Percoset: Side Effects

Sometimes the brain does work slowly. But it still works.

A few days ago Steve confided to me that his hands were itching ferociously, and they weren't the only new itch. We looked at his hands and saw nothing. No sign of rash, swelling.  Nothing. Still, I offered him one of my antihistamines, just in case. Now an OTC drug, it seemed safe enough to give it a try.

No help.

It wasn't until the next morning the brain kicked in ... productively. I knew he'd been on fairly regular doses of Percoset for several months due to all the delays in fixing his back pain. I finally remembered why I quit taking it. Itching! It's also the reason I never take codeine. While I frequently got raised eyebrows when I never had adverse side effects from Perc, considering the two are related, I never thought I'd start to react to it after many years of it being a usable painkiller for me. I still bless the four months I had it after my knee surgeries. But after one of my heart procedures, when a few were prescribed for pain, I came down with a bad case of the "itchies".  Everywhere.

Perhaps it just took that long for my body to recognize its similarity to codeine and decide to react to this too. Perhaps it was just that it wasn't really needed for pain this last time so there was a lot of unneeded chemicals floating around in my blood looking for something else to attack. I mean, really, who knows? But percoset is now off my available painkiller list. Let's hope I never need it like I did after knee surgery. Vicodin does absolutely nothing for me. In extreme cases ibuprofin can't quite cut it. What then might be my choices?

At any rate, Steve informed me this morning that all the itching has stopped, and he's now on a regimen of 800 mg. ibuprofin, 4 X day, waiting for his pain interrupter procedure to be scheduled.

And waiting....

And waiting....