Since the awfulness of last weekend, I've kept testing the pills, always as a last resort when the mental stuff fails. Objectively, I've judged that I'm getting at best 20% efficiency from the pills, and often 0%.
Today, the pain has been flaring more than since the weekend, and I could tell it was going to go big. So I had to take two top-up doses (6 hours apart though), plus two increased slow-release doses. The last two days I had to take one slow release and one top-up dose.
Yesterday, though, I focused heavily on the fact that I was taking the pills as a way to take care of myself - a loving, caring act, not one of punishment. Because as I mentioned last week, I think it's the idea of the pills being another way to punish myself that causes them to be so freakin' useless.
This new approach helped some yesterday; today even more so. Today I'd say I got 30% effectiveness out of the pills I took at 3pm, and as much as 50% from those at 9.
This is a massive improvement, and if I can keep it up, it means that I do have something to fall back on when the mental approach fails. Which it does, a lot. I can't even begin to tell you how important this could be. It will go some way to assuage the fear of the pain, and hopefully give me a tiny bit of confidence that I'll be able to cope with all this.
It might also mean I can put off thinking about coming off the pills till the pain is more consistently controlled by mental techniques (or has just gone down a lot). In other words, to when I wanted it to be in the first place.
The downside is that it means even the efficacy of the pills is dependant on me being able to adopt and maintain the right mental attitude. Which is unbelievably difficult when you're in blinding agony. It may require more preventative pill-taking, so my mind is clearer and I can better focus on those mental techniques.
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