Hey everyone, I apologize if this is a re-post, but it was part of my introduction post and I wanted to make an informative thread about the procedure and my personal uncommon experience, since I couldn't find much about it on here and it's increasing in popularity and safety. This thread is also for anyone curious about/considering undergoing/or that has underwent the procedure. It would be really great to hear any feedback and I'd be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Please feel free to message me anytime.
Before I post my personal experience, I would really like to stress that the majority of the negative parts of my experience were/are highly irregular so please don't let this be a deterrent for anyone considering it, because it did for me what 7 plus trips to rehab and numerous home-brew detoxes never could due what this ultimately did in a fraction of the time. Also, please note that I'm not trying to "advertise" or push this on anyone, I just want to share my story, maybe hear some other personal experiences, answer any questions and hopefully help someone in the process of doing so.
I won't mention specifics as to where the particular address of the facility is, or the name of it via this thread, but if you are truly interested or want to research the facility on your own, send me a message and I can give you the information. It is a very low key, professional and small privately owned facility, with one highly trained doctor with over 15+ years of experience performing each procedure, along with a team of highly trained medical aids who specialize in and have worked for a long time, in this field. Lastly, I must stress again that my experience was extremely A-typical and I have personally seen/heard it work wonders on friends and other patients. Relapse rate is extremely low and they offer a wide range of aftercare, including naltrexone injections and unlimited follow up appointments. I found this particular facility very much suited to my needs, as they specialize in detox for long-term methadone and suboxone users as well. The doctor who performs the procedure is a really great, no-bullshit kind of guy and I really appreciated his honesty, never once feeling like I was being suckered in to the procedure as I have felt speaking with other facilities in the past whenever I researched them. This particular facility will literally not accept you unless you truly want to get clean and can prove this to the doctor beforehand. And on that note, here is my story.
On April 30th I underwent the infamous "anesthesia assisted rapid opiate detox" procedure, so here's a brief (or as brief as I can make it) story of the nightmare that was my detox. I went to a place in (New York City) and honestly my doctor is fantastic. He's been working in the field for 15+ years and really knows his shit. The actual procedure you don't feel what so ever, and it rounds out to around 9,800 U.S. dollars. But they have payment plans that are pretty affordable so don't let the price terrify you. Just think about how much your habit costs you every year along with the risks involved with drug abuse both physically and legally and the price for the procedure really doesn't seem like that much.
I did this as a last ditch effort, mind you. Apparently 7 trips to rehab weren't enough so I ended up in the methadone mill for about 5 years. I'm 23 now and have been using opiates intravenously since just shy of the age of 14. Growing up in a suburb of the city and playing in a band with guys 7+ years older than me afforded me the luxury of a full blown habit at around age 15. Yeah, not good and it only went downhill from there.
Anyway, when went for my consultation visit, I was on 220mg of methadone before the procedure(i had previously been on 300mgs at a different clinic i was discharged from. long story.) and also taking around 12mg of xanax with 4mg of klonopin daily. Now, I'm sure some of you are like "what the hell you'd die, this kid is a fucking liar" - if you are one of those people please don't even bother making any rude remarks because I personally know what I was on and that's all that matters to me, not to mention if anyone has the slightest knowledge of or has ever been on methadone maintenance with a hard habit prior/during methadone maintenance, you know that with a high tolerence, what I was taking was like a juice box and a handful of skittles.
Due to the length of use and amount of methadone I was on, My R.O.D doctor wasn't comfortable detoxing me directly off of the methadone because in ordinary methadone-taper style detoxification, even when detoxed slowly over the course of a year or simply quit cold turkey (the only reason you'd ever do this would probably be because you were in a jail that doesn't administer methadone) it can stay in your body/cause withdrawl to last anywhere up to months and in the cases of patients who have been on it for multiple decades and in extreme cases, sometimes years after use is stopped.
My R.O.D. doctor told me I'd need to stop methadone immediately and take 3-4 weeks of a different opiate supplement before the procedure. Three weeks later just prior to the detox procedure, I was taking, on any given day - dilaudid 16-24mg daily, morphine sulphate 200mg xr tablets, crushed up and de-waxed 800-1000mg daily, 90-120mg of 30mg roxycodone, smoking 3-4 200mg 72 hour fentanyl gel patches and shooting up good quality, china white heroin. This obviously more than supplemented my previous habit and in addition to my benzo habit, resulted in me being all sorts of fucked up.
