I'm needing some encouragement. Feeling very, very alone with all this. Long story short: I'm a long-term survivor of a chronic form of of a blood cancer. Had serious, intense treatment 9 yrs ago that left me still alive, but with some rough neuropathy and function problems. 6 yrs ago I was put on neurontin and methadone. I should mention I seem to have a high sensitivity to meds of all types. It wasn't easy to go on those, but they saved my life, although created other problems, particularly marital because "You've changed!" Yeah, ya think? Cancer, near death, fall-out from treatment, loss of work, identity, friends and a helluva lot more -- yeah, that mighta changed me some. After a couple years I was able to get off the neurontin w/o any worsening of condition [which is both pain and weakness in nerve signaling which translates into reduced ability]. I've remained steady at 15 mg of methadone for over 5 yrs and am relatively stable and functioning -- but I hate it! It's not the drug so much that I hate - it's the whole fucked up system, the suspicion, the shaming, the worry over a hundred possible things going wrong. Anyway, this past fall I decided to attempt getting off of what I've heard someone here call the 'holy grail of withdrawals'. Doctors are of little to no help with this - and frankly, I feel as though they expect me to fail -- and anyways, what's the deal since they look at me through the filter of "cancer patient" and kind of write me off to a degree. Here's the thing -- because of my station in life, I'm ALLLL about the QUALITY of said life. Quantity would be nice, but since that's an unknown all I can do is focus on quality. In my best version of life in my mind, it would not include asshole pain docs and their controlled elixirs with their federal narcotics contracts! I have pretty low tolerance for b.s. To cut to the chase, I've slooooowly titrated down, thanks to things I've read here and elsewhere, from folks way more helpful and understand this stuff from the inside better than the docs seem to. It hasn't been too bad until recently - and still, it's not in the 'Horrible Zone' - but sometimes lately I can peek it over the horizon. I've been doing a steady reduction of 1/8 of a 5 mg pill [.62 mg] every 12-14 days - going from 15 mg to 7 with only a few days of some withdrawal symptoms that would pass and that I ride out with the help of pot [which I had to cold turkey for several months for a scheduled pee-test,]. At the 7 mg point it started becoming less predictable with the symptoms [nausea, diarrhea, anxiety, depression, lousy sleep] lasting for more days. I hit the pause button recently to stabilize at a little over 6 mg for a few weeks. I needed a break from this 'Titration Project' feeling like my obsessive part-time job. It was a bit of relief - but now here I am back in the saddle - now reduced to a shade over 5 mg with the worst diarrhea - my gut feeling like crap, weeping out of the blue when I'm alone and feeling esp. blue and lonely with all this with my head in my hands crying over "how did my life ever get here?!" Anybody who's ever been here - I gotta tell you, this titrating methadone shit is in some ways harder than when I've been in chemo! i.e. I can handle A LOT! I have handled a lot! But right now, with this, I'm feeling lost -- and mighty scared of just having enough ability to get through these next 5 mg to find out who/what I am without it. I'm doing my best to put in place other pieces of scaffolding under me - one of the main ones: meditation. Like serious mind management unlike I've ever done before. But it's a lot like herding cats. Feral cats at that. Any guidance out there is welcomed.
