Reply #25: My personal opinion was that

[dflprincess]

they were trying to calm her fears. Given the condition of my mother's back (she has shrunk 4 inches) and her age (79) she is never going to be off pain killers. I see the same doctor and he's fairly conservative about pill pushing. He tried a variety of less dangerous pain killers on her before resorting to OxyContin. Even with this one she is rarely without some pain but she is able to get around better since starting this one. She's been on the same dosage for over a year and has not noticed any difference in how it works. I have not noticed that it affects her mind at all. In fact, the pain relief she gets has seemed to make her sharper.

She's also on Fosamax in the hopes of slowing down, if not preventing, any more bone loss and has been to an orthopedic surgeon who concurs that there is nothing more to be done for her back. Last year, her internist also sent her xrays down to the Mayo Clinic as they are doing some new treatment on vertabrae damaged by osteo but they came back with the opinion that her back is too far gone for it.

My mother was never one to run to go to doctors on a regular basis - if she was her back would never have gotton this bad. But, she kept writing it off to the aches and pains of aging. Frankly, I was more concerned about the amount of Excedrin she was taking for her "arthritis" (which she thought it was) than I am with the Oxycontin. At least now that she's on that, her doctor insists she come in every 6 months so she is being checked out more often than she used to be.