My husband and I had just bought our first home. In 2013, at the age of thirty-seven, I was marketing director at the Nature Conservancy of Canada. I can remember turning down Ibuprofen because I wanted to feel my pain, to know the extent of it and track my body’s healing through its diminishing noise.
#NON GEL FENTANYL PATCHES EXTRACTION HOW TO#
I can remember when I didn’t know my way around all the downtown Toronto hospitals-didn’t know the locations of the comfy chairs where I could pass the time between appointments or how to get from Mount Sinai to Princess Margaret without going outside in the rain or snow.
This wasn’t always my life, a life of pills and patches and schedules. So I have to move them around on the flat parts on my abdomen: just under my bra line, on the flat part of my pelvis, on my back, my arm, or my chest. And to ensure the drug is evenly distributed, as well as to avoid the risk of contact dermititis-there’s something about the adhesive in the patches that irritates skin-I can’t put a patch in the same place twice in a row. I’m not supposed to change patches immediately after I shower the drug can be absorbed too quickly when applied to freshly cleaned skin. They are individually packaged and come with a stiff plastic backing that makes their application easy.
My patches are a thin, clear plastic with discreet blue lettering. Timing is important because I can’t allow the baseline-level dose of fentanyl to vary or my pain will come back the medication works best when it’s administered consistently.