As a fellow who stays away from “stink’in think’in” as much as I can and who like you is in the rooms… I must say Shirley’s statement is not altogether uncommon for the “normal” folk still out there. My wife for instance still drinks like a normal human being…and she only understands what we go through intellectually but with the absence of empirical data for her she will probably only ever know what we go through on an intellectual basis and no more…
Yeah, I know. And I have no quibble with the “unreasonable” part of Shirley’s assessment. It’s the assumption of stupidity that gets tiresome. Us junkies can be just as brilliant or just as stupid as normies.
With my c-section (emergency), I was on whatever they put in my IV (dilautid and I don’t know what else) the day of and then vicodin, as well as 3 OTC ibuprofen and 1 OTC Tylenol (uh…every four and every six hours respectively, I think) for a few days in the hospital. They gave me a prescription for one more week worth of vicodin, which my husband lost on our way into the pharmacy. :smack: I was too afraid of being branded a drug seeker to try to get another prescription, so I just took the ibuprofen and Tylenol for another week and a half and it was just fine.
So yes, like Mama Zappa, I discovered it’s possible for at least some people to not stay on narcotics long after a c-section. I was VERY careful to take my OTC drugs on schedule though, not be late at all. It’s much easier to keep pain away than to make it go away once it’s started hurting again.
Yep - you speak the truth!
I’ll keep that in mind. I’ve done pretty well with my back pain and sciatic pain with just Tylenol and heat, so I’m learning to deal with moderate pain without the painkillers (before, any little twinge, I’d pop one), so I’m hoping it’ll be okay. I find that higher pain tolerance I had before my addiction started has started to come back, so hopefully, it’ll all be good.
E.
You might find that if you are prescribed strong pain meds for real pain, they don’t give you the same buzz. I love me some pills, but if I’ve ever needed them for serious pain I don’t get the same feeling from them. It’s as if the pain eats the painkiller instead of me eating the painkiller.
I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but it was my experience when I had some surgery. Morphine schmorphine, I still felt like shit and had terrible pain. There was no way to enjoy that buzz.
I don’t think Shirley meant it as an insult. I’m sure both she & I know several drug addicts, but they don’t present themselves as addicts and we don’t even know they are addicted to something or other. The people who are addicts probably hold down jobs and families, functional addicts. However people like she & I have grown up living with a media that equates drug addiction with being homeless and a thief/prostitute, not people who are functional addicts (which I’d guess most addicts are).
As for the statement about alt. meds, I was wondering the same thing about ibogaine. Supposedly it resets your neurotransmitter chemistry and works well for treating addiction with just 1-3 doses, but the trips people experience (it is a hallucinagen) are the most painful, damaging experiences people ever face in their lives.
Thanks, Wesley.
I was thinking more along the lines of the horrors of withdrawl and everything I’ve heard, read, been exposed to via various media outlets and thinking that if withdrawl is so bad the rational part and tolerance probably drops considerably and the person who is trying to stop the addiction is probably not going to want to deal with a lot of little details ( many pill taking or maybe instructions.) I am just thinking of just how I am when I have a migraine. All I can manage is " Where the hell is my Imitrex…" and then go lie down. I cannot fathom what it would be like to go through a withdrawl.
I did not mean to offend anyone.
On a few occassions I have been given prescription, codeine-containing cough syrup. Strictly for good reason, of course.
I found it very frightening to start refering to it a “my friend codeine” after a day or so. But it was my friend… I felt ever so much BETTER after I took it!
On the other hand, I never finished the second bottle. After a week my illness was much improved and… well, I didn’t like the mental fuzziness my new “friend” was inducing. So at a certain point I just stopped taking it and eventually poured the rest of it down the sink. After it sat in the medicine chest for a month or so.
So no, I don’t think I’ve ever been an addict, but I think I did get a teeny glimpse of how one can fall into that pit.
On the other hand, after I had the abcess drained, while the pills the doc gave me made me “comfortably numb” before the bandage changes they didn’t seem to do jack after the gauze was peeled off, the silvadene scoured out of the wound with water, more silvadene trowled in, and new gauze strapped on. It hurt. At least after the new bandage was on and I could go sit in a corner and stop shivering after 10 or 15 minutes. Well, OK, that was only the first week.
I am not going into the “joys” of debriding here.
So I probably could have asked for and gotten something stronger for that medical episode, but like I said, the pain faded outside of the bandage changes and I could get a good night’s sleep, which is really my biggest issue. During the day I can tolerate some pain, distract myself from it - but I really do need to get good sleep or I’m a wreck.
I don’t understand. I’ve been taking two and a half Oxyco/Apap 7.5-500 for over two years for leg pain due to an L5 damaged nerve root in my spine. Every now and then the leg will stop hurting for a day or two and when that happens I just don’t take them. And not taking them doesn’t bother me in the slightest. How can that be?
