I've been on a very high dose of pain meds for my migraine because normal migraine meds don't touch the pain & just mess with my heart so they ended up not even being an option.

I have been going to pain specialists since 1999 & it wasn't until 2003 that they finally got the dose that worked & actually kept me pain free (my migraines were continuous & never went away) so to be finally pain free even though the symptoms were there they were without the pain in the head (I still get the light sensitivity & the lights flashing in my eyes & smells can at times really get to me & even trigger the migraine pain mildly). I never got any feel from even the really high dose that I was on them other than pain relief....I was finally functional & it felt soooo good to be pain free & functional like I had been for most of my life.

When all the crap about pain medications & having to lower doses & the pain specialist I was seeing closed his practice....the one I started going to when I left my H & moved to a whole new state......so I had to find a new pain specialist & no one was willing to prescribe the dose that my body required to control the pain.....until my pharmacist talked the founder of the one pain practice into taking me on as a patient....& he was wonderful...actually came up with an old treatment for migraines that uses lidocain on long q-tips stuck up your nose for 2 20 minute treatments started off once a week until the pain was better under control along with 3/4 the dose that I had been on & over the year we were able to work it down to 1/2 the dose & the lidocane blocks. He said that there is a direct connection from the back of the nose to the pain center where my migraine centered (most of my migraine pain was in my eyes).....that is until after my oral surgery the end of March......that triggered the migraine pain back full force....but the block is still working & took the pain from a 5/6 down to a 0/1 by the next morning & it's keeping it down well this week.....but I am also on what they consider a high dose of the pain medication along with the block but with all the pain that the oral surgery is causing they aren't even going to mess with any dose change.

Of course, I really like using the patches because you don't get the up & down like with pills. They are 3 day patches with enough for a day 4 most of the time so that if you don't get it changed immediately on day 3 you aren't in immediate pain.....patches are the only thing that works for me without being on a constant pain roller coaster.....

But I have never had an addiction problem & even on the really high dose like I said, I never got any kind of feel from the medication other than pain relief. All the pain specialists who have gotten to know me know there is no problem with the meds I'm on & they have also said that there are tests being down that show that certain people's DNA's metabolize pain medications such that it does take a higher dose.....even when my anorexia was really bad & I was in the medical hospital for that I was still on the high dose of pain meds & felt no different between then & when I was at a higher weight.....so it definitely has to be the way my body metabolizes pain medications....or at least the one's that I can tolerate.....can't tolerate anything related to morphine without itching from head to toe. Demoral shots always worked but it took a huge dose of that to break the migraine pain otherwise they sent me home from the ER is as much pain as I went in with.