Ultram generic name Tramadol

My pain clinic specialist explained to me that it's considered too easy to abuse because it has much fewer side effects to taking too much of it. That is, you can forget that you took it, take an extra one and not suffer any nasty consequences. He recommended it as a prescription alternative to some more dangerous drugs.

I told him at the outset that I didn't even want to try anything opiate or addictive. I knew that anything I took for my chronic pain was going to become gradually less effective over time and I'd need to take more of it in order to function at all, to a point of diminishing returns. When it's addictive opiates like oxycontin, Vicodin and so on, additional health problems with the addiction surface.

I wasn't even willing to start on that road.

My happy surprise came when the Ultram was a lot more effective than Naproxen or Aleve or anything else I took before. I'm on a heavy dose of it, but that dose is just right for my pain management and the result is that I have many more days when I'm mentally functional. My judgment and memory improved dramatically.

I struggled through most of my life with chronic pain without even realizing it. I'm not sure how I managed to ignore the fact that half the time I was so addled I couldn't tell what day it was or what I was doing, but I did. Some of that was by endorphins generated in sustained activity, if I focused on my writing long enough I would start getting a "runner's high" that blocks the pain entirely and leaves me much more competent.

I still get that when I work on my novels and it's no surprise to me if I skip my meds during a 12 to 18 hour writing stint. I write in those long sessions because it does generate the endorphins and those are natural healing, that actually resets my stress related symptoms and brings my nervous system down to a calm level. However, I had better remember to take my meds when I get up and when I finish writing, or I'll pay for that fast.

On bad nights I can't sleep the night through. I wake up when it's time to take my medication. The pain is no longer as constant as it was before I had any medication, so going back to the state that was everyday before I started it is a shock. I'm more aware of it as pain now because of that.

Before, when I was in denial about all my disabilities, I honestly believed other people dragged around in life with as much extreme pain as I did. I heard them complain enough going up stairs or bending over to do anything that I could dismiss my real scoliosis and limp and walking trouble from the right side hemi-hypoplasia. I heard them complain so often about regular aches and pains that I thought I was just lucky not to get headaches.

I don't get headaches as often as I get the other symptoms of fibromyalgia. What I get are all the eighteen "tender points" flaring up with a particular pain that I used to blow off to being just fatigue -- and I have no idea why I didn't notice how tired I was all the time.

Except that other people complain all the time about how they're so tired and stressed.

I didn't understand it wasn't normal to be in so much pain that I couldn't think straight, or so tired that my limbs shake after going up a flight of stairs. I saw enough chaos in other people's homes that I didn't realize my not keeping up all my activities of daily living at a growing deficit of strength and energy wasn't normal. I didn't understand why if I tried to put myself into shape by exercising I would instead wind up driving myself into a sickbed no matter what the exercises were.

It's chilling to look back on how I spent most of my life in a haze of pain, a perpetual fog where I was never quite aware of anything going on. I know that most people thought it was depression. I thought it was depression too, but the depression was situational. When all the mountains in someone's path are things other people jeer at and say "you're making mountains out of molehills" the shame will knock out their judgment.

This drug has improved my mental function to a tremendous level. It isn't euphoric. It has no mood effects at all other than that if the pain comes down out of the stratosphere I'm not discouraged and despairing from the pain.

I used to get suicidal about half the time. I had to define my pain scale levels by function, so I defined Pain Level 10 as the point when I want to just die rather than go on with that much pain. Pain Level Nine is the point where I cry involuntarily no matter how I feel emotionally. Eight is when I'm severely impaired but still in some control of myself, and so on.

With my full dose of Tramadol, I no longer get the suicidal pain levels without an extreme outside stressor or extreme overexertion. At all. If I take it easy and manage stress I can go through an entire year without it going past the crying point, and the days when the waterworks happen whether I want them to or not are much fewer. Before I got this medication I cried at least several times every day as I did things that I shouldn't have even tried and paid the price.

I've got two doses of chronic fatigue, one from fibromyalgia and one from right side hemi-hypoplasia. That latter mouthful is that the right side of my body is smaller and weaker than the left -- my right leg is 3cm shorter than the left, right arm an inch short, everything distorted. Even the way my teeth fit in my mouth is crooked on the right because my jaw is smaller.

I also have scoliosis and that back pain is the indicator that I'm overdoing physical activity. When I started taking Tramadol, I had some problems with getting too overactive. I was used to paying attention to back pain to tell me when to stop what I'm doing and rest.

It knocked the pain levels so low that I was blissfully unaware I was wrecking my back daily -- walking too far, bending too much, reaching for things, doing things that normally my back pain would leash. Eventually I learned to pay attention to a subtle tight sensation that does happen when I overexert. It took conscious attention because that sensation isn't painful, it's just a clenching -- a spasm with the pain signal removed, so it's a whisper rather than a shout.

Once I adapted to that I stopped having so many problems with boom and bust pain cycles. I'd be active almost like an abled person and then on bedrest for a month to get over it until I figured that out.

