Pain Management Community

I have been managing chronic pain for over 12 yrs now and I felt like lately, my pain has been coming more and more under control along with finally successfully managing severe constipation with a stool softner along with a 8 oz glass of unsweetened prune juice nightly. I am on 50 mcg/hr Fentanyl Transdermal and I am allowed four 10 mg oxycodone IR pills for breakthrough pain. Haven't had to use all four yet and most days I only need 2 1/2 but it is SO NICE to have leverage should I need it when increasing my activity level.

About 3 months ago, I tapered my dose of Flexeril from three 10 mg tabs a day to two as I was getting severe dizzy spells and tremors from it. Once I tapered, the tremors went away but I was still getting dizzy spells. I finally decided to stop Flexeril cold turkey about 3 weeks ago. Before completely stopping the med, I had been taking Flexeril for over 6 years daily and this year I realized I didn't need it anymore as my new stronger pain meds were covering my pain. When I stopped the Flexeril, I had uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms. Cold sweats (my body was cold but I was still sweating), chills, shaking at night. But after 2 weeks all of those symptoms went away.

Then last weekend, the seizures began. They only happen when I am very sleepy either from being up all day and it is late at night or during the day on the weekend when recovering from a long work week. Last weekend, I had a couple of seizures that were pretty mild such that I thought that I had a seizure, but I wasn't entirely sure it did.

The seizures begin when I am nodding off or starting to fall asleep in my arm chair while on the computer browsing the internet and reading articles before bed. I continue to wake myself to try to finish reading before bedtime. After about 5-7 times of reawakening myself, the seizures started. First I lose muscle rigidity on the right side of my face and my jaw drops and I noticed I make a yawning sound during this phase and then shortly after that the convulsions begin. The first two seizures had no aura (or warning) BUT Friday night I knew for certain that I had a seizure. There was an aura beforehand. I had a dream like vision of going to the garage downstairs and opening the door. When I looked out, one of our cars had the driver's side door wide open and our old stroller that is stored in the left corner was unfolded and rolled out into the middle of the garage between the two cars. I closed the garage door went back upstairs and began to drink my bottled water. Then I realized I was asleep again, woke up and had another seizure except this time it was much stronger! I tried to "get myself out of it" and it tightened its grip on me and the muscles in my neck tightened up so much it was hurting...I heard my voice calling for help and groaning but it was very faint. I tried to speak to ask for help but nothing came out so I just stopped fighting and waited for the convulsions to stop. After the seizure, I realized that I didn't leave my chair and my bottled water was unopened. I was quite shooken up to say the least after that.

Please see the reply to my post for the last part.