Life with opioid-induced constipation (OIC)
This is the painful reality
My name is Elaine and I’m 71 and I’ve lived in the area for about 15 years now. I developed this condition called Cranial Torticollis, right-sided Cranial Torticollis, which actually means that the muscle over-develops on this side. They don’t know why it happens, but it causes my head to turn to the right, so since 2001 I started starting opiates, painkillers.
Elaine has been on opioids for over 10 years
Over the next few years, it went to opiates – Diazepam, Amitriptyline, and the doses increased and increased and increased, so I’ve been on a lot of medication for the past 10 years. The Dihydrocodeine – I take a lot of that during the day and that has the biggest effect and it causes huge problems with constipation.
As her dose has increased, so has her pain from OIC
It got so bad that I was having a lot of pains in my stomach, pains in my back. I couldn’t do the hoovering, I couldn’t sleep. A deep, horrible, sustained pain – and you want to die from it sometimes because it’s so bad. It’s what I call the ‘scream pain’. You can go into the loo and you can scream – I can actually scream trying to go. It’s that bad. It’s difficult to explain to someone because when you say ‘constipation’ people say ‘oh, take syrup of figs or something like that’. They don’t realise that this is a different kind of constipation.
The pain can become unbearable…so Elaine had to be hospitalised
I ended up with a prolapse and I think that was because of wanting to go to the loo and I could not go to the loo. A lot of straining so I ended up with a prolapse, I ended up twice in hospital because I was rolling around on the floor in agony because I was so constipated and I had to have enemas, and even the enemas – on one occasion they had to do it twice because it wouldn’t work.
We must never underestimate the impact of OIC
It has hugely impacted on my life and what I can do, it really has and it’s quite distressing. You feel helpless because there is nothing else out there. Constipation is painful – opioid constipation is excruciating – that’s the difference.
THE MORE WE LEARN ABOUT OIC, THE MORE WE CAN HELP PEOPLE LIKE ELAINE