The other thing I discovered is that on days when the pain would have pushed to suicidal, I start to itch wherever it would hurt. All the tender spots get itchy, some more than others depending on the flare. So I began paying attention to it when I start itching all over because that's the signal that stress or physical stress is getting to be more than I can handle -- and that I will pay for overdoing it.

I've had to make some serious lifestyle changes too. I had to give up even trying to prepare my own food, which is a great loss because I'm a fussy eater and no one can fix food that precisely suits my tastes the way I can. The loss of a sense of independence was even worse. My grief over coming to terms with the fact of complete disability was harrowing, it took years.

I still sometimes find myself grieving it, remembering what it was like to believe that I could do anything that anyone else could do. So many dreams lost by comprehending what those skeletal differences mean in terms of function. I can only walk at a quarter of the pace of anyone else, all my life I've been left behind when walking with people. I'm short so I'd blow that off to their being tall.

Except it happens when I'm with someone shorter than I am.

I can only move at a walking pace by a full run, and so I'd get punished for that in grade school for either running in the halls or for being late to class because I could not get from one room to the next in the time allowed between bells. I wouldn't wish my childhood on my worst enemy.

Grade school was a complete nightmare. I was never able to do all of the things abled children could and the other kids were eerily accurate at every symptom diagnosis that later took specialists to comprehend. Everything got put off to depression.

No one questioned why I was that depressed, why I was a suicidal little kid. No one even considered the possibility that I had reasons for despair that were real and physical. I always got told that I was crying wolf.

Now at this age looking back at it, I wonder what life would have been like if I'd known all along and gotten used to that. If I'd have come to terms with it a lot sooner. But the fibromyalgia wasn't even discovered back then, that part of it wouldn't have been diagnosed till the eighties or nineties and did take a specialist to identify it.

I also wonder how many other people are misdiagnosed as depressed when they have physical problems including chronic pain instead. It's so easy to misinterpret. Someone cries all the time and says "I can't live with the pain" and then if anything stressful happens, they fall apart and want to die. Looks like depression.

Treatments for depression are as useful as insulin for non diabetics, whether medication or therapy. No therapist can give me the capacity to keep up walking with other people, walk very far, get out of the house on days I'm not up to going out.

There are some rule of thumb observations you can make if you are in chronic physical pain and it's been misdiagnosed as depression. One is to ask yourself if certain things relieve it. Does taking an over the counter pain pill reduce it at all?

That's a sign you might be dealing with pain and overtired and crabby because the pain is constant. What's routine, what's everyday becomes a baseline but pain does have its effects on mind and body. I lose memory, lose judgment and lose interest in anything else when it gets too extreme.

Does sitting still for a long time and distracting yourself from the "depression" actually work, leaving you feeling undepressed if you rested long enough? That's a sign that it's a stress related pain. Real depression is emotional and doesn't just go away if you read a good book and get your mind off it. But if it's just that your body needs to sit still long enough to rest and quit spasming, then wow, a good book and soft armchair can work wonders.

Chart the times you get depressed against activities you do. I wound up having to journal everything I did in life, times of day, how I felt, what I felt after doing it to start seeing and understanding these patterns. It helped me to wrap my head around the fact that I'm dealing with physical disability.

I'm not some glamorous creative madman brilliant-but-insane, tortured with depression because I plumb the depths of the unconscious where stories and paintings come from. No, I dig for stories and paintings because Nature evolved me to sit still and write fat fantasy novels and that really does relieve the pain. I'm not even depressed when nothing depressing is going on. If I'm well fed and have something interesting to do and no one bugging me to do things I can't, then wow, I'm happy most of the time.

Real depression, mental illness, strikes when everything's going right in life even by the most personal criterion. It's being unaccountably miserable on the happiest day of your life when you're in the middle of doing something you love, feeling physically fine, nothing's gone wrong, your loved ones are being real nice to you and there's no stresses. That is depression -- that is mental illness, a disjunct between your responses and the real world.

Physical illnesses like the wide range of immunological chronic pain disorders that include fibromyalgia, MS and others are part of the real world. They can seem like depression because symptoms strike when you're in the middle of pleasant activity. But if you can chart them to how much activity you do and other body factors then it's not depression. Many of these immune system disorders have flares caused by stress.

I have had to give up in person debating much as I used to love it. I like arguing a cause that I feel passionately about. I limit that to essays now and I don't defend them even in chats, because I know the stress of the back and forth pressures will start reducing my competence. I owe my pet issues better presentation than I'd give them in the middle of a flare.

So it may take a lot of lifestyle changes to adapt to an immune disease like fibromyalgia. Goals need to be scaled back and adapted to reality. Long held dreams may shatter into impossibility. But the upshot is that if you have one of these diseases, tramadol and other maintenance pain medication can also bring you more benefits and function than you could ever have imagined.

I didn't know what it was like to be completely without pain until I had my medications.