BumTummy
Greenlighter
Greetings, Bluelight.
Everyone has a “story” so here is mine. I tend to be wordy so if you’re one of the “TL;DR” short attention span types then you may just want to click your back button now. Or read it over a few sessions. I didn’t write it in one sitting so I wouldn’t expect you to read it all in one sitting. This is going to be long. Very long. I’ve never attempted to share my entire story before so I have a lot of pent up ideas and emotions I want to convey. This is mainly for my cathartic benefit but I figure some of you may be bored enough to read this anyway. I consider myself fairly proficient with written English so I will make this as easy to read as possible for those of you brave enough to attempt reading the whole thing. I’ll try to make it interesting but it may get a bit dry in places.
In November of 2003 my life changed. I won't say it was for the worse, and it certainly wasn't for the better. I try not to dwell on my circumstances only on getting through the day, one day at a time. I just say that things changed.
I don't remember what day it was exactly I just know that it was a week day in early November. I had gone to lunch with a co-worker. We went to a Chinese buffet. I had my fill and everything was going fine until just after we left. I remember that my co-worker had to stop someplace to purchase something. During the few minutes we drove from the buffet to the store my stomach started bothering me. All jokes regarding Chinese food aside it felt like I was extremely hungry again even though I just ate. I told my co-worker that I would just wait in the vehicle. As I sat there the discomfort turned into outright pain and slowly intensified. I thought I was going to throw up. But after sitting still for a while the pain subsided and I was able to finish out the day without incident. Little did I know that this foreshadowed many years of intense misery to come.
Later on that evening my fiancé at the time said that we needed to go to the grocery store so I went along. Towards the end of our shopping I started feeling the “hunger pain” feeling again. This time it intensified to the point where I was actually walking hunched over.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to describe in detail what my pain is like. Imagine you haven’t eaten in some time and you’re hungry enough that the hunger sensation is actually physical (Many people say “I’m hungry” when in fact they’re just bored). You’re really hungry, so hungry that your stomach is actually bothering you enough that you can’t think straight. Now multiply that by a factor of about 10. The sensation is somewhat dull and diffuse but when the ER nurse asks you “Where is your pain?” you indicate an area in your central abdomen between your naval and the bottom edge of your sternum and seems to come from deep within. The pain itself, while dull is unrelenting. Once it starts full swing it is continuous. It feels somewhat like a cramp and bloating at the same time. Since you technically aren’t “Sick” you don’t suffer from the side effects of a viral bug or food poisoning but the constant pain begins to make you nauseous and you start throwing up from the pain. You learn quickly that in the absence of any kind of medication the act of throwing up (hence forth to be known as an “event”) somewhat relieves the pain for a short while due to the fact of your stomach muscles being “worked out” (There is a reason behind this which will be apparent later) and that the more intense the event the more relief you get albeit very brief. After a few hours your stomach no longer has anything in it but whatever you put in (I eventually learned that if I kept a mild flavored Gatorade handy and drank some just before it wasn’t as hard on the throat/esophagus when it came back up and helped in keeping me hydrated) just before an “event” and you are now throwing up every 30-45 minutes.
Pain is of course highly subjective and can be hard to clearly quantify in words but that is the best way I can describe it short of writing a novel. Even though I am doing just that with this post lol.
Back to the evening shopping trip. Towards the end of our shopping my stomach had begun to bother me again and it caused me to walk with a hunch and contorted face. My fiancé was of course concerned and since I didn’t know any better and had no prior experience like this I just thought I was extremely hungry again or maybe even “sick” with something. We finished our business and went home. I managed to help bring in and put away the groceries then attempted to eat something. It didn’t go well. I eventually threw up and went to bed thinking I just needed to rest. The next morning when I woke up I didn’t immediately feel bad so I figured it was over and began to get ready for work. Within 30 minutes I started to feel the sensation again and decided that I would call in sick and rest the day. I’ll skip all the gory details but I’ll just say that seven days later yes, seven days. I was finally well enough to return to work. I had lost about 25lbs and was still a little queasy but the worst was over. I guess it’s worth noting that for this first full episode, being the typical stubborn young male I was I did not go to the hospital or visit a doctor. That would soon change however.