That’s two and a half per day.
This is the first time I have truly attempted to look at what exactly happened to me regarding pain medication, both while on it and going off it.
I am disabled by several health issues, and I am in constant pain. I have a high pain tolerance, so if I am complaining about pain then I have been enduring it for a while and it has become big pain, major pain, making it terribly difficult to think or respond without sounding, well, bitchy and/or pissed.
Check my location, I live on an island in the Gulf of Alaska. When my body began to develop all the infirmities I now live with, my family physician had no problem giving me hydrocodone, with the instructions to take one 10 mg pill every 4 - 6 hours as needed. This was not a problem, as I mentioned I have a high pain tolerance, so depending on the day I took between 0 - 4 pills a day.
Well, despite knowing people who are heavy into opiate/narcotic use, I was blissfully unaware of the pain pill black market in operation, both on the island as well as throughout the state. So I was unprepared when my doctor told me that he could no longer prescribe my hydrocodone, that I would have to travel to Anchorage - a 400 air mile round trip, plus cabbing around the city to doctor appointments - once a month to be seen at a “pain clinic”. I have mobility trouble, along with some truly impressive pain, and travel only exacerbates the pain. The insurance would not cover an overnight stay, so I had to take the 7:00 am plane out of Kodiak, spend the better part of the day waiting in the clinic to be seen (for some reason they could never manage to schedule an appointment that fit in with the flight schedules in a reasonably timely manner, so I was spending a great deal of time waiting in the airports as well as the clinic) and do my best to make it back to the airport in time to catch a plane home. The clinic always overbooked, and more than once I spent the night in the Anchorage airport in the stupid wheelchair, reading a book and dozing, yee-freaking-haw.
I relate this in order to emphasise that it was no fun for me to obtain the medication, in fact, it was horrible every trip. I went for five years.
The first clinic’s physician (and I use the term loosely, he has since had his license to practice medicine in Alaska revoked) put me on a mega dose of time released oxycontin to be taken twice a day, with instant release oxycodone to be used up to 6 times a day for breakthrough pain. (I may have gotten the 'contin and 'codone reversed) Plus a muscle relaxer to be taken several times a day. Then the big oxy problem became nationally exposed and the insurance would no longer pay for it, so he switched me to methadone for a month. Then he put me on morphine. I am a little hazy on the dosage, it was either 40 or 80 mgs of time released morphine to be taken twice a day, along with (I believe the dose was 5 mgs but it might have been 15 mgs) instant release morphine to be taken, again, 4 - 6 times a day for breakthrough pain. Plus the muscle relaxer. (I have been given, at different times, flexeril, soma, and skelaxin)
I did not/do not need that much pain medication on a daily basis. I was doing just fine on the small amount of hydrocodone I had been taking. However, the doctor knows what’s best, right?
Fast forward five years. I have not been functioning, as I have been drugged out of my mind. I was unhappy with being physically dependant on morphine, but every time I tried to taper off the withdrawal was, well, I don’t even know what words to use to describe it, but it was very, very bad. Finally, in October 2002, after my husband had left the kids and I to go red crabbing, the pharmacy in Anchorage, which I had to use as a condition of the pain clinic, sent me my instant release morphine, but not the time released. In order to keep from crawling out of my skin I ate a month’s worth of instant morphine while waiting for the other script to be sent, which took two weeks. However, by the time it was delivered, I was in withdrawal, too sick to keep anything down, even the morphine. Lying on my bed, drenched with sweat alternating with cold chills, involuntary trembling, bizarre electrical type of pains shooting through my body, mentally just aware enough to know that I was in trouble, retching every time I moved my head the slightest bit, diarrhea with the complications of blacking out when I had to stand to go to the bathroom as well as the joy of sitting on the toilet holding a big bowl and emptying my body from both ends simultaneously, hallucinating, absolutely no sleep at all, and this went on for three days before I was throwing up and evacuating blood. I called one of my adult daughters and a friend at 3:00 am, the friend stayed at the house with the two younger kids while my daughter took me to the E.R. (It took both of them to help me get from my room and into the car, and once at the hospital my daughter had to get a nurse to come with a wheelchair to get me from the car to the E.R.
