Karen: Adjusting to multiple medicines – Adapting to side effects

Karen
Female
Age at interview: 37
Number of medicines: 8
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian

Karen has had many challenges finding medication that manages her pain adequately enough to enable her to sleep. She reduced her work hours to allow for this.

At that stage, everything would be kind of pretty good for a couple of weeks, but then it wouldn't be working as well. I'd be, you know ... most of the time, like, pain … I can distract myself much better during the day, do other things and just ignore it. 

At night, it's much harder to distract yourself from it and I've never been the best sleeper anyway, but for me that's one of the indicators that the pain is getting a lot worse too, if I'm waking up a lot at night and if I'm waking up and can't get back to sleep. So, yeah, after the Tramal ... the tramadol, the Endone and then ... I think it was just a gradual trying to get it under control until in the end I'd decided that I was still in pain, but functioned better with the combination, rather than going onto the OxyContin. 

Then, after the surgery, I was on OxyContin then as well, with OxyContin, Tramadol and Panadol. Then it was gradually cut down and off the OxyContin first of all, then reducing the Tramal and I got down to the 50 mg of Tramal, but I was only working three days a week and, when I increased it to four days a week I needed to go back up to the 100 mg … So I guess it was that ... when I really started to sort of ... I guess I'd decided that I'd rather work four days a week and be on less medication than still be drugged to the eyeballs and work full-time again ... and I'm lucky enough that I can afford to do that ... I can ... I'd much rather be getting the full-time wage, wouldn't we all? But I can afford the pay cut to be able to do that.

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The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.