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Opioids Hands falling asleep at night - related to having injected heroin?

jrabhino

Greenlighter
Joined
May 5, 2011
Messages
3
So started iv'ing H about two weeks ago and iv'ed oxy one night, no complications when injecting however, its about 4 to 5 days after my last injection and my hands are falling asleep during the night more frequently than usual. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if it's anything to worry about?
 
I went through something similar to this.. although I have never injected I did smoke heroin for a couple years.. I would wake up in the morning with one of my arms completely numb.. and I just couldnt figure out why it was happening for the life of me.. I told my mom about this and she told me that she actually watched me laying on my arm in my sleep which caused it to be numb when I woke up... I would nod off and roll over on my arm which would cause it to be asleep when I awakened..

Not much of a scientific answer but its an idea to look out for.
 
Even though you have had no complications you know of you are still sticking sharp things in to your veins that carry the blood around your body so its still going to have an effect on you

Even if you only use your hands now and then if you use your arms they lead to the hands

But yes i have also notices since i used to IV that the circulation in my hands are not as good as they were but its kind of expected from what i was doing to them every day
 
yeah ive also noticed my hands and arms falling asleep and going numb fairly often as well.
i iv in my forearm now but i used to have to go in my hands when i couldnt use those veins anymore but they came back =)
i know the things i iv (heroin, roxies, suboxone, subutex, etc) arent the best things to be putting directly in my bloodstream like that
but im sure the above is right. after iv usage the circulation is effected leading to hands and arms going numb more often than usual.
just another negative to the iv ROA but i still love it ;)
 
When you got a good amount of opiates in your system its a lot easier to sleep in positions where your cutting off blood supply to certain parts of your body, without subconciosly repositioning to get the blood flow going again. Thers been a few people here on BL that have fell asleep/passed out on there arms and awoke with paralysed hands/arms, me included. Its definitly bad news when that shit happens cause it can take months to heal and can leave a hand arm completly useless untill it does.

Of course sticking yourself with needles could reduce bloodflow to, but unless your blowing out a lot of veins and getting symptoms during the day too, I would guess its how your sleeping.
 
for me i feel it happen through out the day, more often than before i used iv drugs. its happening in my right arm right now. i had just shot some subutex in my left arm and now my right is numb-ish
 
I notice it a little during the day but its mostly at night, figured its probably circulation related. I just wanted to make sure i wasn't about to give myself a stroke or lose a limb. Anyways thanks for the replies.
 
What you describe in the OP never happened to me while sleeping.

This has though:
When you got a good amount of opiates in your system its a lot easier to sleep in positions where your cutting off blood supply to certain parts of your body, without subconciosly repositioning to get the blood flow going again. Thers been a few people here on BL that have fell asleep/passed out on there arms and awoke with paralysed hands/arms, me included. Its definitly bad news when that shit happens cause it can take months to heal and can leave a hand arm completly useless untill it does.

Of course sticking yourself with needles could reduce bloodflow to, but unless your blowing out a lot of veins and getting symptoms during the day too, I would guess its how your sleeping.

And this might be a possibility.
Another possibility is that you damaged a nerve in your last session.


Take a break and see if it goes away.
 
I use opiates daily (not for fun - I'm addictecd to them) and have been doing so for a handful of years. I do not inject them but use them via insufflation (a shit ton, I really should just swallow them all) and swallowing the pills. Every single night I experience this, and sometimes during the day my limbs get super tingly and/or numb for periods of time. It is perhaps not related to IV'ing the opiates but to using the opiates in general.

I don't think it'd necessarily happen for a one time use, or even a small handful but from regular using/habitual opiate use.
 
When you got a good amount of opiates in your system its a lot easier to sleep in positions where your cutting off blood supply to certain parts of your body, without subconciosly repositioning to get the blood flow going again. Thers been a few people here on BL that have fell asleep/passed out on there arms and awoke with paralysed hands/arms, me included. Its definitly bad news when that shit happens cause it can take months to heal and can leave a hand arm completly useless untill it does.

Of course sticking yourself with needles could reduce bloodflow to, but unless your blowing out a lot of veins and getting symptoms during the day too, I would guess its how your sleeping.

^ I was passed out motionless on my right arm/shoulder for 12 hours from an opiate overdose... completely compressed/destroyed the nerves in my brachial plexus (shoulder) leaving my arm completely paralyzed. its been a year now of weekly physical therapy and i still cant feel my pinkie. ive only been able to lift my wrist for about 5 months and been able to write for about 3.

the liver failure, kidney failure, pancreas failure and 2 day coma i got over and healed from very quickly. its this fucked up arm / pain that has been a nightmare and ruined my quality of life.

SERIOUSLY, be careful about nodding off on fucking opiates.
 
It's a bitch fucking your nerves for a high basicly. I got real high and when I crashed I layed my head on my bicept with a nice firm mat under it, slept for about 4 hours and when I woke up complete wrist palsay. Took three months to move it an inch and 4 till I could effectivly punch my buddy with what he called my "iffeminate T-rex hand lol. Glad to hear yours healed up etard, hope phrozen fared well too. I was scared it was never gonna heal when it first happend. And being a union laborer mostly doing demo on hazardous materials in hazardous enviroments I was fucked for a few months not working.
 
Happy I found this thread via search engine. This has been happening to me, I don't IV. I just woke up like 10 seconds ago with my hand completely numb. Two days ago I woke up about 3 times. Every time it happens I am pretty messed up on horse
 
^happens to me regardless been clean for about 9 months and it still happens to me, and I remember it happening when I was a kid before I did drugs obviously... I sleep pretty soundly so I figure I roll onto my hands/arms and they go numb, I've woken up and not been able to feel or move my hand for a minute and its really cold, everything comes back when I get blood into it, and this has happened both when I'm getting high and clean for a good amount of time...
 
