Neurontin dang near killed me. I took one and my heart basically started beating about 5 times a minute for about 20 minutes. I laid on the floor and couldn't get my head up. My wife thought I was asleep so she didn't call 911. I came through it though but never again.
Fentanyl patches are something that can give you a 3 day dose in about an hour. My friend was on that stuff for a long time and it was stoned out for a few hours then nothing for a few days until the next patch. I wouldn't take that for any reason.
There are some people who need pain killers (the real stuff) but the government is cracking down because of the pill mill operations in Kentucky and Ohio and especially Florida. Too many kids have died because doctors wrote scripts for any wannabe junkie that came in their office. As a result people really need the stuff can't get it.
BTW I got cartilage damage in both knees when I was 12 and had juvenile arthritis. I also was in a car wreck that banged up my knees even worse. Now they are pure osteoarthritis where it isn't just bone on bone. I broke my ankle twice and didn't even know I had done it the first time until an x-ray the second time showed it. I also broke 8 fingers playing football in school not to mention getting a bruised kidney which never really heals right. I was in a car that rammed a telephone pole (about 30" thick) which nearly threw me through a windshield but just hurt my neck instead. I have a neck injury, a back injury from a job I had, fibromyalgia,
trigeminal neuralgia (the most painful condition known to man - also known as the "suicide disease"), carpal tunnel in both hands, rheumatoid arthitis,and nerve damage in the front of my stomach (which travels down the leg) from a surgery I had for cancer. I had stage 3 cancer at one time (in the ureter and had spread to my surrounding lymph nodes) for which they gave me massive doses of chemo (because I basically had zero chance of living) added onto the massive chemical exposure I got from working in a toxic waste dump (didn't know that's what it was at the time of course). That chemical damage caused me all sorts of problems like muscle spasms, convulsions, etc. etc..
I don't mean to be just complaining here. I just wanted people to know they can survive a lot and they can come back to have a decent life for a while at least. When you get older it might catch up with you again but for a long time it's possible to go right on with things. My doctor called me a medical marvel for having so many things go wrong and living through it.
It's gotten to the point that I can't walk more than about 30 yards at a time without stopping to ease the pain in my back. I've been trapped being too far away from my car where it took me hours to get back because I plain couldn't walk.
But even with all this I managed to block out most of the pain for a long time. I rode centuries (100 mile rides) on my bike while I had these things. I got where I could climb hills all day long and I'm talking straight up and straight down almost. And I learned to improve my shooting from a bench a great deal by nothing but practice and lots of it. I have to admit that my problems have pretty much overtaken me now but I fought it long and hard. It's not that I have some special courage or anything. In fact it's more a fear of never being able to do anything that drove me to do things anyway despite the pain.
And of course it's always possible to be even worse off than I am. And my luck I will learn just how.