Author: hatmaker510
Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2011 10:15 am
Hi Pam and welcome to the forum. I appreciate you sharing your story with us. And I’m sorry to hear it didn’t go that well for you. I honestly don’t know that much about "normal" morphine doses, but when acute pain treatment is needed in sub patients, they’re supposed to give you more than the "average" dose that they would give to opiate-naive patients. Do you know if the 20 mg they were giving you was more than the "average’ dose? What about what they gave you to take home – was it the more than the "normal" dose? If not, then your surgeon(s)/doctor(s), unfortunately, didn’t handle your pain relief treatment correctly for you being a sub patient. That said, it’s not that unusual.
I had a minor procedure last year and afterward all they gave me were vic’s and I took about twice the prescribed dose in order to get pain relief, which did hold me over until my pain subsided, about 3 days later.
Oh, and the withdrawals you were feeling after your procedure were probably NOT in your head. Suboxone is strong and likely raised your tolerance, so I do believe the amounts they gave you before and after your surgery was not enough to keep you out of w/d.
Under the "Links" section of the forum, the very first "sticky" post is a thread that has a link to an NIH article/paper about treating acute pain in patients on opiate replacement therapy. It’s an extremely valuable paper that many of us have read ourselves and then actually shared with our doctors and/or surgeons before a procedure/surgery. So many in the medical field don’t understand sub and what to do when they need to treat our pain and this paper actually gives them concrete options on how to do that. So if you really need to have that other procedure, this paper might actually help to make it a much better experience for you.
I think the fact that you found new insight into yourself and realized through having those percs that you might not be ready to go off sub now is impressive. Now you can have that in your mind and keep it as a consideration when you find yourself deciding when it’s time for you to discontinue your sub treatment.
You are certainly not the first to have such a negative experience with a procedure while being on suboxone. (And yes, being off it for 7 days still isn’t enough for sub to stop "blocking" the full agonists.) Again, thanks for sharing and welcome.
