Glenn: Problems with multiple medicines (II) – Addiction
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Glenn
Male
Age at interview: 50
Number of medicines: 6
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Glenn was prescribed pethidine for migraine before his conditions were correctly diagnosed. He felt more stable after taking pethidine, became dependent and ‘doctor shopped’ to find a willing prescriber.
Glenn:
I had a migraine headache and I went to a hospital and they gave me pethidine. Now, when the initial euphoria of pethidine wore off and the headache had subsided somewhat, I actually felt stable and that was fine. I went through a series of getting about four or five migraine headaches very quickly and the same thing happened every time. Somewhere in my head said, well, if that makes you feel stable, that's what you need to take. So I then doctor-shopped and I actually think I opened a hole in the system, because it was so easy to get. Very easy, surprisingly. But it did, it made me feel stable, but it didn't make me feel how I do now, which I would classify as I feel normal; right. Of course, I was spending so much time trying to find the narcotic to make me feel stable that it was affecting everything else around me … Because I was on the road all day and I was in different areas all the time, so I might be in this suburb one day and that suburb the next day, so that was good. You'd be doing a job and, oh, look, there's a medical centre. Let's just walk across the road, sit there for a little while and we'll be right. Then the next day, or maybe even that afternoon, you're at a different suburb and you could do the same thing again. I did that for two, three years maybe. I actually came to understand where it was easier to get pethidine …
Jacqueline:
So now that that's no longer something you have to do, what's life been like since you were able to stop the doctor-shopping?
Glenn:
There's more life. I was exhausted. I wouldn't be able to plan anything, because I would have to plan everything around finding a doctor. When I stopped that, all this time, we can go away for a weekend and I can do this or do that and not have to worry about it, because I didn't need the narcotics. If I needed my medication for bipolar or ADHD, that was fine. I could go into a GP in an emergency situation and get it if I needed it, or I would get it from my pharmacist because he held the scripts.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.