not trying to relitigate the diagnosis wait, that’s a different rant. this is about after. got the fibro dx in january. amitriptyline in march, 10mg, mostly for the tender point flares at night.
that one i can actually evaluate now bc i logged it, helps the pain but the weight gain is a slow tax i’m not thrilled about. pregabalin came next, 75mg, about three months ago. nerve pain went from a 6-7 down to 4-5 most days which sounds like a win on paper. except my mornings are wrecked now, brain doesn’t come online til like 10am and my job doesn’t care that my brain is dissolving before then.
so two meds in and both of them fixed one thing and taxed another. is that just how this goes? like is there ever a combo that doesn’t cost you something else, or is the whole game just picking which tradeoff you can live with. what i actually want to know: for people who feel like they landed on something that mostly works, how many meds/doses did you cycle through before that happened, and how long did each trial actually run before you and your doc called it a fail vs give it more time.
i have my pain clinic appt in two more months and i want to walk in with a real sense of what a reasonable timeline looks like instead of guessing whether 3 months is enough to judge amitriptyline or if i need 6.