Author: SometimeIdiot
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 12:00 am
Greetings to all,
My deepest thanks to you for your interest and support. Aside from a cousin and three close friends (none of them live near me), nobody knows about my addiction. Maybe the scariest thing is trying to get sober and stay sober without any real family support. Can’t tell my wife right now because she’ll try to take my kid away, and losing my kid would devastate me.
So I moved my appt. up to yesterday (Tuesday) ‘cause I really wanted to get started and am sooooo sick of my current life of drugs. Saw the doc and told him how much I’d been using – basically between 800-1,000 mg of hydrocodone per day (about 80-100 pills per day of 10/325 strength hydrocodone). He said he’d never heard of anyone taking that much per day. Am I really the only one who’s abused that much? Anyway, told him that over the past 5 or so weeks I’d cut down to about 25 pills/day (250 mg), and even did a few days with only 16 pills. Cutting down so much wasn’t easy, but I managed to do it and am glad I did. Baby steps, baby accomplishments …
In Dr. Junig’s Q&A section, in the thread titled “Bad luck, hard knocks, tapering Suboxone, Talwin,� the doc wrote this, which really scared me:
| Quote: |
| What you describe sounds like ‘precipitated withdrawal’—if your total daily dose of opiates was greater than 30 mg of methadone, or 50 mg of oxycodone, or 70-80 mg of hydrocodone, then I would expect you to feel sick when starting Suboxone—unless you went a few days without any opioids and got your tolerance down a bit. |
Dr. Junig’s comments scared the crap out of me, because I was hoping to stop using yesterday (Tues.) and be in w/d sometime today so I could start the subs. Christ, I’ve been taking 10-11 times the amount Doc Junig said might need days of w/d before starting sub. WTF? Terrifying. Am I gonna have to be in w/d for a week before I can take my first sub? After discussing the matter with my doctor, we agreed that if I was really fearful of precip w/d, then I shouldn’t do this during the work week. So he wrote me a script for sub film, and clonidine (sp?) and Restoril, a good sleeping medication. Although I hoped to be hydro free today, I resupplied myself just enough to scrape by until Friday afternoon, at which point I’ll be out of pills and will begin w/d. I told my supplier I’d be traveling on business for a month, so he won’t be calling me trying to sell more pills for a while. If he calls me, hopefully in a month I’ll be on my way and will simply say “no� to more pills.
My doc prescribed 24mg per day (one 8mg strip 3x per day). Hopefully between whatever inner strength I can muster and the w/d meds, I can go an entire weekend and well into Monday w/out too bad w/d symptoms, and by then maybe I’ll be in deep enough w/d to take the sub without worrying about precip w/d. I don’t want to take the full 24 mg each day, but I guess I’ll have to see how I feel after an 8 mg strip …
Important Question: Has anyone gone on sub after using so heavily like me? If so, what was your experience going on sub? How long before your induction?
I’ve been at “only� 25 pills (250 mg) of hydro for over 4 weeks, so I hope to God my tolerance has dropped somewhat over the past month.
If someone knows Dr. Junig, I’d love to hear him elaborate on the comment I quoted above. He’s scared the crap out of me! LOL.
Thanks for reading and for all your support,
SI
