Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

Oh Ye who is falling apart, are you talking etopic heart beats or irregular heart beats as you are confusing me and I am only Three and a Half.

Hi Ox
Glad that med works for you. I have a friend of about 45 years of age who is hooked out of his brain on similar med.
Being as I never know when to stop work wise I always put up with the pain as masking it would encourage me to make the condition worse.
However you have my sympathy having to work with it, been there and it is not a pleasant place to be. Then the pain gets worse along with the anxiety of it all and you end up like "Blue Eyes" above. Still we can rebuild her, if I live long enough

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

What's the bloody difference? All of it's irregular, LOL

Okay, in all seriousness, what I experience is called ectopic heartbeat, which technically means an extra beat or a skipped beat. My heart will feel like it's fluttering, then go THUD, then it kicks back into normal rhythm. They also refer to them as PVC's, or premature ventricular contractions. When it was happening all day long, several times an hour, it was very annoying, aggravating and sometimes alarming. I was extremely tired of it.

(I'm quoting now from a website definition)

"PVC's are extra, abnormal heartbeats that begin in one of your heart's two lower pumping chambers (ventricles). These extra beats disrupt your regular heart rhythm, sometimes causing you to feel a flip-flop or skipped beat in your chest."

I called them the "flip flops" long before I ever saw them described as so by someone else because that's exactly what it feels like.

Whatever the case, or whatever they call them, it's irregular, as far as I'm concerned. And during my heart ultrasound, they also found a leaky valve, but said it was minor and nothing to worry about right now.



Unless you can give me a whole new body, there's no hope for me. I'm doomed.

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

Hello Miss Confused, shame you are not here for the weekend as it is the "Old Crock Race", London down to Brighton. Huffing and puffing you could be a star and famous.

You suffer from "Ectopic Heartbeats", at the moment I am getting them day and night, thumping and banging and rather scary as they get so bad the blood pressure machines do not give a reading. Being a Third World Country here, waiting over two months to see a GP is not much fun. They are extra beats not irregular heartbeat. When your heart beat is irregular then it may need a "pacemaker" or shocked backed into its regular beat. Note this is not my area of expertise at all.
"Normally, the heart is sent a signal to beat from the sino atrial node in the top right hand chamber of the heart known as the right atria.
During Ectopic heartbeats, the signal is sent from somewhere else in the heart. This signal can come from either the atria or the ventricles (the upper or lower chambers of the heart) causing the heart to beat earlier than normal within the normal heart cycle.
As a result of the need to have time to send the signal in advance of the normal signal, Ectopic heartbeats tend to occur when the body is relaxing. This is because the heart is beating slower. "

I have just managed to get my appointment changed to Friday 13th, omen of bad tidings that date in the UK.

So on a happy note have you got your Halloween Outfit ready for tomorrow night co's we want to see a picture of you in it.

Take care, funerals are expensive

ps Flip-Flops they are shoes

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

Linda my son gets a lot of pain due to rheumatoid arthritis + a lot of other conditions, he is prescribed Tramadol, he still gets pain but I think this reduces it a bit. I too have arthritis + blood pressure/cholestrol , I am prescribed codrydamol, I take one plus one paracetamol and it helps for a while but wears off after a few hours , plus it gives you very strange /disturbing dreams and upsets your stomach. Unfortunately there doesnt seem to be anything which eases pain for very long

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

Ive been in pain for 30 years due to 3 slipped discs, ive tried everything to combat the pain and the only thing that helped was Turmeric capsules, twice a day.The pain went from 10 to 2 after two weeks.The plus is there is no side effects with this , try it you can get the capsules off of Amazon.

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

I have fantastic pain meds that work a treat, Gabapentin and Naproxen together leave me totally pain free, I can walk for miles, play tennis without so much as a twinge!

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

My knees are painful. Ibuprofen works but upsets my stomach. Some of the gels to rub in work for a while but I'm still in discomfort a lot of the time. Exercise sometimes helps, but sometimes it has the opposite effect. Resting also helps but it sometimes makes things worse. An interesting thread. Thank you.

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

Hey, that's what the people on those websites call it too!

And I don't wear Halloween outfits. I'm scary enough without one. And the Friday the 13th thing, people here in the states are the same way. I'm not superstitious, so it doesn't bother me, but there are some people so serious about it that they won't even leave their house. Except the last Friday the 13th we had, my morning went completely wrong. I don't normally work on Friday's, but my boss wanted me in that day. I should have known right then that things were not normal.

It started with a flat tire on the freeway, leaving me in the middle of 4 lanes of speeding traffic, terrified I'd get hit as I waited for the rescue service to come and get me off the road and to a shop so I could get a good, used tire to get me around until I could buy new ones. So I finally get there. They put the tire on my car. THEN tell me they're cash only. I had some cash but not all of it, so I asked the guy if I could run to my bank to get the rest of the money and I offered to leave him my driver's license to assure him I wasn't going to drive off with the tire and never come back with the money. For some reason he trusted me and said, "No, it's okay, you go to your bank and I'll see you in a bit."

So on my way to the bank, I almost hit an old homeless man who walked in front of my car. Then the money machine at the bank spit the cash out with such force that it ended up on the ground instead of in my hand. So I had to get out of my car and chase $20 bills all over the parking lot. I went back, paid the tire guy, then went to work and after that the day was okay but I was still like, "Yeah, I shoulda stayed home today."

Listen, talk to your doctor about beta-blockers. I know the "flip-flops" are scary, but they're rarely serious. However, if you get dizziness, nausea or any kind of pain with them, take yourself to urgent care, don't wait for your scheduled appointment.

That's true. And the side-effects are just not worth it to me. The more I'm reading of others' experiences with these drugs and also from doing some online research, the more convinced I am that I'm just going to have to suck it up and live with the pain.

I've read great things about Turmeric. From helping with ailments to improving overall health. I'll have to look into that and also see what my doctor thinks about it, just to get her opinion.

Naproxen did nothing for me

Resting can make it worse, exercise can make it worse... it's like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. But I've been thinking... what about hot or cold treatments? Like heating pads or cold compresses. I wonder if those would do any good. My biggest problem area is my hips. And most nights are miserable because I'm constantly switching sides. If I lay on one side too long, the pain in my hip is throbbing and then will sometimes shoot even more pain down my leg. So I have to turn over. Couple hours later, the same thing and I'm turning over again. So I wonder if lying on a heating pad or a cold compress (I'd have to try and find out which is best for that type of pain) would calm it down at night.

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

I used to take Syndol which had a muscle relaxant in it called doxylamine. It helped me such a lot but they changed the ingredients after taking it off the market for a while. It's not the same now. Heat doesn't work but I'm going to try cold packs. Thank you very much for your help. I don't get much sleep because of my knees. I too have to keep switching sides.

Re: How to live with body pain when you're afraid of taking meds?

I just had an experience recently where the doctor prescribed a medication to ease the inflammation in my ankle. I looked it up when I got home. There was a warning on the box like " Keep under your physician's close observation". I come to find the medication is a steroid. The side effects start with dizziness and get worse from there. I already take medication to prevent the kinds of side effects this stuff can cause. I am not going to take it. Great, I go outside and tip a car on it's side...what do I do then? Ring up the doctor and say I might be having a problem here...Nope, not taking the chance.