Fentanyl 50 Mcg/hour Transdermal Patch (Page 4) (Top voted first)

I WAS PRESCRIBED THE 50 MCG/HR FENTANYL PATCH FOR CHRONIC BACK PAIN & DEGENERATIVE DISC DISEASE. I WAS GIVEN THE PRESCRIPTION SEVERAL WEEKS AGO. I JUST GOT IT FILLED 2 DAYS AGO BECAUSE I'M AFRIAD TO USE IT. I HAVE READ ALL THE PATIENT INFO, RESEARCHED IT ON THE NET & TALKED TO SEVERAL PHARMACISTS AS WELL AS MY PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIAN. ALL OF THE PHYSICIANS & PHARMACISTS TELL ME THAT THE PATCH WILL HELP ME WITH THE DAILY PAIN. THEY SAY THAT THE PATCH SHOULD NOT CAUSE ME ANY HARM BUT THE ONE TING THAT'S STOPPING ME FROM USING IT IS THE RESPIRATORY SIDE EFFECTS & POSSIBLE OVERDOSE. I'M SEEKING SOME ADVISE FROM PEOPLE THAT HAVE USED THIS DRUG BEFORE WHETHER IT WAS A GOOD OR BAD OUTCOME.

I AM OPOID TOLERANT BECAUSE I'VE BEEN DEALING WITH THIS PAIN FOR THE LAST 5-6 YEARS. WHEN I HAVE A BREAKTHROUGH OF PAIN & HAVE TO SEEK EMERGENCY TREATMENT OTHER PAIN MEDS GIVEN (IV OR IM) DON'T WORK ANYMORE. ER'S HAVE GIVEN ME MORPHINE & IT DOESN'T EVEN TAKE THE EDGE OFF THE PAIN. DILAUDID DOESN'T WORK UNLESS I'M GIVEN MORE THAN 3MG'S & THAT WEARS OFF AFTER ABOUT AN HOUR IF IT LASTS THAT LONG. WHEN I'M IN SEVERE PAIN MY PRESSURE RISES. I'M AFRAID OF THE PATCH B/C I DON'T WANT TO FAINT OR PASS OUT FROM A DROP IN MY PRESSURE. I'M CURRENTLY TAKING VICODIN 7.5/500 EVERY 4 HOURS. I HAVE NOW BUILT A TOLERANCE FOR THE VICODIN AND IT HAS BEEN CHANGED TO PERCOCET 5/325 & SOMETIMES I CAN TAKE UP TO 3 OF THEM EVERY 4 HOURS.

I'M ALSO ON OTHER MEDS THAT I BELIEVE WILL INTERACT WITH THE FENTANYL. I TAKE LEXAPRO, ATIVAN, CLONIDINE DAILY. I NEED SERIOUS HELP!!!

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If call the 1800# on the back of the box and vibe than the lot # on hour box and they will send you (for free) a patch that goes over the patch like tegaderm only it is specifally made for the patch, it wont fall off. Again they are free

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Due to a failed fusion, I have been on morphine for over 4 years. I moved on to the fentanyl patch 4 months ago The patch has taken away the daily throbbing that was driving me crazy.At times I will admit I wanted to be dead! I still have extreme pain from my shins to the balls of my feet, which I pretty much accept. Th eonly problem I have with the patch is I want to sleep even though I am not tired.

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you will be OK, I have been on 75 mg for over 5 years, and it works great, I think I will have to go to 100 mg. It will be OK, and you will like the pain relief you get. Well worth it.

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Allof these pain killers derive from herion.ive not done heroin,but I believe you...Without the cut heroin should be clean and not so harmful as amounts of the drug can be monitored as safe to use depending on tolerance, weight, etc.Some ppl would say you re crazy but I think that's the smartest thing , (fact ive heard in a long time) All BS aside you make a very rational, simple statement and possible solution to his Sandoz vs. mylan after the dr.is sympathetic toprescribe..