Several weeks went by and my ordeal was an unpleasant memory. Christmas was only a few days away and since I judged myself to be a good boy that year I had ordered myself some extra goodies that I was eagerly waiting for. I don’t remember exactly what day the next episode hit I just know that it was shortly before Christmas and I was once again in excruciating pain. I was once again missing work and irritated for it because as I work in IT, Christmas time at the office is like being on vacation because all of my “customers” are out on vacation so traditionally it’s goof off time. Not that it’s not goof off time 80% of the time in IT (You’ll understand if you are in the business) but still, I take my holiday goof off time very seriously. But I digress. Back to the latest episode. This time I decided to go to the emergency room. Once there and triaged in the doctor that finally saw me was having a hard time figuring out what exactly was wrong. They did all the normal tests that are performed for abdominal pain but they all came up empty. They only thing they knew for sure is that I actually was in pain as my blood pressure and vitals pretty much painted a neon sign. “Dis mofo B hurtin 4 certin yo”
Morphine. My first taste. It was everything I had heard about and more. I also didn’t particularly enjoy it. I don’t mean to sound “uppity” but I am a fairly sharp individual, I think fast. While on morphine I discovered that while I was still fully aware and alert to my surroundings my reactions and mental reflexes for lack of a better term were somewhat slowed down. I can see the appeal and don’t begrudge people who enjoy “being high” (or whatever colorful euphemism you want to call it) but it just isn’t for me. Also, I found out what “Morphine Itch” was first hand. Or face as it were. It did help with the pain however. Spectacularly so once they dialed in on the correct dosage. But unfortunately there was also a new discovery made from that first encounter. Fate it seems slapped me with a ‘Draw Four’ and declared ‘Blue’ when all I had was ‘Red’ and no color change cards (Reference to the card game of Uno) It turns out that I am naturally resistant to medicine. All medicine not just narcotics. As such to get any kind of relief from the pain through morphine they had to give me the maximum allowed dosage. (Which at the time I believe was 5ml every 4 hours) This without any previous exposure to morphine or any other narcotics. I ended up being admitted to the hospital proper for 3 days and during nearly the entire time they kept me on a steady stream of the maximum dose of morphine every 4 hours.
I’m not sure if you’re supposed to hallucinate or anything while on morphine but I distinctly remember an instance where I was lying in bed, with my eyes closed but could still “see” the room around me except for the area that I looked directly at. The area that I focused my gaze could only be described a dark pulsating “blob” that moved around as my eyes moved, everything around it was clear, or as clear as I remembered it.
So I celebrated Christmas 2003 in the ER. 2004 was a rough year. Several more visits to the ER and numerous clinical visits for every kind of test you could image to pinpoint the cause of all the pain. In the meantime I was prescribed several types of so-called “pain medication” with little to no success. I don’t recall all of them but I know the “usual suspects” were there. Gabapentin, Marinol, Tramadol, etc, etc along all sorts of other medications designed to treat various abdominal issues. Zelnorm, various IBS drugs and the like all with virtually no effect on the pain while at home. Finally my gastro doctor decided to have me try 7mg Vicodin pills and I was finally able to get some relief as long as I took some immediately at the first signs of symptoms.
I settled into a pattern of sorts with my pain cycle. At first I would go approximately a month of “good times” followed by a full 7 days of misery a few days of shaky recovery and then fine for about a month again until the cycle repeated. As you might imagine I missed A LOT of work in 2004. Thankfully I was never in danger of losing my job but due to missed work I effectively took a 30% pay cut for 2004.
