Pajiba

Wait, that was Vicodin. I thought it said Oxycodone.

Hydrocodone. And I TOTALLY called it on the day the news broke. I KNEW motherfucking prescription pills were the culprit. They similarly killed a 32 yo friend of mine. Lethal Interaction, heart attack, dead. To be sure he was abusing them, took more than he should, but still, no need to die for it. Those damn things are fucking dangerous, and the doctors need to quit handing them out like tic-tacs.
OK. Rant over.

Lindsey's point is excellent; they hand that shit out like it's Halloween. She shouldn't have been mixing the cough syrup with the heart medication, for fuck's sake, let alone the painkillers. And Prozac is contraindicated for a lot of stuff too. (Yes, I Googled.)

In the area I live in, which is small town Ontario, addiction to Oxy and similar drugs is so rampant that someone (myself, who has a severe form of arthritis) who could legitimately use those kinds of drugs cannot get them. The Doctors here will not prescribe them. I've actually debated telling the Dr. that if he will not prescribe them to me I will go buy them from the street. They certainly don't hand them out like tic-tacs where I live.

I'm with Jadine. Oxycodone and its relatives are Schedule 4 controlled substances. Doctors (legitimate ones) do not hand them out like tic-tacs. They have quite a significant reporting burden whenever they write an Rx for them. If you know of a doc handling them out freely, he/she is breaking the law, report them now.

My wife had a pretty serious addiction to Vicodin that she sought help for a few months ago. It was getting really bad, and now we have a fortune in emergency room bills and copays that will follow us forever, most likely.

@banana, thanks, but no thanks. I'll just keep taking copious amounts of Advil.

There are a lot of rural Canadian places with serious Oxycodone issues (most of Cape Breton, for example) but I'm still shocked at how easy it is to get a prescription.

My boyfriend was having wrist pain, likely induced by his Blackberry, and before suggesting physio (or telling him to toss is berry) he was given Oxycodone. I made him toss that shit.

That clip of Jay Leno was amazing. Even though it was completely different then his Tonight Show act, it still manages to be exactly as entertaining.

600mg Ibuprofen and 500 Mg Ex strength Tylenol has essentially the same painkiller as 1 Vicodin. No opiates.
I lived in constant pain for years. Thank goodness I had already fucked up and gone to rehab when I was 22(booze, but I don't take any mood altering drugs at all anymore), because if I had had the ready option of prescription pain pills during that time, God only knows what would have happened. 20 Ibuprofen a day is no joke either, but no opiates at least. All that pain left when the Husband did, interestingly enough. Huh. Maybe all this 'Pain' could be addressed from a variety of fronts.
My friend Brandon was beautiful. But the online Pharmacy based in Mexico that filled his endless prescription written by a doctor he never met didn't know that. He did it to himself, no argument, but couched in respectability because it wasn't technically 'illegal' he broke himself on those pills, and they took him. And a lot of the pain he was medicating wasn't physical, to be sure. He was failed on many levels, and I fear our Ms. Murphy was too.

That's what geep said.
Posted by: Xtreme at February 26, 2010 2:01 PM

are you calling me out?! let's take this to facebook, bitch!

Hey! I gave up gossip blogs for Lent! Now I have to start all over!

On an unrelated note, I lurve that LOST timeline. Flawed, certainly, but helpful as well.

On a completely unrelated note, I was reading Adrian Amos' blog today and I think he's really going through some rough shit right now. Can we all just send him our positive thoughts and comments? I think he could use some uplifting right about now. Thanks.

Vicodin makes me a drooling, crying, sleepy yet unable to sleep wreck. I had stomach cramps and nausea and every side effect except for the rash when I took those bastards. I hate them. I just tell the doctor that I'm allergic to them because I never want to have anything close to them again. Give me a 500mg ibuprofen and I'm a happy gal, pain-wise.

Well, at least we know you can get them somewhere...

I can't stand the woman and who knows, she could poison me or something. I would be too nervous to buy something like that illegally, you never know what you're going to get. For the time being I'll just suck it up and wonder why the hell I was afflicted with this Godforsaken arthritis. I'm too young for this bullshit.

Hey, kids, prescription drugs are still drugs. ALL drugs (including aspirin) have side effects, side effects that are more likely the longer you take the drug (and the more of it you take). And drug interactions can fucking kill you.

