Codeine & Alcohol (need answers, help)!

[jakandjil]

i'm new so if something is wrong or something i shouldn't have posted please go ahead and tell me. i made this thread because i need answers and i have searched the net so much to try and find my answers but i just can't find anything even relating to what i want answered!

so here's what happened. a few months ago i was out with a few mates, and had a 4 pack of woody %10ers to myself. downed them pretty fast. rolled my ankle i was pretty drunk. i'm a female and i'm also quite short (keep that in mind for what i'm going to say next); anyhow 2 - 3 hours later i got home, i'm not sure what i did to my ankle but it still hurts till this day. my ankle was in so much pain! i slept for a good 3 hours woke up at about 6am. in the most incredible amount of pain, so i asked my boyfriend what i should do, he thought it was a good idea to give me codeine. i downed 2 codeine ibuprofen +. that was the first time in my life that i had ever had codeine. i went straight back to sleep after having the codeine. i slept for about 3 more hours. this is when it gets pretty damn crazy, i then woke up. i walked to the lounge room and slowly dropped to the floor because it felt as if my whole rib cage was crushing my lungs. my back felt like it was clenching up along with my torso. my boyfriend was still asleep, and i had another 2 mates in the house. i called out for them then i couldn't say a full sentence properly, i tried yelling i couldn't yell, i was actually suffering from shortness of breath. i looked up at the ceiling everything went white, my vision went fuzzy. i couldn't say a full sentence, my back felt as if it was being hit with a pole. my friend rushed me to the closest medical center. before when i said whilst i was looking at the ceiling and it went white, i thought i was going to die, dead set. i ended up being okay in the end. the whole situation lasted about 45 minutes.

what i want to know, is why this happened? i've read so much stuff about mixing codeine with alcohol but nothing i read even came close to mentioning these effects, except for it saying "it could be extremely dangerous". i just want an answer that i will understand and when i say understand, an answer that someone can explain what was happening to my body at the time i was getting SOB & my back and torso were caving in. i swear my respiratory system was going to shut down.

 

[nAON]

If it was codeine + ibuprofen and you took 2, it was probably quite low dose, typically they're either 8mg or 30mg per pill, which isn't really high enough for the depressant interactions. Maybe you're just allergic to it?

 

[PotatoMan]

This is quite odd.. Ive mixed 150 mg of codeine with some bombay gin with no problems... So most likely you can be allergic to codeine or iburofen because my moms allergic to iburofen and gets a bad reaction when she took it.

 

[Venrak]

Sounds like a panic attack.

Alcohol is a CYP3a4 enzyme inducer, which is also the enzyme responsible for the conversion of codeine to morphine in the liver, ergo when alcohol is taken before codeine it will increase the metabolic conversion rate from codeine to morphine. Now, morphine is metabolized by CYP3a4, so it will last much shorter than usual if you induce before hand. I myself am deficient in the enzyme and the only way for me to get a good buzz off normal doses of codeine is to induce before hand, except the high lasts around an hour.

You may have had an idiosyncratic reaction to a dose of codeine that was relatively low even considering enzyme induction, you may have had a panic attack, or both. I'm leaning towards a bad reaction to either codeine and/or alcohol which triggered a panic attack.

Don't mix codeine with alcohol again, and if you do take codeine in the future, start with an ultra low dose of around 4-5mg (half a tablet of the OTC stuff, give or take).

 

[jakandjil]

ahh thank you for all your replies! i appreciate it so much! this has helped me so much and cleared my mind. i have been thinking about it for months. and i have no clue at all about codeine. so you have all helped me. and i also did find it strange as when i researched what happened to me nothing close to it came up. next time i have a check up i'll find out if i'm allergic to it (which is really strange because my whole life i've never had allergies).

if this helps the situation of trying to figure shit out,
i have severe anxiety, post-traumatic disorder and panic disorder.
i'm also an ex ice addict, and i mean an addict.

so what doesn't make sense if i possibly had a panic attack, how come it just happened if you understand what i'm saying, usually when i have anxiety panic attacks i'm aware of when it starts happening. but yeah my anxiety panic attacks are a lot more normal then what happened when i mixed the codeine and alcohol.

oh and venrak, also is the first paragraph you state that the "high" last for an hour, do you mean as if, because the alcohol converted the codeine into basically morphine as it passed through my liver that it made me experience that morphine state and possibly because it was something i never had been trough before it made me panic without knowing it, or my body tried to fight it off and that's why i panicked (with out actually knowing).

i'm so confused haha. you are all saying that it's such a little dose, which is confusing for me as to why it effected me so hard off such a tiny amount.

i'm taking all your answers into consideration! so if anyone has anything more to say please do! i'm extremely appreciative of any information and opinions!

