Pain Management Programme Day 7
My seventh day has been and gone at the Pain Management Programme.
You can catch upon my PMP Days here:- Pain Management Programme
Today was about managing Pain Medication and Sleep.
We started off with our Pain Medication, a nurse came in and described an overview of all the main types of medication, their general uses and side effects etc.
We then went through specific ones and it was a bit of an eye opener, for instance I didn’t realize that the Cocodamol I take has codeine an opiate plus paracetamol but it sits somewhere in the middle, neither one or the other.
We talked about the side effects of medication versus the reward and were invited after lengthy discussions to review whether they both equalled each other, or whether we felt we wished to reduce our medication, stop or indeed change to something else.
This is going to be a working progress the thought and decision process. The implementation process is something that we would need to get clarification with our Doctors on.
We then discussed sleep and the effects pain has upon us and medication use on sleep deprivation. How sleep deprivation affects us, the spiral that this makes with thoughts, actions and consequences.
After this we then discussed ways to help improve sleep patterns and habits. One of the main things to set up some kind of routine. There were many sensible suggestions. Luckily at night time I ‘generally’ (dont want to tempt fate), don’t have sleep problems, what I find however though is after I take my painkillers at lunch time, i take a severe energy dip and want to sleep, remaining awake and fully functioning can be a tall order, especially as my pain levels then start to pile up.
Having the afternoon talk about sleep i did indeed unfortunately fall asleep on and off, it was like someone had given me a sleeping pill, i think a few others felt the same, though no snoring was heard. Even though my chocolate brownies were a grand success they didn’t seem to inject enough sugar boost to keep us as alert as I think the teacher would like, but a very useful session nonetheless 😉
We finished off the day with our Deep Muscle Relaxation exercises, I feel I am getting better and better at this, but don’t want to tempt fate by speaking too soon.
I have also included some photos of recommended book reading by the PMP Programme, if you click on each individual photo you should be able to bring up large versions if you are interested in getting the full names etc from the spines to order one from say Amazon, where I have got mine from .
That is all for today, Justine xx
© Justine Nagaur
It's a lonely place 
Definitely sounds like lots to process! I hope this proves to be very helpful for you!
thank you Lori, it is, it’s something to take away with one and try to process then learn for sure, one more week to go x
It was a very interesting day and it seems full of eye openers.
Pain killers have a double sword.
I’m really happy to see you going through that and looking forward to hearing more about your takeaways.
Xxx
ah thank you yes and i have weaned off one pill in totality lol, i shall continue the same for a week but oh boy i had the sweats last night badly and i cannot believe that with just one pill, or maybe i was just sick hah…who knows.. x