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Yeah you should have been prescribed something else if it caused those type of issues....Guess since every individual reacts differently,you never really know whether it works or not until you try it....Im curious why you chose to stay on it for 10 long years if it was harming your body like that???Good luck with future meds....And yes it does cause severe withdrawals when u stop taking it,but all opiates have that problem

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Its good to hear you are getting pain reilief, it takes time for you to not feel sleepy. I have been on Fentanyl 50MG for about 3.5 years, I also take Oxycodine, 8hour tabs , 2x day. I hate being on Opiods, but unless folks have the level of CP we have, they have NO IDEA! I wish I could take an Ibuprofen but my polyneuropathy and neck pain and diffuse pain are so bad, I want to die, to me it’s about QUALITY OF LIFE vs longevity and besides what is longevity if it’s TORTURE! but also I’ve read many studies that Opiads if monitored and not abused do NOT effect how long we live. I have always been responsbie and take only as needed and have learend to rest when pain is coming on really strong. I wish you well, God bless you, Vee, Co woman with CP

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I dont think thats a very high dose of percocet for pain. It takes me at least 15 to 20mg of oxy to control my pain, with the patch. Doctor can prescribe it without the acetaminophen, so you will be gentler on liver. The patch isnt as scary as it seems as long as you follow directions. Im always nervous trying a new med so I understand. Hope your pain is being well controlled now.

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I have been taking percecet for years..7/325 then 10/325. 180 to 200 every 30 days..I then took 15 oxycodone..percecet without the acetaminophen. .I wanted off pills..now I have a 50 fentynal patch and take no more then 1 or 2 ..10/325 percecets a day..I will probably be off pills in 30 days..the patch is great. .time released...I call it my action patch..I can do more physical labor and dont hurt like I did...OR...if I sit down for 5 minutes I doze off to sleep...there isnt anything to be scared of unless you have other medical conditions/medications that it may conflictI with...

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I Agree Gettinoffperc....its a wonderful opiate drug

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Ive had severe severe chronic pain for 7 years due to a severe neck/spinal cord injury. Ive been on opiads since about then, due to that pain never went away. I actually started the pain meds about 3 months after the injury and went through hell before I finally succumbed to meds (Fentanyl, 50 mg and Oxycodene for breakthrough pain)
MY FEAR--is this any of yours???? Im only 50 and fear I will be on these for the rest of my life!!! It helps for about half of the day then I have to go to bed to rest off the pain. I kow people get off of pain meds, but some of us may need them for life.
DOES THIS SHORTEN OUR LIFE SPAN?
How dangerous is this?
HOW DEPReSSING IS ThIS?

My sister and my family think I can just do this in a natural way, but they have NO IDEA of how intense my pain gets!

I feel stuck in a hard place for sure, signed, “Sometimes really DEPRESSED"

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Dave, you summed it up 100%. People without pain can't understand that suicide is our constant companion, our best friend. The Doobie Brothers had a lyrics"You'll always have a chance to give up, so why do it now". That's what keeps me going-I can always make the choice and end this captivity so let's keep going. A sad way to sum up 59 years on this earth, the last 17 under the claws of degenerative disc disease pain. Not even my wife of 23 years can possibly understand me as well as you probably do Dave.

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dude i've had a few lets say for the officials, (unfortunate ACCUINTENCES ) who have had them H blues man, U know the un-prescribed blu's blues. Anyhow, both have said the same thing. If one could harness the consistency and availability of the H to suit their (obviously) self prescribed intake, they could keep their pain to a minimum for less then, one said $10.00 & the other $7.00 a day. And lets (for all its worth), say to all you people who have really been thru the s***, some two & some three unsucsessfull operations, Allthough these words are all very true, I am by no means sugjesting self medicating with anything. Nor am I premoting experimenting w/ any drug FOR ANY REASON other then its dr. appointed directions!!! simpilly trying to confim my mans statement on pharmasuitical company's controlling (GOD ONLY KNOWS)& to what extent what meds we can & cant take,STAY W/ ME HERE AND REACESS THE POWER GIVEN TO THE BIG NAME DRUG COMPANY'S::::: (lilly, mylan, phizer) ext.ext....(#1.)The testing,(#2.) Long & short term effects OF THE ACTIVE INGREDIANCE, SAME TESTS FOR THE OTHER DRUGS PUT IN TO STABLIZE THE OTHER, (NO.3) THE S.I.D. OR HOW DR.S PRESCRIBE EACH MED. (NO,4) OF COURSE AND TRUST ME I MADE A HUGE JUMP TO GET TO HERE, THE $$$$$$ PRICE$$$$$. I BELEIVE THEIR THE BIGGEST SILENT AND UNCONTROLLED PUBLIC THEIFS IN THE NOT SO FREE WORLD!!! SO, And no joke here folks, I leave you people & with a few things to ponder at, and maybe, if only just for a few breaf moments some of you will have, while reading this and attempting to tie my misspelled words togather got a minute or two of relief while I attemted to take you with me thru the front doors of what this great country calls its gathering of great minds. OR WACKED OUT SCIENTISTS. If only someday & for the whole day they knew what it was like to have little or no money and a son or daughter that needed on going treatment and had no insurance!!!! OH NO WHAT THEN PEOPLE????