 

[missmeyet?]

A little dose can effect everyone differently, just keep that in mind.

Also I agree with Venrak, this sounds just like a panic attack almost textbook. This is especially true if you have a history of aniety and panic disorder. It seems strange that this wasn't the first thing you thought if when you had this reaction. And also remember in a panic attack the physical symptoms feel very rral, often like you are dying.

Most importantly, you said you did go to the hospital right? What did the docs say there?

Also, just because you have never had allergies does not mean that you cannot suddenly have an allergic reation out of the blue. This happens to a lot of people. Sometimes an allerfic reation to something can happen the first time you are exposed to it, sometime it can happen the 10th time, sometimes someone can take something for years and then suddenly develop an allergy to it.

 

[jakandjil]

A little dose can effect everyone differently, just keep that in mind.

Also I agree with Venrak, this sounds just like a panic attack almost textbook. This is especially true if you have a history of aniety and panic disorder. It seems strange that this wasn't the first thing you thought if when you had this reaction. And also remember in a panic attack the physical symptoms feel very rral, often like you are dying.

Most importantly, you said you did go to the hospital right? What did the docs say there?

Also, just because you have never had allergies does not mean that you cannot suddenly have an allergic reation out of the blue. This happens to a lot of people. Sometimes an allerfic reation to something can happen the first time you are exposed to it, sometime it can happen the 10th time, sometimes someone can take something for years and then suddenly develop an allergy to it.

missmeyet? - i did feel like i was dying. it was the closest feeling\experience to death i've ever had. and yes i did go to the medical center. funny this but, they asked me what i had done that night i said i drank i told them how much i also said i had the codeine, in fact they said nothing about the codeine and that i was silly because i drank that much, they did not help me at all, if they had of i would never of asked the question, silly doctors. how pathetic can they be. they did not mention anything! i told them what i was experiencing they just marked it down to the alcohol. they didn't do any blood test's or anything, they just checked my heart rate and gave me a hydro-lite.

thank you though, as it felt exactly like i was dying. i thought i was going to die.

 

[Venrak]

In my personal experience there is a big difference between anxiety attacks and panic attacks; the former IME is characterized by a negative mental feedback loop, with minimal entrainment through physical sensations, whereas panic attacks often center around physical sensations that drive the amplitude of the anxiety and feed back into the physical sensations.

My first panic attack I was convinced I was dying because my oxygen saturation was too low, I hyperventilated, lost body sensation, started seeing red/blue/green spots all over the place and then passed out.

These things can be very physical and frightening.

 

[Intenselife]

I have done this before and it cures any on-coming hangover, but everyone reacts differently, just becareful to not repeat the experience.

 

[jakandjil]

In my personal experience there is a big difference between anxiety attacks and panic attacks; the former IME is characterized by a negative mental feedback loop, with minimal entrainment through physical sensations, whereas panic attacks often center around physical sensations that drive the amplitude of the anxiety and feed back into the physical sensations.

My first panic attack I was convinced I was dying because my oxygen saturation was too low, I hyperventilated, lost body sensation, started seeing red/blue/green spots all over the place and then passed out.

These things can be very physical and frightening.

to be honest this makes me at ease. because i've convinced myself about the stupidest things happening then i started to freak out.
this one time after being up for a couple of days on meth, i slept for about 2 hours, i woke up, i couldn't find my nose ring, then i for some reason thought i had inhaled it through my nose and it was stuck in my throat, i was in front of the mirror for about 4 hours trying to cough it up and stick my fingers down my throat. i'm so silly. i started going all red and just was so agitating. it was so annoying, i ended up finding my nose ring that's the only thing that stopped me from thinking it was down my throat. i literally thought it was stuck in the middle of my throat, i even thought i could feel it!

 

[Venrak]

^I can relate; I once spent around the same amount of time in front of a mirror convinced "rings" in my larynx came "unhooked" and I was trying to fit them back together. In retrospect, both our problems could probably be traced to either a swollen epiglottis or post-nasal drip.

Stimulants can play games with our minds. While it's important to know this, it's also important to know it's time to step back when this starts to happen (and actually a while before).

 

[jakandjil]

venrak that sounds so similar to the problem i had!! but what do you mean, like how could they be traced to the epiglottis or post-nasal drip, what does that have to do with us tripping?

 

[Venrak]

This is getting off topic, but I'll say this: after binging for a few days and losing a bunch of sleep, our perceptions of what actually is happening to us and around us tend to get distorted and rational thought can go out the window. What starts as an irritation in the throat due, for example, to inflammation of some kind can lead to all kinds of crazy thoughts which often get accepted as what is probably happening even if there are much more likely explanations. It's as if Occam's Razor doesn't apply anymore.

In a nutshell, we become deluded.