All Hail Neurontin

If you've ever suffered from insomnia, you can understand my praise right now. For the past two nights, I've been able to sleep for more than 3 1/2 to 4 hours. It is amazing how much more rested I feel today with 7 hours sleep that was uninterrupted! Yay, Neurontin, or rather, the generic equivalent.

I wake up with pain, but not the excruciating "Oh my God I'm going to hack my leg off at the knee to stop this!" pain I had been experiencing. However, now that I'm not feeding the body the Vicodin through the night, it seems like I have had to bump up from a pill to a pill and a half during the day. I see the doctor on Wednesday and will bring that up.

Nurse Kathy brought up that this really isn't RSD, she felt it was more a peripheral neuropathy. She sent me some links, and while the symptoms of the two are very similar, I do fit the PN diagnosis much more closely. Instead of specifically seeing a pain managment doctor, I'm probably headed to a neurologist to figure out the cause-but I think we already know.

The other odd thing is that peripheral neuropathy typically happens to diabetics, as their circulation is poor. In discussing this with Liz, she offered to send testing strips and a glucose meter. At first, I didn't think that it was neccessary-I'd been tested as part of the lupus screen and it came up fine. The more I think about it, well, testing couldn't hurt. If there is an issue, I would catch it early. It would be typical for me to have a complication of diabetes before actually having diabetes.

The irony in this is that in the past year, I have begun eating far better than I once did. Fast food meals are rarely consumed, when they were nearly 50% of my food consumption. I've lost around 30 pounds by eating meals that Ed and I have prepared, either at the meal prep kitchen or at home. I took the old toaster oven into work to make those meals at work.

My appetite is much smaller, and it took three visits to fast food joints to really bring that home. I ate half of a big mac and was stuffed. That was strange. Three crunchy tacos was my usual at Taco Bell, yet at 1 1/2 tacos, I was stuffed and stopped. And on the way to Sea World, we stopped at Whataburger and I ordered a regular sized sandwich that I could not finish. My lesson has been learned-I will order kids meals.

So, the change in meds is a good one, the change in eating probably will serve me well if in fact, the cart got before the horse. Only time will tell...

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