People have been offing themselves accidentally with prescription meds for as long as we've had prescription meds, so it's not all that shocking to me when famous people do it. They're not any smarter than we are. But I bet they are a lot more likely to get meds when they ask for them. I bet there are tons of people in southern CA who will write a script for anything you want, if you pay enough.

I've never had Percocet or Vicodin. Strongest painkiller I've ever had is Tylenol.

Thank you, Patty O'Green, you're a sweet soul.

BM had seven drugs in her system and DIED from pneumonia yet none of the drugs were antibiotics i.e. drugs that would have saved her from the pneumonia. She wasn't afraid of going to the doctor's offices but she ended up dieing at home from a very treatable disease. I'm guessing that things like meth might have interfered with her decision making abilities.

Diversion!

When I had my wisdom teeth removed the kind pusher-people had quite the plan to make it all OK. First one side, then the other. Valium beforehand for "nerves", knock me out, then painkillers on the painkillers, and "If you need more, just ask."

- First, we're doing all 4 at once, because you won't get me back.

- Second, no Valium, and do it with a local.

- Third, how about half that many pain pills.

- I walked home from the surgery, about 12 blocks, with my teeth in my pocket. (How cool is that? They'll give you the teeth they pulled, if you ask. Then insist. If you're conscious to do that.)

One pill at night so I could sleep and in three days I wanted that next pill. Three pills. Three days. That's all it took. I turned the bottle upside down and left it in the medicine cabinet unitll I didn't want them any more. Took almost two years.

The only time I took pain pills was when I had PRK (it's LASIK only without the flap) surgery on my eyes. Each time my eye felt so uncomfortable that I kept squinching my eyelid shut. After like 3 hours of doing that my eye socket muscles started to hurt like a motherfucker. So I took a pain pill and went to bed. My doctor was smart though. He wrote me one prescription for 7 pills. And that's all I got.

The pain pill doctor's offices are obvious. In fact, they're so fucking obvious that I can describe them to you. Here goes: full waiting room, most of the patients between 35-60 years old. All of the patients look like life beat them with a thorny branch. And the waiting room is always like that. Every time I've come across an office like that I'll ask my co-workers that have been in the territory much longer than I have, Hey is so-and-so a pain pill doc? And every time they say, Yes. It's surprisingly easy for a doctor to do that too. As long as they go through the steps of "pain management" they can write pain pills and it's hard for law enforcement to pin them down. I've known a couple that get caught, but a lot get away with it.

As for the issue of primary care physicians being allowed to write psychotropic and pain medication, I think there needs to be some sort of law that they can write one script and then the patient is required to go to a specialist for management of their disease state. I fucking twitch every time I see Pristiq or Kadian or something like that in a sample closet. Primary care doctors simply do not have the knowledge necessary to manage pain or mental health issues.

Jadine, have you looked into alternative therapies like acupuncture? It won't make the arthritis go away completely, but it will help relieve the pain. I know several primary care physicians that refer all of their pain patients to an acupuncturist.

Dude, I don't care what you guys say, Jay Leno is fucking awesome! Who the fuck can say they really don';t like him without lying.

I sympathize with Jadine's predicament, since most people asking for pain medication want only to treat their very real pain problems. However, just last week in my own clinic, I met a new patient requesting vicodin for what sounded like a totally legitimate reason. He even had a big stack of his old medical records in hand to prove his point. I can't remember the last time I wrote a prescription for narcotics during a patient's first visit, but since he had his proof in hand, I gave him a small prescription for lower-dose vicodin than he normally got, and fewer tablets, since I needed to finish my background check and get a urine toxicology screen on him. Now I have his prescription report, showing no fewer than 54 different vicodin prescriptions from 23 different doctors within the past year, each of which was for over 100 tablets each. And his urine screen shows marijuana. He called today asking for more vicodin, and I laughed out loud.

And Stardust, they can write a law requiring referrals to specialists like psychiatrists and pain specialists as soon as they write the law granting all patients insurance coverage for psychiatrists and pain specialists. As a primary care provider myself, I'd love to be able to send all my complicated psychiatric patients for a consultation with a psychiatrist. I was lucky enough to get a lot of psychiatric training in my residency, and to have 2 excellent psychiatrists in my office that see some patients for free, but that sure seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

P.S. LOL

test

Teach me, Master.

*bows*