The nurse took my vitals, history, etc. after having to put the rails up on the gurney to keep me from falling off during one of my more intense trembling sessions. The on call doctor was a doc I am not overly fond of to begin with, and he could not seem to comprehend what the problem was. His assumption was that I was going through withdrawal and was looking to score some more dope. All I wanted was for him to give me something to stop the throwing up. Earlier that day I had called my doctor who offered phenergan in either injection or suppository form. As I knew that it would be unwise to try to take myself to his office I chose the suppositories, and used three before giving up. All I wanted was the damn phenergen injection, I desperately wanted to stop barfing and get some sleep. When I mentioned that I hadn’t slept in three days and nights he told me flat out he wasn’t giving me anything to help me sleep. He also told me that I was having anxiety problems…“Why look at how you are trembling!” and kept offering me valium. Oral valium. Duh, I had xanax at home, hell, I had morphine at home, just make the puking stop! Trying to take a pill wasn’t going to help when I couldn’t even wet my mouth without retching. Three hours later I finally got the phenergan injection (which hurts like you just don’t even know!) and went home.
I doled out the morphine during the times that I thought I was going to die. Literally, die. I had friends checking in with me several times a day to make sure I hadn’t died. There were times I wished that I would die, just to stop the physical hell I was going through.
The worst of the physical symptoms lasted about 2 - 3 weeks. The drugs had taken a severe toll on both my body and mind though. I was weak and just…not well for several months. Like 6 - 9 months. I still, four years after detoxing have enormous chunks of memory that are just…gone. Although I have always had a large vocabulary and have always been articulate, I still frequently find myself in mid sentence either blanked out on a word I wanted to use, or just have blanked out what I was talking about.
I don’t consider myself an addict, recovering or recovered. I am able to take pain pills when I am given a script, which is rare. I do not, and never have, taken more than the doctor told me to. I have never touched pain pills which were not prescribed for me. As an example, my #3 daughter had her four eye teeth pulled, her tongue clipped (she was tongue tied) and her braces put on all in one day. She was given a script for codeine, which I managed for her, and I was not tempted in the least to take any of them. Now that I am aware of the black market which is thriving even more now that the local doctors send everyone to pain clinics in Anchorage, so everyone has the “good stuff” and if I wanted it, I could have an impressive array of pretty much anything I wanted with just a phone call or two, if I were so inclined. I have days in which I would give pretty much anything for a legally prescribed pain pill (today is a bad day pain wise) but I would prefer to just shoot myself in the head rather than become dependant on opiates/narcotics. My choice is either go to the pain clinics and get a bag of major drugs and zombie out, or live with the pain. I live with the pain. I eat far too much ibuprofen, I have a script for soma, I have a heating pad, and there are nights when I have a hot toddy or three in order to get some sleep. The pain rarely allows me more than three hours of sleep at a time, but I cope. I take naps. Sometimes I cry. Life is precious though, and I find joy in very simple things. I love my family and friends, I try to keep my mind busy, especially when I am unable to keep my body busy.
You’re not an addict.
This is an important concept here - proper use of opiates does NOT lead to addiction. At least, not inevitably. Therefore, I would have to conclude your dosage is appropriate for what is being treated.
Thanks for the response Broomstick. It still seems weird though. I’d think, that from reading this thread, taking this stuff for 2 years would, at the least, cause a physical addiction.
I used to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol. The alcohol was a snap to give up, but the cigarettes were hell on earth. Maybe people can be addicted to certain things but not to others.
I’ll definitely second what Broomstick says. If you’re only usuing opiates responsibly to treat pain, it’s not very easy to become addicted. Addiction tends to happen when the user is taking high doses multiple times a day in order to experience euphoria, and even at this rate it may take several weeks or months to develop a serious monkey on your back (it all depends on the drug, individual body chemistry, etc.)
Unfortunatly I have trouble convincing my dad to believe this. He fractured his spine a few years ago in a car accident and has been suffering from severe back pain ever since. He’s got a prescription for oxycontin that his doctor told him he could take once a day, but he’s so frightened of becoming a “junkie” that he’ll only take it once in a great while when the pain becomes unbearable. The rest of the time he’d rather tough it out.
Unfortuately the War on Drugs and the media’s usual panic-mongering has convinced a lot of people that opiates are worse than plutonium, when in fact they can be a tremendous gift for those in pain.
Fair enough, Shirley. Just keep in mind that the craftiest person on the planet is probably an addict in withdrawal plotting how to get his next fix.
Opiate withdrawal has two major components, the physical, and the psychological withdrawal.
Any person can become physically addicted, having been given enough opiates, and then deprived of them. Physiologic changes in the body happen, as does withdrawal. It’s moderately uncomfortable, but not life-threatening.
Then there’s the psychological addiction. Not everyone experiences this part. And some experience it only mildly. But a person with the actual disease of chemical dependency is far more likely to suffer a more severe psychological withdrawal. With a psychological addction, the person’s mental well-being becomes more and more dependent on the opiate. Withdrawal then not only feels like a nasty flu (the physical side of it) but the individual will feel more or less hopeless, depressed, anxious, and unable to cope without the drug. Suicide risk goes way up. Time flows like maple syrup in the arctic winter.
Happy is the person who only needs to go thru the physical withdrawal.