^happens to me regardless been clean for about 9 months and it still happens to me, and I remember it happening when I was a kid before I did drugs obviously... I sleep pretty soundly so I figure I roll onto my hands/arms and they go numb, I've woken up and not been able to feel or move my hand for a minute and its really cold, everything comes back when I get blood into it, and this has happened both when I'm getting high and clean for a good amount of time...

Well yeah it does tend to happen to me quite often anyway, just find it weird that it would be so prevalent every time I have been on smack. Might just be being paranoid
 
So started iv'ing H about two weeks ago and iv'ed oxy one night, no complications when injecting however, its about 4 to 5 days after my last injection and my hands are falling asleep during the night more frequently than usual. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if it's anything to worry about?

Are you on methadone right now ? Because it has happened to me a lot at first when I was at higher doses and now less and less since I am under 50mg of one a day, I was reading medical only sites where people use methadone for pain and some of them have this problem it seems.

Something that scares me a lot due to my previous IV'ing of dilaudid pills (arguably the safest pills to inject with the simple cotton cylinders that come in our injection kits in my province of Canada...I don't understand how they can have the SecuriCups but not the SteriFilts which are made by the same company but anyways... Everyone always heard of deep vein thrombosis and blood clots in the feet but something I have read, and I can provide the sources if someone want them, that former IV drug users have a problem with Upper Extremity Deep Venous Thrombosis, some info here http://home.smh.com/sections/servic...ucation/podcasts/documents/maimd_12-11-09.pdf... it affects axillary and subclavian veins, subclavians veins are at the extremity of axillary veins which are in the armpit and then goes to the back...and along with the jugular..it's pretty scary, especially since it was once considered a benign disease...but I have read on pubmed and some other scientific sites about how such has been observed on people with artherosclerosis but also cancer and IV drug usage...when I decided I had enough of shooting dilaudid, I got on methadone and a few months later I would get this electrical shock like pains in my armpits and like I am feeling right now, feelings of fullness in the left part of my throat.. Right now I am on a daily regimen of aspirin and soon will probably be on anti cholesterol pills...at 30 years old....maybe 4-5 times I have injected pills which were not ideal like brand name dilaudid and I am paying the price, my doctors say nothing alarming is going on but I did indeed develop upper extremity deep vein thrombosis...just from IV'ing dilaudid for 2 years...i'll eventually need to be placed on warfarin if the health modifications I am developing right now do not help enough (I've lost 10 pounds from daily bike rides of an hour long in average...) but yeah, my first warning signs were waking up with my hands laying on my stomach feeling numb....then the armpit electrical shocks...so I went to the pneumologist and he said I didn't have lung cancer which was a fucking relief, but then the whole left shoulder and sometimes throat fullness became so bizarre my GP had me run some tests and they were able to detect something was wrong just from blood tests so I had to take an angiography with thallium I think so they would see how blood runs in my back,shoulders and chest...

and I got those bad news. So far the daily aspirin, smoking cessation and bike rides have helped but I have definitely damaged myself in a very hard to detect weird way. And I thought I was totally safe due to injecting only very safe brand name canadian dilaudid which have only 2 rather safe inert ingredients, lactose and magnesium stearate, and the pills are so tiny...maybe it was the few other bad things I injected that did it, I suspect the Hydromorph Contin crushed beads, while even if I was triple filtering them, considering I was shooting up material coming from crushed methylcellulose beads....heroin could be causing similar stuff but not due to the same reasons why I now live with upper extremity deep vein thrombosis. I was lucky overall, I had a blood cloot detach itself from the subclavian vein in my back and pass through my heart and lung and didn't die, but i'll always remember the terrible feeling of impending doom I got that day, I was put on blood thinning medication more serious than aspirin after this happened, I had called 911 quickly but there is something as post thrombotic syndrome..it's like the whole thing will annoy me for life, all I can do is try to mitigate the symptoms the best I can.

Consider all that a warning guys, disease can catch us in the weirdest ways, and I still am furious at myself for picking the needle, all this because OxyContin disappeared for a while...only for it and 8 companies making the old school formula as generics 3 days after I came out of methadone inpatient at the beginning of my treatment. Oh yeah, I also got off methadone and switched to suboxone while inpatient (i had to be looked over medically because I was kept sober for 78 hours as not to get precipitated withdrawals...) because methadone is really bad for the heart, all of this happened as I gained 50 lbs from methadone...that crap might save lives for many but it made me swell up so bad...and it was all water but it sure didn't help my heart either ways...
 
for me i feel it happen through out the day, more often than before i used iv drugs. its happening in my right arm right now. i had just shot some subutex in my left arm and now my right is numb-ish

You prob knocked a nerve. I know I sleep with my arms bents and my wrists folded so my fingers are practically touching my forearms. It's hurts a lot in the morning and increases any pain I may have felt from the IV the night before. Good luck ;)
 
I sometimes sleep with my arms in a strange position and my ulnar nerve gets squeezed and wake up with my ring and pinky fingers numb. Try sleeping with your arms away from your body (like jesus). It helps immensely.
 
So started iv'ing H about two weeks ago and iv'ed oxy one night, no complications when injecting however, its about 4 to 5 days after my last injection and my hands are falling asleep during the night more frequently than usual. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if it's anything to worry about?

Possibly lack of circulation from collapsed veins? May be unrelated. A couple of times I have woke up and my hand has been literally NUMB. Like it was a missing limb...I assume from lying on it in your sleep (I don't IV btw).
 
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