No Pain

A lot of people have been asking about my pain level. I went to a pain specialist last week and it was very worthwhile. I had been taking primarily vicodeine but was limiting myself to 6 pills per day because of the liver damage that can be caused by the acetaminophen part of vicodeine. My oncologist had prescribed as much morphine as I wanted but it didn't seem to have any effect on my pain receptors. The result was I was in pain most of the time. This doctor prescribed a form of vicodeine that had 2x the amount of codeine and 1/2 the amount of acetaminophen. He also gave me a prescription for Lyrica. This is a fairly new Pfizer drug that is non narcotic and works for nerve pain. It takes a several day to take effect. The result has been NO PAIN!! It is so wonderful to be pain free for the first time in 7 months. I expressed my concern to the Pain Specialist about getting hooked on these drugs. He explained there is a difference between drug dependency and addiction. He says that I will get dependent upon these drugs (biochemically speaking) and may require a higher dosage to get the same effect. He says that I will have to work with him to slowly wean myself off of them when I am completely healed. Addiction is when a patient starts taking these drugs to get high not just to alleviate pain. He said the patient then starts lying to the physician to get more drugs and then tries to gets drugs from multiple doctors. I had never thought about the distinction between dependency and addiction. I always thought they were one and the same.