Update

It's been really nice the past few days, having my best mate staying. It's a lot easier to bear the awful pain kick-offs when you're not doing it all by yourself.

There has been quite a bit of pain. There were the terrible back spasms on the first night (see my earlier post) and then I woke up in the very early hours of yesterday morning with terrible shoulder pain.

I thought I was going to have to take a couple of pills, which obviously I didn't want to do. As a last resort before that, though, I tried some of the mindful breathing techniques that I've been using against the panic.

I wasn't all that optimistic, but it did seem to help, and I was able to fall back to sleep without more pills.

The pain didn't start off too bad the next day, but a trip to Tesco was enough to bring on another flare/up that took several hours and pills to go down.

Despite all that, though, I was still determined to keep trying to reduce the amount of morphine I take, so last night I only took one slow release pills, instead of the usual two. Not only does this mean less morphine, it also means less lactose, because any slow release opiate contains lactose (must be something to do with the hydrochloride that makes it slow release).

I'd had about 36 hours of agonising stomach cramps due to lactose already, so the more I can reduce it, the better.

I was reasonably OK last night pain-wise, though I did have to take extra quick release pills, but pain levels are high today - I'll have to see how it goes to decide if I can carry on with the experiment tonight.
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