Continued. (I'm typing on a tiny smart phone. Forgive my errors that I'm not going to correct)
If you were someone say in your 30's, I would perhaps think your Dr doesn't know the dosing for fibro, or maybe s/he is one of dreaded several Dr's. who don't believe fibro exists outside of the psychological realm (the last 20 yrs of research shows it's very real). However, we could also assume your doctor is afraid to fool around with dosing higher with "brain meds" in a younger person. Your brain is not fully developed.
Brain develpment after age 18 & 21:
http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html
There are pediatric Dr's for fibro. Probably not very many, more of a rarity. But it would be ideal, maybe not needed.
Gabapentin doses , according to a pain doc I had, don't really do much for fibro people until they get up to 1800 mgs (some go higher). He said at that dose doing word retrieval becomes more challenging for the brain. (but individual patients also report worse brain fog with lyrica and cimbalta). I hate stumbling while grasping for words enough already, so I declined gabapentin. But it's a personal choice people make. I don't know their pain, or the demands of their lives and families.
And come to think of it, someone recently posted a very low dose of gabapentin. Its essentially helping her with sleep. That reduces pain.
Nortriptyline and amitriptyline lengthen the time in stage 3 (deep) sleep. That gets you more growth hormone, and that helps a little with pain, cuz everyone needs daily tissue repair and uses growth hormone to do it. Those are antidepressants but used at usually. Very low doses...not enuf for depression symptoms. Nortriptyline is a metabolite of amitriptyline, so nortriptyline has fewer issues with dry mouth and next day sleepiness. That is if a Dr. says it's OK for you to be on these meds.
Your depression is very common in fibro. There are neurotransmitter changes, maybe it's our central nervous system inflammation causing depression in some people, adjusting to pain sux, etc etc. I can't handle most meds. So for 13 years I used walking and bright light exposure for my depression. It helped a bit, kept me above my depression-normal and definitely happier.
What finally turned my depression around was thyroid medicine. (Which isn't to say that this is your problem too.) One day you could look at a symptom list for hypothyroidism and see what you think. Hypo means low, so that would mean having low thyroid hormone. The normal thyroid meds didn't work for me, but by sheer luck I came across a great psychiatrist who actually wanted better thyroid and adrenal tests run. Then I did some web surfing about
hypothyroidism, T3 thyroid medicine, and other intricacies. So at that point I found a doctor who understood hypothyroidism better than the average doc. The fact is, very seldom do we get lucky with doctor choices. But we can overcome luck if we try hard.
You're gonna be all right. And you're gonna surprise yourself when you look backwards someday and say oh yeah, I *can* do flares. I didn't think I could do this, but I've proven I can. I always get thru it. The confidence will come. Believe me.
But it's ruff in so many ways finding how to be in the world you are in with the new body you have, different problems from most people, that others cannot possibly understand. They Just Can't. Its that simple, that complicated. Yeah, that's very tuff.
I'm at another site quite often, and some of the younger members there felt a need to also connect with other people who became ill while young. I've looked, & your age definitely makes you eligible to join them. I think there are problems that are unique to you younger folks, so I went and found their site name. Luckily it happens to have just come up again, two days ago. Maybe some things are meant to be?
http://www.allthebeautifulpeople.com/
If you happen to be in the San Francisco area, someone there (very young) posted a while back that he wanted to start a youthful support group for the area. I can't remember any details of what he put in motion, but I could prolly find it.
Good luck settling I to this world of ours.
Post Edited (Rockon) : 10/2/2015 7:58:27 PM (GMT-6)