Free medical advice of the day follows below. Disclaimer: this is my personal ...opinion, and in no way an official medical consult nor associated with the institution with which I am associated.
Now, with all of that legal s*** out of the way I can offer my 0.02.
I deal with post-operative pain on a daily basis and prescribe analgesics so often that it has become second nature. A person's response to painful stimuli is very individual and is hard to guage a priori. However, it is universally true that if the stimulus is great enough a patient will metabolize whatever they are given for analgesia. Typcially, we will order whatever it is that we believe is warranted by the degree of pain that we expect. If they ordered Oxycocet/Percocet rather than T3's they are generally expecting you to have reasonably severe pain (6 or 7/10 on a 10-point pain scale).
In addition, I will frequently advise patients to take their medication if they find that they are even thinking that their surgical site begins to hurt. As a result of the time that it takes to metabolize an oral analgesic it is important to take the medication before the pain is at its worst. If the patient does not do this there will be a long delay between ingestion of the medication and the time it enters the bloodstream. This allows the pain receptors to become sensitized so that they respond more actively to any stimulus. What does this mean in plain english? The pain becomes more difficult to treat with a given amount of analgesic the longer that you wait. Therefore, if one Percocet would treat your pain after 30 mins, it might take 2 Percocets after 60 mins, etc. The longer that you wait, the harder that it is to get on top of the pain. It is always easier, and takes less medication, to get on top of the pain right from the start rather than waiting until the pain is bad.
The bottom line? Take what you are given as directed from the get go. It will be easier to treat the pain and it will take less analgesia than if you had waited until the pain was worse.
R