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Gosssh I so get what you saying and feeling, I can't seem to get on a decent breakthrough med.Oxys work but I'm not getting caught up in that mess over and over. I just need something strong enough to knock out the breakthrough. But if I even suggest what works its well I'm not giving you that! So I get something that don't work, and have to take twice as many, then they seem befuddled why I'm short. Gezzzz this has been going on and on and on for over 11yrs. I'm tired, like I'm sure most everyone on here is. I guess so days are just better than others. Anyway Happy Thanksgiving Everyone. We will make it guys. One day at a time. Blessing.

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Exactly how it is with me, I have severe CP from a neck injury that left me with debilitating neck and lower spine pain. Some people dont understand why some of us have to be on pain meds. Meds are meds!!
I still have a lot of pain but not near as badly or as often.

I have been on Fentanyl for about 4 years. I also take Oxycodene for break through pain but not every day.

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why do you choose to wear 2/25 mg instead of 50mg I am on the 50 too. I have been on these for about 6 yrs and dont see them as anything but a medication and am responsble. And I know the Lord knows my heart and that I do the best I can and he takes care of me. Blessings, V

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Yes the Lord will take care of us, and thank you because its good to know that these last that long. He allows things to work where others may not understand why maybe something is not working for them. I am on 50mcg several bulging disc an degenerative problems, and the patch sticks with the tegaderm and works very well. He knows our heart's. I personally have to be careful about breakthrough meds, so I ask my doctor to take me off oxys. I do need something that will kick that pain that breaks thru out. Blessing Continued and have a restful joyous Thanksgiving.

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JustBelieve, I have the same trouble. I haven't asked for anything else for the breakthrough because I don't want that label of a "drug seeker". I have asked for lunesta and lyrica, but I'm not covered for that. Sometimes I'm short at the end of the month too, but not too terribly short. For those days I just live without. This month I actually lost all the medicine that was left, a few days worth, while on a trip. It happened to coincide with needing a renewal. Boy, did one pharmacist have a fit over that!! Like I'm a criminal. I was told to pick up my soma the next day, even though I could have just switched the insurance on it and could have picked it up that night. When I go to get it in the afternoon the next day, there's a pharmacist "covering" for the regular guy and won't let me have it. Told me I had to wait til the next day. So that's TWO extra days I had to wait. I should have just gone the night I requested it. Geez. Plus, they switched the insurer. I think because it came in as a new script, but I have in their computers to use a certain one because it's cheaper than the other medicine. I've got two different scripts of the same class of meds so my regular insurance (which is free) doesn't cover them both and I've got to pay for at least one of them. I don't have a car and my roommate has to pick up for me and she's already had to go three times for these two meds. And I'm not even done filling my scripts for the month. I hate it. I've moved in the last year and I KNOW if I had lost my meds when I was getting my scripts from my other pharmacy that they would have at least given me a few days worth until they cleared through insurance. God, really?? I have NEVER lost my meds before. It's not like I have a history of coming up with excuses to get my medicine early. I got the "it's a controlled substance" speech and "you can't get them early by law." Geez, what a lie. Last month I got them five days early. And the month before that and the month before that too!! I use the stupid app to do my refills and the app says I can refill something, I push the button and refill it. Then I get a call the next day saying I can't do that. Just when I'd gotten all my meds to get filled on the same day AND figured out which meds can renew 3 days early and which can get 5 days early (depending on the insurance). They go and change their minds!! Most of the stuff they say is too early is OTC meds that I can get any freaking time I want!

Sorry to rant, but really, I have been on the EXACT SAME MEDS with NO INCREASE in strength for the last 14 years!! I haven't asked for an increase even though I've told my doctor I'm not getting pain relief. I recently started having migraines 2 or 3 times a week and my doctor asked if the fentanyl was taking care of that pain. No, it's not taking care of it!! It's awful! It's horrible!! I got crickets—total silence on that one. Nothing new added to help out with the hard days. Really, no one cares.

