When the pain hits, try to take your BTP medication ASAP. Don't wait to unload the groceries, finish that sinkful of dishes, attend to that stack of paperwork. Put yourself and your pain issues first. If you do not have your pain under control, you won't be of much use to anyone; especially yourself. The entire process should take you less than five minutes, a mild trade-off for ignoring your pain and then suffering needlessly for hours.
Called-'Chasing The Pain', failing to address your pain immediately will only result in the never ending cycle of pain, medications and other modalities you use to help such as heat and ice, pain that is not responding, waiting in more pain until it is time for another dose, and the cycle continues.
[Shauna's Life in Pain and Other Fun Things]
Wow, is this ever me. I have such a bad habit of waiting to take pain meds. Especially when it comes to migraines. I seem to be learning to be more responsive to my post-herpetic neuralgia but those migraines do me in every time.
I can't tell you how many times I've been woken up in the middle of the night in pain and instead of getting up and immediately doing or taking something for it I've stayed in bed wishing it would go away. I'm exhausted, it hurts too much to move, maybe if I just stay still I'll fall back asleep and when I wake up again I'll feel better.
Yeah, right.
That never happens. If I fall back asleep--and that's a big if--I wake up later in two or three times the pain that woke me originally. By then I'm miserable and nothing helps.
I need to learn that nothing is more important than dealing with my pain right away. No matter what I'm doing, no matter who I'm with, at the first sign of pain I have to do something about it.
