Quote:
Originally Posted by On_A_Freeway
It sounds like your mind is in a good place. It is not easy to stay positive with all of this. Not letting chronic pain define you is not small feet.
|
Thanks, but it's almost a way of survival I suppose. I also suffer from tinnitus, another life-long condition that can drive you mad if you give in to it. Being stubborn can be bad, in in this case it's a life saver. I force my brain to ignore it (most of the time). Don't ask me how that works, if I knew I'd be rich!
Quote:
|
Staying sober has been pretty wild. I miss having drinks, but staying sober is much more manageable than i could have imagined when I was first trying 2.5 years ago. It took a lot of work but it is paying off. The life I was living was just craziness. The drinking I miss, is what I was doing 10 years ago. The past 10 years ago I was just barely existing though.
|
A very good point. Although I feel good about having escaped the madness, I'll never forget that a big part of the motivation was because drinking just didn't work anymore... So yeah, the "10 years ago" touches the right snare for me. There was this short period of time when it was fun, when it didn't go too far, when it had no direct consequences. Luckily, I know there's no going back there; starting again would be where I left off + worse.
Quote:
|
am looking to get some help from the CBD area cause I am sick of being on meds that have bad side effects. I will report back to the group next month as I will be starting in a few weeks. I have low expectations but my neurologist is very much pushing me to drop the gaba for CBD. Thinks I should be able to have a trade off one for the other.
|
I hope it works for you. I have experimented with it - high quality CBD oil - and sadly it didn't do much for me. Maybe I should have given it a longer try, but in the weeks that I took it I felt no difference. (then again, neither did gaba)
I also experimented with different kinds of weed & hash (legal-ish over here). I did notice that different strains have very different effects, and one of them indeed did temporarily reduce the pain to almost zero. Problem is: it was temporarily, and I wouldn't want to go through life "baked", nor do I want to replace one addiction for another one.
But, I guess I'm trying to say that there are many types of weed and oils, and it may be a case of finding the right one. Some of the weed just made me feel sleepy, others made me feel agitated and paranoid, and even the one that works against the pain made me feel uneasy. I just don't want to take any chances anymore, and value feeling "clear" over not feeling any pain. However, I would urge you to try it for yourself and give it a real shot. I know that for some people it's a half miracle, so just take my info as "n=1".
Quote:
|
I am also trying to start to eat healthier this week. I lost a ton of weight since I stopped drinking but have put some back on. Sweets are doing it to me but I was told not to worry about them in my first year of sobriety. That makes sense for most people but with PN, i cant imagine being overweight is a good thing. Logically it would help to remove the need to support extra mass. So that's kind of the next thing to tackle.
|
Eating healthy and losing weight (after 6 years I weigh 32kg less...from 128 to 96 being 6'7") worked very well for me, and seriously reduced the pain. But I only started tackling my weight after 9 months sober and feeling "solid" about sobriety. There's only so much we can do at the same time. But if you feel up for it; yeah, it works.
Quote:
|
Does anyone else experience restless leg type symptoms at night? That on top of the pain is really maddening.
|
Not anymore, but I did have that for 2 years before it turned into PN.
Don't worry about the scatterbrain thing BTW, most of us have been there. PN messes with your life, and getting sober is also a huge thing, so feel free to keep asking questions. Talking about it, and knowing there are others who deal with this helps. At least, it did for me!