Pain med help

It's been a while since I've been on here. I need some suggestions on pain meds. I had wrist surgery two weeks ago and I'm looking at six months recovery time. I'm allergic to hydrocodone, but have no trouble with dilaudid. I don't like to take it, though. I got my orthopedist to prescribe tramadol. Love it, but it turns out I can't take it with my psych meds. Any ideas?

Ok, I'll bite.

It would be very unusual for a six-month recovery time to mean that you will be in so much pain for the whole six months that you'll be in need of prescripton meds of all that time.  I've had some pretty serious surgeries and I honestly don't think I've ever been on pain meds post op for more than a week or two. 

Also, could you clarify.  Is your orthopedist the one who did your surgery?  Because generally your surgeon would prescribe all pain meds necessary for you to get through this post-op period.  So if you haven't talked to your actual surgeon about options I'd start there.  If the surgeon can't help you, maybe a visit to your PCP is in order.  I guess what I'm trying to get at  is that it's very important that only one doc is prescribing meds, especially narcotics, for a specific medical instance.

Personally, I've had success with several pain meds post-op.  Even excluding the codeine/synthetic codeine that you have issues with, there are options.   Dilaudid is obviously one.  There is also fentanyl.  Both of those come as patches that you can wear for a day or several days. They release a controlled amount of medication constantly.  Methadone has also begun to be used for long-term and chronic pain.

It used to be that there was a pill type form of Demerol (for the life of me I can't remember the name now) that was prescribed for pain but there was quite the issue over it's potential for abuse and I'm not sure it's prescribed in the US anymore.  Your pharmacist would know exactly what I'm talking about and be able to tell you.  And there is the possibility that I've misunderstood your post and that you're not allergic to genuine codeine, just the synthetic, which would then make Tylenol 3 an option.

Hopefully others will chime in with more info - but if you could confirm those couple of questions you may get more specific answers.

At any rate, good luck to you on your journey.

edited to ask:  when was your surgery?

Orthopedist is the surgeon. The surgery was three weeks ago. I'm not sure if I said what was done. There are two rows of little bones in your wrist. I had to have one row removed. I'm still in a lot of pain. I had to take two dilaudid yesterday just to type. There are physical parts of my job that I'm unable to do right now. I don't have a lot of grip strength. Anything more than a few ounces is difficult or impossible for me to hold. I'm going to have to do pt and that's what is going to kill me, long term. I don't know if I'm allergic to real codeine. 

That does sound very painful.  I still wouldn't give up hope that you'll be able to transition from the narcotics in less than six months though. 

So does your surgeon know that you can't take the Tramadol he gave you and that you are still in this much pain?  I'd be calling pretty constantly until I got some relief if it were me.  Some pain is to be expected during healing and we all know that - but being in so much pain you cannot function is not acceptable.

Oh, and I remember the name of the Demerol-type pain pills.  They were called Darvocet or Darvon.  They never worked for me, but everyone is different and that may be another avenue to explore.

I really hope you get this managed and start feeling better.

amy