Hi Tina,
I can’t speak to or add anything to what Thomas shared about neuropathy and hepatitis B. I can just share with you my personal experience. I have cirrhosis, so I don’t know if that adds some component to the equation, but my G.I. has had me on 4 x 100mg per day of Gabapentin for neuropathic pain. I worked from 1x to 4x over the past year or two and I don’t notice that it does much.
I can’t remember if you mentioned before what stage of liver disease you have from hepatitis B. Maybe cirrhosis is a factor that can cause so much pain in different parts of our bodies. The difference is that I don’t think I have neuropathy (with the tingling, burning and numbness), I just have neuropathic pain. I have a pain specialist that added Nortriptyline at 1 x 10mg per day. Both these medications are approved by the FDA mainly for other diagnoses; one being epilepsy. However, both these and many others are prescribed by doctors for other purposes. I notice more of an effect from the Nortriptyline than the Gabapentin. The Nortriptyline at least helps at night to give me enough pain relief to give me another hour or two of sleep due to the severe insomnia I experience. I used to only average about 2 hours of sleep per night before taking this med, so now I can usually get at least 3-4 hours of sleep. I only take both of these meds before bed because they are supposed to have some sedating affect, but that probably doesn’t apply to you since you are in the hospital and don’t need to worry about daytime vs. nighttime.
Your situation sounds pretty dire and my heart goes out to you. I wish you had someone to advocate for you. I know how hard it can be when you don’t have much of a support system in real life, but at least you have this community to have some connection to. I will pray for you and ask everyone else in this community that your situation tugs at their heart strings, to pray for you also.
I know it’s not a lot when you are suffering so much, but good luck and God bless,
-Paul
