Diving with Oramorph and Morphine

[stephen hawkins]

Is there anyone out there who can shed light on my problem.

5 years ago I suffered from a pain in the right side of my body near my kidneys. The doc put me on different painkillers but none seemed to work. Eventually he prescribed Oramorph and Morphine MST tablets. This did the trick. 5 years on the pain is still there but manageable and I get to lead a normal life. There are no side effects like the highs you see in war films !! Just pain relief.

Now on to my question. How would this effect my chances of learning to dive? I do not want to go any deeper than 20m. But I would love to be able to dive like any normal person would. Can someone please give me any hope of achieving this?
BTW. I am physically very fit, male, 42 and lead a perfectly normal life.
Please help !!

Thanks

Steve

[Chris aka divingchef]

Is there anyone out there who can shed light on my problem.

5 years ago I suffered from a pain in the right side of my body near my kidneys. The doc put me on different painkillers but none seemed to work. Eventually he prescribed Oramorph and Morphine MST tablets. This did the trick. 5 years on the pain is still there but manageable and I get to lead a normal life. There are no side effects like the highs you see in war films !! Just pain relief.

Now on to my question. How would this effect my chances of learning to dive? I do not want to go any deeper than 20m. But I would love to be able to dive like any normal person would. Can someone please give me any hope of achieving this?
BTW. I am physically very fit, male, 42 and lead a perfectly normal life.
Please help !!

Thanks

Steve

Hi Stephan

What I would do is contact the dive medical team on this link and discuss it with them. http://www.uksdmc.co.uk/

Hope it all goes well
Chris

[Nigel Hewitt]

Eventually he prescribed Oramorph and Morphine MST tablets. This did the trick. 5 years on the pain is still there but manageable and I get to lead a normal life. There are no side effects like the highs you see in war films !! Just pain relief.Basically yes. Those are big mean painkillers and they will effect you.

As Chris said you want a pukka diving doctor to rule one way or the other. The UKSDM team are good. They like to keep people diving and they know what are reasonable restictions but if they say no they are not kidding so just forget diving for now.

[purple vonny]

With my pain nurse hat on, I would also recommend that you get referred to your nearest pain management centre and see if you can get on a pain management course. Or at least do a supervised slow MST reduction. After 5 years, morphine is probably rather ineffective. This is because you develop a tolerance for it, but it is quite a complex matter.

You also develop a tolerance for the side effects so that after a few years, you no longer feel drowsy, nauseous, etc. However, it continues to affect your reaction time and has a sedative effect (which you are now used to) and therefore, would probably affect your learning to dive.

It will take a while to reduce your dose slowly (5mg reduction per week is about right). Do not stop suddenly (I'm sure you know this).

Send me a private message about this if you want, I helped people with opiate withdrawal for 15 years. Patients generally did not report any increase in pain after stopping long term morphine slowly.