Coming off after 10 years…

Author: robx46

Posted: Fri May 17, 2013 11:00 pm

BeautifulDisaster wrote:
Wow rob, you are a trooper!!! Your story is very inspiring for me and im sure others as well. I feel confident in telling you that things will get better, even though i cant speak from expirence because i have yet to come off. Im still at 2mgs and i wanna take it nice and slow. When you give you brain a constant supply of opiates everyday your brain does "forget" how to make its own. So when you stop it does have to relearn how to do that, it takes time, but it will happen. Your brain has had a steady supply of outside opiates for 10 years and now its still being lazy, but as long as your symptoms are improving i think thats a good indicator that relearning.

I think the sleep thing is gonna be the toughest part for me when i come off. Im a sleep whore though and i find it very hard to function right if i dont get enough sleep. Back pain is also an issue for me when i wd, and i cant decipher if its real pain from a real problem or just the wd. When i was about 6 years old i was found to have a moderate case of scoleosis(sp) it didnt really start noticing pain until i was in my early teens, but even though i had some pain it wasnt unbearable or anything, i was always able to deal with it pretty well. Now everytime i wd i get severe back pain, so im unsure if its just the wd or if my problem has progressed and maybe now theres some other issues as well.

Are you taking clonidine to help with your wd right now? Maybe that can help you get more/better quality sleep.

keep on truckin man! As tinydancer said "your my hero" lol

Yeah definitely take it slow. at 2mg you are getting there though. My symptoms are improving but like tinydancer said, some symptoms might stick around for 2-3 months. My body has always been pretty quick kicking drugs out of my system, which leads to nasty acute wd’s but I also would get better quicker than normal.

I’m still a bit miffed at the back pain, or the severity of it despite taking lots of ibuprofen. It is getting better, in my waking hours at least. But I’m also doing a lot of therapy, stretching, almost some yoga type stuff. & I’m still trying to do much of my normal workouts that I was doing before going off sub. Hope it keeps paying off. Time will take care of some things but I have to also help myself where I can just by doing stuff even if I don’t feel like it.

I do have to prepare myself for the fact that I probably will have some pain my whole life to some extent, but I can tolerate some pain, always have. I put my body through a lot of trauma when I was younger, shattered multiple car windshields with my head in high speed head on collisions. It is almost bizarre that I survived them, let alone not even a broken bone. Thank my parents for some tough DNA I guess. But there was no getting around some back trauma, I should be glad that is all I’ve had to deal with & no real structural damage. Just some jacked up muscle & tissue I guess, but thankfully I’m still 100% able bodied.

No I really haven’t taken much to help me out. Just advil. I do have a blood pressure medication here that I can take, & I think I did take it like a week ago before bed but I still slept like crap (I think there is just no easy shortcut to dealing with the sleep issue for now). Not clonidine though. I remember taking that stuff a lot back in the day during all my rehab & detox stints. It would knock my on my ass. I stand up, I see purple, I sit down! I guess it did help though, that was better than my heart beating out of my chest. That really isn’t an issue now though.

Its really just a restlessness. I can fall asleep easily, but then 4 or 5 hours later for some reason my body thinks its time to wake up, but my brain disagrees. I can certainly handle that annoyance though. I have to remind myself I’ve been through much worse. Oh, & the good news in all this that I’ve failed to mention is that I really have had no cravings at all. I think nearly a decade of not getting high has pretty well taught my brain how to better deal with that stuff. & time, time just helps as the years pass. Not saying I’ll never have cravings again, but I’m just better at knowing how my own brain works. If I ever fall off the wagon, I know exactly what I’m doing & what I’m in for. Plus, its just time to try life without chemicals. I was like 13 the last time I lived that way in the real world for any extended period of time. & quite liked life back then, so maybe it all works out in the end.