(I realize I kinda de-railed this thread so I'll add a bit at the end that is relevant to the thread)
Ahaha, stay away from pills... they're honestly the only thing that motivate me to keep going. I've had a taste of pretty much every opiate (with the exception of oxymorphone) and I'm on one of the weaker-end ones right now. Both doctors have expressed concerns about my long-term health, mentally and physically, as my joint pain isn't my only problem, but for now it's the main problem. I wish so badly that I could just use cannabis but my situation and level of pain just don't allow for it. I do, however, find that if I am good about my dosing and such, that I can take about 50% of my total prescribed dose if I use cannabis and some other meds as well (synergy/potentiation basically.)
I can use yesterday as an example kind of... woke up around 7.30am, took 10mg hydrocodone, 25mg promethazine, and a trench of indica through the ashcatcher+glass around 9am. I ended up passing out for most of the afternoon because I forgot I should have only taken half of the promethazine pill and I got really really sleepy around noon. Thankfully I had nothing to do till around 6, which is when the promethazine wore off, so I took another 10mg hydrocodone, a trench of ~25% sativa 75% indica, went out and walked my dog, came back for dinner, more indica, and fell asleep. If I can pay attention to what I'm doing, I can kinda "boost" the analgesic effects through more than the 3-4 hours that I can expect from it... right now for example, I took another 10mg pill just before 8, and it's now 45 minutes after that. I can feel the opiate working on me because my mind stopped registering the pain in my hands, right elbow, hips, and knees.
I'll be leaving the house in just under an hour to go see my specialist. We'll see how my bloodwork came out (I'm betting on it being perfect, again...) and go from there. Get some stuff refilled, or new scripts or whatever... referral to a place that does some cutting-edge genetics work to see if I can pass this on... if I can I probably (definitely) won't have kids. I can hardly imagine myself having to go through my life like this, much less my own flesh and blood.
I wasn't kidding either when I said I'll probably spend the rest of my life on pills, either. As of right now my prescriptions include an opiate, prescription NSAID, anti-nausea, migraine meds, and an emergency steroid "dose pack." My specialist, a guy who's been working in his field for the better part of 30something years, when he had me perform some stretches, he actually said "wow" a few times. He was pretty frank about it when he said that he believed that it wouldn't be a "curable" thing and summed it up along the lines of "...so the main focus of our appointments will be treating your symptoms and keeping you comfortable."
The problem... is that I have a fair bit of symptoms for one disease, and then some symptoms of another disease... both are bad, and probably no good when I get both at the same time...
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So, relevance to the thread, for some people I think it doesn't matter if they "permanently lose a few IQ points" if it improves their life that much. For me, it helps. For others, it's their version of my Vicodin.
You really have to sit down and be honest with yourself. What makes you feel better at the end of the day? Does cannabis improve your quality of life enough to "justify" "risking" those points? Can the results be taken to heart?
Personally I feel like the combo of pills and cannabis does a pretty damn good job for me. Better than either of them by themselves for sure. Maybe that's not the case for everyone else, but it is for me.
