Author: setmefree
Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2011 10:45 pm
Wow…I can’t believe it’s been three months since I last updated this thread! A lot has happened since then and I didn’t do a very good job (well…I didn’t at all) of keeping any notes on how I’ve been progressing during this timeframe. So I’ll have to rely on memory as best I can.
So when I left off, I was at ~0.25mg/day of Suboxone and feeling more intense w/d symptoms setting in. After a few weeks of that and seeing very little improvement in terms of ‘stabilizing’ at that dose and becoming w/d symptom free, I became fairly convinced that it wasn’t going to happen that way for me.
Right about that same time, I was hit with some very distressing news from my adult son. He didn’t do anything (He’s perfect, you see…lol) but something was done to him, something very unforseen and hurtful and it sort of set us all into a tailspin. I needed to travel 500 miles immediately to be with him for support and I was in no position to be all out of sorts and in withdrawal at the same time. Just not worth it. So I did not try to decrease my dose and sometimes would bump up and take another 0.25mg during that week or two I was staying with him.
When I returned home and saw my doctor and discussed with him what had been going on, we discussed some alternative ways to shore up my taper and possible make my detox a little easier. Between the two of us, we decided that I would be allowed to do a trial of tramadol with my taper. He gave me a very limited supply after I assured him that I know all about the pitfalls of the drug and that tramadol was NEVER a drug of choice for me and NEVER gave me any sort of an opiate high.
I am choosing purposefully to not share the specifics of how my doctor and I decided to work the regimen out because I do not believe that this could work for many opiate addicts, and in fact, I think it could be detrimental for some to even try to use tramadol to help them finish a Sub taper. But….for me…..it has worked thus far. What I believe the very short course of tramadol did for me was to allow me to finish ‘washing’ the buprenorphine off my receptors. It eliminated the stacking of bupe and allowed me to be able to space my bupe doses out far enough to sort of lose that incredibly long half life of bupe also. Therefore, giving my brain a break from that steady stream of the potent opiate, bupe, which I have fed it for over two years. I did experience some acute withdrawal from the bupe nonetheless, as I did not take nearly enough tramadol to eradicate that. I had pretty severe GI pain/diarrhea….multiple episodes over a few different days. I had moderate to severe leg pain upon waking for several days. I had moderate episodes of anxiety at times and some days of mild depression and low motivation. Compared to full agonist withdrawal….a piece of cake!
Got through to having about a week and a half of no bupe and no tramadol and was doing pretty fine, except for some mild sleep disturbances and mild occassional anxiety attacks, until…..Bad news again…a close family member of mine has just been diagnosed with an aggressive, infiltrating breast Ca with mets. Let the meltdowns begin! I had a come-apart mentally and being fresh off everything and still feeling pretty fragile and having no more Klonopin (which I had used for comfort during detox) I fell off the wagon, so to speak. The thing is….I still wasn’t exactly home free with my detox/quit, as I still had periods during each day of feeling mild w/d and had thought about dosing with a little Sub at times. Well, this time I did. I only took 0.25mg and within about an hour and a half, I felt so much better.
I haven’t done anything against my doctor’s orders. He has said along that it takes as long as it takes. And if I need a little dose of Sub once a week for a few more months…that’s fine with him.
So, overall, I feel like I’m in a pretty golden place…..I’m all but completely off the Sub. I’m happy with where I’m at. I feel pretty good. I’ve just got to be functioning at a high level coming up here for the next couple months as we deal with what’s going on with my son and with my family member’s Ca diagnosis and treatment plan. Compared to things like that, being on a tiny bit of Sub off and on for a little longer doesn’t bother me much. Especially because I feel so much better without being on high dose Sub every single day and having all the unnessary build up of the drug in my system.
So there’s the update. It may sound crazy to some, it may make no sense to some, but it’s working for me. I don’t recommend it to others, as we all have to do this the way that works for us and the way our doctors will work it with us. But I feel good now….pretty darn good!