Anyway, I went in on the 30th of April for the procedure. They didn't require me to come in for the procedure in active withdrawal or anything and I was able to get high while sitting in the waiting area by administering fentanyl gel, orally. After signing my last few release forms, They took me to the room I would be spending the night in, which had a beautiful walk-in shower(which sadly I was only able to use sitting on a handicapped bench hallucinating from post anesthesia and throwing up on myself) a bed for myself and one for my girlfriend, along with a hd tv and outside the room a fully stocked refrigerator with lots of food, ice-cream, sandwiches, yogurts, juices, a cappucino machine. I would stay there sober just for a vacation it was so nice haha. But yes there were Lot's of lovely things I couldn't manage to even think about eating without throwing up.
After my brief tour, they hooked me up to an IV, Loaded me up with clonidine for about 5 hours then took me to the procedure room. I don't really feel like explaining the exact method of detox, but it primarily involves flushing your body with a ton of naloxone and naltrexone whilst under anesthesia. I am and always have been, along with my father and grandfather, somehow naturally tolerant to anesthesia and have woken up unable to move yet feeling pain during surgeries before, so I was pretty freaked out. The procedure, normally takes about 3-4, or sometimes up to 5 hours with the minimal, being two hours. This was not the case for me.
I was under anesthesia for 11+ hours after they had to drastically increase my dose (thank god I didn't feel anything) but as a result, I woke up puking my brains out. I then proceeded to cough and vomit fluids i didn't even know my body could produce, along with black tar from my lungs and I proceeded to throw up literally until there was blood. Due to the fact I was a human beanbag chair, I also asphyxiated on my own vomit lord knows how many times so I came down with pneumonia right after.
I know they say don't eat for 12 hours and i hadn't had anything besides a sip of water to wash down my benzos before going in, for like 15 hrs. It's been 25 days and I'm slowly on the up and up. The biggest thing for me is I'm no longer psychologically craving opiates. The worst thing is restless leg syndrome. This is due to pockets of methadone still remaining in my body, slowly being released as well as withdrawal from my xanax taper. My doctor said he had never seen someone with a tolerence as high as mine, so I visit him frequently for clonidine and loperamide.
As a doctor, I really have a lot of respect for him because he is honest, blunt to the point, and he's available by phone literally 24/7 and really great about medications/proper dosing and just genuinely a kind person. I was laid up really badly after I got home and couldn't move around much or at all during the first week after the detox, and having run out of the envelopes of take-home medication he gave me, I was unable to get to the drug store to fill out my prescriptions. I called and told him this and right away, he physically went to the pharmacy, paid for out of pocket and over-nighted me the already filled scripts, never charging me.
I'm doing much better now and genuinely feel all the pain and discomfort is/was worth it. I'm still having extremely bad leg pain/RLS, but he says it's from the long term methadone use/abuse and xanax taper. Other than that, I quit LITERALLY everything, even cigarettes, except for the benzos, which I am tapering down from (currently at 4mgs of xanax) to help me sleep and deal with the restless leg syndrome. Seriously if you can put up with a few days of shitting your brains out and an upset stomach if you don't react well to anesthesia (worst case scenario), I would recommend it to anyone having a really hard time getting clean. Especially if your habit isn't enormous, but you're just not able to quit. Because if you have a moderate tolerance, it's really a walk in the park from what I've heard. And of the people I've talked to who have done it, it all worked out really well for them and hell, even in severe cases like mine I'd rather go through 3 weeks of discomfort than months of a slow and painful methadone taper, followed by months of discomfort afterwards. But anyway I'm just a rare case scenario in terms of the adverse effects post-op. The psychological effects have honestly been the toughest for me to deal with, mostly a lot of suppressed anger and sadness, but it gets better. The mood swings can be pretty crazy sometimes, but I'm hoping that the depression help forum here will help out a bit until my appointment with the therapist my R.O.D. doctor is setting me up with. Anyway, that's my horror story, though honestly it was really a blessing.
