Very tired and grouchy this afternoon... I worked my butt off today but there's very little to show for it. I cleaned up the coffee table in the living room, which had turned into a snowdrift of papers again... then I took the box of bills etc (which is an entirely random jumble that theoretically contains all the bills and paperwork received since we moved...) and spent two hours sorting them into another box which I realised has filing rails on it so I could use actual hanging file folders instead of just rubber bands, and shredding the ones that were junk. You wouldn't think that just sitting in the chair and moving papers from one box to another could be so exhausting, but I was BEAT by the time I was done. I need a few more file folders to finish...
I haven't tackled the papers in the 'inbox' in the living room yet, I was too tired. I was so sore I was going to take a pain pill, but when I sat down to read facebook I belatedly saw somebody's warning that as of today tramadol is now a schedule IV drug in the entire US (and there were a dozen comments from people in states where it's already controlled describing how they just plain can't get ANY pain meds at all so they just have to suffer because no doctor wants to write up a 'narcotic' prescription for fibromyalgia, even though tramadol is a PSEUDO-narcotic, not the actual thing...) Argh... I'm down to the last dozen pills and I was at the 'I need to get a refill pretty soon' stage, and I just looked at the bottle on the weekend to check that it had a refill left on it. So I called Walgreens to ask what the change actually meant, and the first guy said that yes, you could still use the refill/s you currently had but after that you'd have to get a new prescription and he transferred me to the pharmacy, but they said my prescription was closed... argh again! I wasn't terribly nice to the girl. I didn't yell at her or call her names, but I was frustrated and I said something about 'I guess I'll just have to go without then, bye' and hung up the phone... thinking about it logically I guess my prescription was just too old, plus it came from a different doctor to my current one - it was the last refill I had left from my previous doctor. As a non-controlled substance it could be written up for a whole year so the bottle said I had until February to get my refill, but now voila, it's no good. Oh well... I called the doctor's office to ask if I have to come in and she said no, since I was just there two weeks ago the doctor can send it in for me, and it doesn't matter that they haven't given me a tramadol prescription before(yet)... my ninety pills lasts me anywhere from 3 to 6 months so I don't have to worry about refills very often!
Hopefully it will all be taken care of by Monday and I can get more before I run out. The nurse is somewhat puzzled by this schedule change... so far as I'm concerned I know that some people CAN be addicted to the stuff, but it's pretty darned hard work - for every one person you hear about who's taking 100 pills a week and getting prescriptions from six different doctors to keep themselves in meds, there are thousands like me who take it just when they need it. The only possibly 'narcotic' effect I've noticed is that if I take it at bedtime, I don't sleep as well or as long, so I wake up at 3am. But I get to wake up not hurting, and I play on my computer until I get tired again... I don't like to take more than one pill a day, but if I have to I'll do two, and I try never to do more than two days in a row... I'm allergic to ibuprofen, I can't take over-the-counter NSAIDs anyway because I'm already on prescription meloxicam, and tylenol doesn't do a darned thing except lower a fever and remove a few muscle aches. My current doctor doesn't write narcotic prescriptions (and I am NOT going to get into pain management - when I tried they just told me to go away and take tylenol and lose weight, seriously!), so that leaves me with tramadol for breakthrough pain. Oh well... let the bureaucrats have their way, hopefully it's just another minor inconvenience and it's not going to turn into a major roadblock to pain control.
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