One lady with fibromyalgia.
Chronic pain is a chronic pain! There is no better way to say it. Fiberomyalgia is a real ailment causing real pain.
Fortunately for me, I found an Interventional Pain Management physician who knew about fibromyalgia; he did the following:
1. Did not call me nuts.
2. Listened to ME.
3. Prescribed exercise, Lyrica 75mg; Cymbalta 20 mg daily. All three have worked together to decrease the Fibromyalgia.
First diagnosed with fibromyalgia, 1992, I suffered bouts of pain with increased intensity for years. Some days I was not able to get out of bed easily; just going to the bathroom was almost too much to bear. I was prescribed Elavil and bed rest. With children ages 18 to 7 I needed to function at a high level. Elavil made me so looped I slept for hours. My complaints were met with a change of medication to Pamelor. The development of a tremor made my home care nursing job impossible to do. Even simple drawing of blood from a patient was too difficult.
I elected to not take any tricyclic antidepressants after that. While the pain was so bad, pain was better than not being able to function mentally and physically. Fortunately the tremor stopped a few weeks after the Pamelor was discontinued! I went back to work in a job that I loved.
Learning to do exercises less stressfully was helpful plus taking 800 mg of ibuprophen 3 times daily helped me get through the days and nights. A move to Okinawa, Japan, proved to be very stressful. The pain index was registering 8 – 10 daily. I became depressed. A psychiatrist prescribed prozac. Immediatedly I started feeling better. Adverse publicity regarding prozac lead me to discontinue it though personally I had no symptoms. Returning to the USA, I sought a new doctor and a different approach to this strange illness that has no known cause, but is aggravated by stress. I went back on Prozac without problems, but was switched to Effexor approximately 2002., and now Cymbalta because they raise serotonin levels better thus promoting pain relief through relieving stress. An interesting aside: I no longer cry even when something is sad. I attribute that to the antidepressant. The adjunct of Lyrica to the mix has helped the pain relief, too. Diet changes, guaifenesin (cough medicine ingredient), narcotics and other modalities used or suggested did not help. I am glad that no one prescribed narcotics for this condition. However I did take narcotics for some surgical procedures. The narcotics did alleviate the surgical pain, but NOT the fibromyalgia pain. This knowledge was great! I never went down the road of getting addicted to pain medications.
Most days now I do not think of pain. I garden, do some minor landscaping, go up and down stairs with much greater ease. Thank you to my interventional pain management specialist.
Thank you for believing and relieving.
Susan Noel
Comment : This lovely lady was truly MISERABLE until she got proper treatment. Now she’s much pleasanter to live with.
I was the first of her pain management physicians, and got things started the right direction.
She’s incorrect on one minor point. The benefit of the antidepressant on pain is due to the Norepinephrine effect, not the serotonin effect.
Yes, she’s my wife. And I’m grateful she is!
Ken Noel, MD