Please feel free to ask me any questions you might have, or share any similar or personal experiences, or share any general input.
Thanks for listening to my story.
Before I post my personal experience, I would really like to stress that the majority of the negative parts of my experience were/are highly irregular so please don't let this be a deterrent for anyone considering it, because it did for me what 7 plus trips to rehab and numerous home-brew detoxes never could due what this ultimately did in a fraction of the time. Also, please note that I'm not trying to "advertise" or push this on anyone, I just want to share my story, maybe hear some other personal experiences, answer any questions and hopefully help someone in the process of doing so.
I won't mention specifics as to where the particular address of the facility is, or the name of it via this thread, but if you are truly interested or want to research the facility on your own, send me a message and I can give you the information. It is a very low key, professional and small privately owned facility, with one highly trained doctor with over 15+ years of experience performing each procedure, along with a team of highly trained medical aids who specialize in and have worked for a long time, in this field. Lastly, I must stress again that my experience was extremely A-typical and I have personally seen/heard it work wonders on friends and other patients. Relapse rate is extremely low and they offer a wide range of aftercare, including naltrexone injections and unlimited follow up appointments. I found this particular facility very much suited to my needs, as they specialize in detox for long-term methadone and suboxone users as well. The doctor who performs the procedure is a really great, no-bullshit kind of guy and I really appreciated his honesty, never once feeling like I was being suckered in to the procedure as I have felt speaking with other facilities in the past whenever I researched them. This particular facility will literally not accept you unless you truly want to get clean and can prove this to the doctor beforehand. And on that note, here is my story.
On April 30th I underwent the infamous "anesthesia assisted rapid opiate detox" procedure, so here's a brief (or as brief as I can make it) story of the nightmare that was my detox. I went to a place in (New York City) and honestly my doctor is fantastic. He's been working in the field for 15+ years and really knows his shit. The actual procedure you don't feel what so ever, and it rounds out to around 9,800 U.S. dollars. But they have payment plans that are pretty affordable so don't let the price terrify you. Just think about how much your habit costs you every year along with the risks involved with drug abuse both physically and legally and the price for the procedure really doesn't seem like that much.
I did this as a last ditch effort, mind you. Apparently 7 trips to rehab weren't enough so I ended up in the methadone mill for about 5 years. I'm 23 now and have been using opiates intravenously since just shy of the age of 14. Growing up in a suburb of the city and playing in a band with guys 7+ years older than me afforded me the luxury of a full blown habit at around age 15. Yeah, not good and it only went downhill from there.
Anyway, when went for my consultation visit, I was on 220mg of methadone before the procedure(i had previously been on 300mgs at a different clinic i was discharged from. long story.) and also taking around 12mg of xanax with 4mg of klonopin daily. Now, I'm sure some of you are like "what the hell you'd die, this kid is a fucking liar" - if you are one of those people please don't even bother making any rude remarks because I personally know what I was on and that's all that matters to me, not to mention if anyone has the slightest knowledge of or has ever been on methadone maintenance with a hard habit prior/during methadone maintenance, you know that with a high tolerence, what I was taking was like a juice box and a handful of skittles.
Due to the length of use and amount of methadone I was on, My R.O.D doctor wasn't comfortable detoxing me directly off of the methadone because in ordinary methadone-taper style detoxification, even when detoxed slowly over the course of a year or simply quit cold turkey (the only reason you'd ever do this would probably be because you were in a jail that doesn't administer methadone) it can stay in your body/cause withdrawl to last anywhere up to months and in the cases of patients who have been on it for multiple decades and in extreme cases, sometimes years after use is stopped.
My R.O.D. doctor told me I'd need to stop methadone immediately and take 3-4 weeks of a different opiate supplement before the procedure. Three weeks later just prior to the detox procedure, I was taking, on any given day - dilaudid 16-24mg daily, morphine sulphate 200mg xr tablets, crushed up and de-waxed 800-1000mg daily, 90-120mg of 30mg roxycodone, smoking 3-4 200mg 72 hour fentanyl gel patches and shooting up good quality, china white heroin. This obviously more than supplemented my previous habit and in addition to my benzo habit, resulted in me being all sorts of fucked up.