In more positive news… I shot a 10k run for USC last weekend. It's for a chronic pain management and research program and they always have reps there from companies developing the newest approaches to pain management. I've been wanting to try one which is an embedded morphine pump which uses a significantly lower dose than is needed for oral medications. This year there was a company there who had a stimulation device which places leads into your spine and a receiver unit into your fatty muscle on the upper buttocks and you carry around a remote control which controls the amount of stimulation you get to your nerves/spinal column. Their goal is to reduce pain by at least 50%. They also let you try the unit FOR FREE for about a week by placing the leads thru an epidural and leaving the receiver unit outside your body strapped to your abdomen. Then you can decide if it works for you or not before you commit to the surgical implantation.

Has anyone heard of this??? I want to try it, but I don't know anyone who has done it and the brochure is very vague. The rep explained it to me very well though. I wish my insurance would cover that! I also wish I could just get it done while I'm already going to be under anesthesia sometime this month for another problem. Surgery just makes all the rest of the pain way worse! Not looking forward to that.

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Hey thanks for responding, but seems like your on a lot of stuff, I sometimes fall back into waiting a lot of different stuffnd still sometimes too, like I tried so hard to just to ware the Patch,


I'm already on xanax, I have a faster then
normal pulse. And I get super anxious. I suffer with depression, my Dad did pluse he was as alcoholic. And I am by no means a hypochondriac! So The cymbalta helps a lot lot, I a really happy, positive lover of life and Ill be ok the name...out of FreakN blue, man I wake up and know I have fallen in that hole...the cymbalta helps but probably keeps me from fallen deeper. So I am on all this stuff anyway And now I'm back on oxys . And short already because the taking the Oxycodon, I
Just 15ml but still. Here I am again, I told ya...I don't want the oxys every month so I can at least keep my tolerance down. I try and take inventory of everthing I'm taking, if I don't really need something.

Then I'm going thru the Hep C thing, since this is my First time with high enzymes, where now I have to get a sonagram. Then a liver biopsy, but God loves even me, If it be His Will and Jesus did not die in vain, I asking God to heal my Liver. He so Good and wise its in His hands.

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Geez!! All that hassle and then I go to divvy up all my meds into daily containers a week later and 20 OR MORE PILLS ARE MISSING! Probably more like 30, but I'm trying to be conservative and give the freaking pharmacy a teensy bit of credit. I don't pick up my own meds most of the time, so it's really easy for them to say it wasn't them. Despite the fact that when I get my script the bag is sealed. Obvious that no one else has touched them and the meds were missing before anyone picked them up.

Told my doc and he agreed with me that I will now have to insist they count out all the pills right in front of me before I take ownership of the filled script. So glad he understood, because I hate the way it looks, especially after I lost meds. Thank goodness I've been with my doctor for ten years and he has no reason to suspect me of anything (his words). But I'm still out all those meds.

This has happened before at the same pharmacy chain, but at a different location. I was lucky that time that I checked the bottle before leaving because while my script is for 90 pills, the bottle only had ELEVEN pills inside.

You can't trust anybody. Grrrrr.

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Sorry to hear about the DDD pain. I know that pain.

When I first started my patch I had similar symptoms, but pretty much forced myself to stay awake so I didn't stop breathing. I was less than 40 years old when I started on 50mcgs and my dosage has never been increased. I also had school aged children then and needed to drive them to school and functions and go to work and my own school and all that. I had very bad nausea for a few months when I started fentanyl and then again the whole next year for long-term antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease. Dropped 100 pounds!

With the advanced age of your husband, however, that jump from 25 to 75 was probably too much. I wonder why the doc didn't limit the increase to 50 instead. The tollerance would probably have been much better. I'm sure my jump from the oral pain meds to the fentanyl at that time was too much also, but I was very committed to get through the kids school years so, I stuck it out.

You might want to try again with the smaller increase (at 50mcgs). It really does work very well at first when used correctly. It is a huge difference between taking the oral meds and not as much up and down with the pain.

Those shots are a killer too. My DDD is in my lowest vertabrae and I had shots too (very large sting!) because my sciatica was out of control even with the fentanyl. Once I stopped driving a low profile and manual transmission car and walking around so much, the pain has lessened. I still have very bad tightness (tendonitis, really) under my left foot where the sciatica eminated from the vertabrae, travelled under the back of my thigh, and then along my calf and under the foot all the way to the ball. I still can't stretch it out all the way.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to do all the things I used too anymore. Drawing, playing guitar, working, traveling… it all hurts so much worse when I'm active and doing repetitive motion activities.

Pain sure sucks all the fun out of life, that's for sure!

Hope your husband is able to get some relief soon. Maybe one of the implants would work well too.

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