or jumpy? bad sign do you find creative ways to stockplile additional med supplies, i.e. geting a 2nd doc to write a script, etc? another bad sign.

these, my doctor said, are people that are going beyond legitiamte long term CP drug folks, to someone that is starting to become a drug abuser. we can clearly see the difference here.

i only wish my meds made me sleepy, would love that for a side effect, but they don't. i dont sleep well like most of us here, and would love to be drowsy enough from meds to sleep better.

didn't mean to preach, but your doctor told that to you right, good luck

david

denise, in your case, i know i was "preaching to the choir", lol. was meant to be more of a generalized statement, not to anyone in particular.

the other good rule of thumb, that i have learned from my doctors, is to listen to your body, it will often let you know what it needs.

when my oncologist first suggested the fentanyl to me, he knew me well enough to know that i might back off and not use it. so he got smart, and put me on 12.5 mgm. it wasnt' enough, and he knew it. but i followed his orders. next we moved to 25 mgm, then to 50 mgm, then to my current dose of 75 mgm. my body adjusted well to it, and the current dose does knock out the bulk of my pain.

with my break through meds, it took some more experiments. when i first came to him, had already been on loratabs for a full year. he switched me to one of the oxy family, it did nothing for me. so went back to the loratabs, then we tried dilauid, which use to work well for me years back, but this time around, it didnt do much for the pain. so in the end, we mutally agreed to let me stay on the loratabs, since my body tolerates them well, and i don't have any of the classic side effects from them.

it's great to have a doctor that will work so close with me, he knows he can't stop the cancer, but he is convinced he can control the pain, and that's great to me. anytime i start to run low of a script, all i have to do is e-mail his nurse, and either a script is mailed to me (if required to have a hard copy) or else she calls it into my drug store.

i agree with your last statement. there are druggies in my area that would gladly pay $10-20 a pop for the loratabs, to get "high" with. me, i am like you, i wish i would wake up one day not in pain, somehow healed of what ails me, and to never need to use them again. it's not likely that will ever happen, as my cancer is progressing full speed ahead, with no curative hope left. i don't even take aspirin, ant-acids, or any kind of OTC meds unless absolutey needed. i don't even take any vitamins or supplements, at the request of my oncologist.

from reading your posts, i think you got things under control, and know what you need to be doing with your own meds. wish all of here at HW CP would wake up and get better overnight. doesn't hurt to dream

david

a very small dose of amphetamine or dextroamphetamine is actually pretty safe and it can totally alleviate sometimes the brain fog. another amino acid precursor: L-Tyrosine 500-1000mg upon waking. a better form of it is N-Acetyl-Tyrosine 350mg 1 or 2 times per day can bump your stimulant neurotransmitters up a bit. the medication called Provigil or modafinil is very helpful to many people.