Anyway, I went in on the 30th of April for the procedure. They didn't require me to come in for the procedure in active withdrawal or anything and I was able to get high while sitting in the waiting area by administering fentanyl gel, orally. After signing my last few release forms, They took me to the room I would be spending the night in, which had a beautiful walk-in shower(which sadly I was only able to use sitting on a handicapped bench hallucinating from post anesthesia and throwing up on myself) a bed for myself and one for my girlfriend, along with a hd tv and outside the room a fully stocked refrigerator with lots of food, ice-cream, sandwiches, yogurts, juices, a cappucino machine. I would stay there sober just for a vacation it was so nice haha. But yes there were Lot's of lovely things I couldn't manage to even think about eating without throwing up.
After my brief tour, they hooked me up to an IV, Loaded me up with clonidine for about 5 hours then took me to the procedure room. I don't really feel like explaining the exact method of detox, but it primarily involves flushing your body with a ton of naloxone and naltrexone whilst under anesthesia. I am and always have been, along with my father and grandfather, somehow naturally tolerant to anesthesia and have woken up unable to move yet feeling pain during surgeries before, so I was pretty freaked out. The procedure, normally takes about 3-4, or sometimes up to 5 hours with the minimal, being two hours. This was not the case for me.
I was under anesthesia for 11+ hours after they had to drastically increase my dose (thank god I didn't feel anything) but as a result, I woke up puking my brains out. I then proceeded to cough and vomit fluids i didn't even know my body could produce, along with black tar from my lungs and I proceeded to throw up literally until there was blood. Due to the fact I was a human beanbag chair, I also asphyxiated on my own vomit lord knows how many times so I came down with pneumonia right after.
I know they say don't eat for 12 hours and i hadn't had anything besides a sip of water to wash down my benzos before going in, for like 15 hrs. It's been 25 days and I'm slowly on the up and up. The biggest thing for me is I'm no longer psychologically craving opiates. The worst thing is restless leg syndrome. This is due to pockets of methadone still remaining in my body, slowly being released as well as withdrawal from my xanax taper. My doctor said he had never seen someone with a tolerence as high as mine, so I visit him frequently for clonidine and loperamide.
As a doctor, I really have a lot of respect for him because he is honest, blunt to the point, and he's available by phone literally 24/7 and really great about medications/proper dosing and just genuinely a kind person. I was laid up really badly after I got home and couldn't move around much or at all during the first week after the detox, and having run out of the envelopes of take-home medication he gave me, I was unable to get to the drug store to fill out my prescriptions. I called and told him this and right away, he physically went to the pharmacy, paid for out of pocket and over-nighted me the already filled scripts, never charging me.
I'm doing much better now and genuinely feel all the pain and discomfort is/was worth it. I'm still having extremely bad leg pain/RLS, but he says it's from the long term methadone use/abuse and xanax taper. Other than that, I quit LITERALLY everything, even cigarettes, except for the benzos, which I am tapering down from (currently at 4mgs of xanax) to help me sleep and deal with the restless leg syndrome. Seriously if you can put up with a few days of shitting your brains out and an upset stomach if you don't react well to anesthesia (worst case scenario), I would recommend it to anyone having a really hard time getting clean. Especially if your habit isn't enormous, but you're just not able to quit. Because if you have a moderate tolerance, it's really a walk in the park from what I've heard. And of the people I've talked to who have done it, it all worked out really well for them and hell, even in severe cases like mine I'd rather go through 3 weeks of discomfort than months of a slow and painful methadone taper, followed by months of discomfort afterwards. But anyway I'm just a rare case scenario in terms of the adverse effects post-op. The psychological effects have honestly been the toughest for me to deal with, mostly a lot of suppressed anger and sadness, but it gets better. The mood swings can be pretty crazy sometimes, but I'm hoping that the depression help forum here will help out a bit until my appointment with the therapist my R.O.D. doctor is setting me up with. Anyway, that's my horror story, though honestly it was really a blessing.
Please feel free to ask me any questions you might have, or share any similar or personal experiences, or share any general input.
Thanks for listening to my story.
I guess I should read up more on opioid withdrawals. Seems like it's more complicated than what I've been lead to believe.
