Typically, when you get a bottle of painkillers after some sort of operation, the instructions will read something like “Take 1 to 2 every 4 to 6 hours as needed for pain.”<\/p>\n
If you’re anything like me, you don’t like to take more meds than necessary, especially not painkillers – so you struggle with figuring out how exactly to take “as needed” meds.<\/p>\n
Your temptation may be to go as long as absolutely possible between taking meds – resulting in excrutiating, hard to control pain. I’ve been there and done that. It’s not good – and it actually doesn’t help you take less, because you have to take more at that point to control the now-out-of-control pain.<\/p>\n
I’ve had a couple of surgeries – a septoplasty and a wisdom tooth extraction – where I tried holding out longer than I should have and ended up with more pain than I should have. My sister, the Physician Assistant, told me to NOT wait until the pain was bad to take my painkillers. “That’s less effective,” she told me, “You need to keep your blood levels of the painkiller high enough to control the pain.” Foolishly, I didn’t listen.<\/p>\n
After my second wisdom tooth extraction a couple months ago (they’re all out now!), I finally figured out how to take those “as needed” painkillers.<\/p>\n
The instructions on my pill bottle were to take one or two every 4-6 hours as needed for pain.<\/p>\n
I took one pill as soon as I got home from the oral surgeon’s office, and jotted down the time and the number of pills I took. As soon as I felt pain returning (4 hours later), I took another and jotted it down. 4 hours later, I felt the pain returning, so I took another and jotted down the time. So far, I was taking one every 4 hours. <\/p>\n
But my situation changed overnight and it took 6 hours to start feeling more pain. I took one pill and jotted down the time. It was another 6 hours before I needed more. Then ten hours. Then 13 hours. Then 4. Then 6. And so on and so forth. <\/p>\n
I took 13 pain pills in a total of 112 hours. That’s one every 8.5 hours on average. I never experienced any side effects of the painkillers, I never felt excrutiating pain, and I had no problem at all not taking them once my pain was gone.<\/p>\n
Success.<\/p>\n
Moral of the story: Take your painkillers when you have pain. Write down the time you take them and the amount you take so that you don’t exceed the maximum dose (in my case, 2 every 4 hours-which I didn’t even get close to reaching, much less exceeding.)<\/p>\n
There you go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Typically, when you get a bottle of painkillers after some sort of operation, the instructions will read something like “Take 1 to 2 every 4 to 6 hours as needed for pain.” If you’re anything like me, you don’t like to take more meds than necessary, especially not painkillers – so you struggle with figuring … Read more How to take “as needed” painkillers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[4,11],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12362"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12362"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12393,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12362\/revisions\/12393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}