The flight home kicked my butt. The connection was too tight in Chicago... it took 25 minutes from the time the bags started to come down until mine arrived. I literally ran through the terminal with carry-on baggage in tow... It felt good to run and it was enough of a workout to really get warm and huff and puff a lot. Got to the gate 4 minutes before flight left, but 6 minutes after doors closed. That gave me an additional 3.5 hours of layover and I fell asleep in a chair... not a good position for any cervical patient, but especially for recent post-op patients. Tuesday was rough... Wednesday was worse with some pretty severe pain. To top it all off, I'm trying to taper off the Oxy and have switched from 10's to 5's, going from 30mg/day down to 15 or 20. Since I've only been back on opiates for a few months and at relatively small doses (compared to my lumbar episode), I thought this would be easy. NOT SO! Even this small taper has me feeling really lousy... headache, body aches... just really feeling crappy. If the flight induced episode goes away, I'll consider going cold turkey. From my 2002 experience, from this point in my taper to the end of the withdrawals was about 3 weeks. I think I'd rather do a bad weekend than 3 weeks of mild to moderate withdrawals. We'll see. I see the PM this afternoon and still have to get past the pain episode before I can even consider going below the current 15 to 20 mg.
Last night I had a pretty frightening severe pain in lower throacic spine... far away from any previous lumbar or cervical issues. I hope that there is not more happening... there were lower throacic problems called out on MRI... let's hope that this was just an anomoly and not the start of something new. I have enough metal already.
I'll keep everyone posted. I'm glad I can provide a glimpse into the ups and downs that so many experience... it's not all sunshine and roses. While we sometimes see the amazing recoveries where people are so much better at just a few days post-op and never look back, I think that this kind of experience is much more common.
All the best,
Mark
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