In late 2004 I was finally diagnosed with gastroparesis. If you aren’t familiar with gastroparesis I can sum it up in a few words; basically the muscles in the stomach walls don’t function like they should causing your stomach to empty slower than normal if at all for periods of time. You would think that this shouldn’t cause any more than some mild discomfort as food just sits there waiting for the muscles to work and process it like it should but it can cause chronic, unrelenting pain as I have described above. If you do a cursory google search for “gastroparesis pain” you will find that it causes many people diagnosed with it chronic debilitating pain. Some lucky people have it relatively mild, others are nearly crippled by it. As much pain as I experience I count myself lucky that I don’t have it as bad as some.
Anyway, the Vicodin was able to mitigate some of the pain and downtime. I was able to attend work more regularly and only had to visit the ER a handful of times. 2005 came and went and resembled the previous year. In 2006 two major changes occurred. I finally got married to the fiancé I had mentioned from ’03. I also had a surgery related to my issue. I’m not going to say exactly what it is because I don’t think too many people opt for it so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to narrow me down but it was supposed to help make my stomach work like it should again. If you have gastroparesis yourself you may have an idea of what I’m referring to, if not then you aren’t missing out. I can’t really say if it helped me out as I still had episodes afterwards and they were still fairly regular. By the way by now I had settled into a fairly predictable pattern of being okay for 2 full weeks followed by one full week of “episode” and then 2 weeks of “okay” again. I’d like to think that the procedure helped keep the episodes from getting any worse but the jury’s still out. I understand that for some people the procedure was like night and day. I don’t begrudge them.
The next 3 years was pretty much more of the same. Fairly predictable cycle. Occasional visits to the ER when the Vicodin didn’t work or I ran out before my next refill and so on. One thing I did notice was that the effectiveness of the Vicodin was beginning to wane. As I mentioned earlier I seem to have a natural resistance to medications so they aren’t as effective on me as most other people. I don’t really enjoy being high for reasons I mentioned earlier so abuse was never an issue for me. My body just needed more of it to make it effective.
In 2010 I got divorced. It was for various reasons. Things just didn’t work out. My ex did a lot of things but to her credit my health issues did not factor into our parting. I had another divorce of sorts in 2010 as well. After 6 years I finally declared to my doctor that the Vicodin was no longer useful to me. I had done some research to see what other gastroparesis patients used for pain management and made a short list of various medications that worked for others one of which was dilaudid. It was also around this time that IV administered morphine also no longer did the job when I was deep in the throes of a full episode so the ER staff tried IV dilaudid on me which worked wonderfully. Armed with my list of medications I went to my doctor and told him that I needed to try something different as the Vicodin was no longer cutting it. He looked at the list and remarked that dilaudid was probably the next best thing. I mentioned to him that they used it on me in the ER with success and he essentially said “Well that settles it.” And so it was that I was prescribed a generous amount of 4mg dilaudid pills.
From the start the pills were only marginally better than the Vicodin but they worked for the most part so I was happy. I never sought out a high from my medication so I kept my usage to only when the pain started up. Unfortunately the pain was becoming to be pretty constant and intense again. For the next couple years I managed to mostly keep out of the ER by using the dilaudid and sometimes doubling up when the pain got really bad. The only downside was the fact that sometimes I’d run out before I could get any more. Those times usually landed me in the ER for a couple days. While in the ER they would administer the dilaudid via IV and it would work it’s magic. Once the pain was brought under control and I was hydrated things would usually calm down after about 48 hours and I could go home.
Fast forward to 2013. It was around this time that I started doing more research into pain medication and bioavailability and determined that in order to get the kind of potency to keep me out of the ER I needed something that was more effective. At this point you might be wondering why I don’t just try marijuana. I would in a heartbeat. I think it would greatly help me. But unfortunately I don’t live in a “medical marijuana” friendly state in fact, I think that even if the entire united states made marijuana legal my state would be one of the last, if not THE last state to legalize. Even then it would probably only go so far as to decriminalize it. Also, I work in an industry where random drug testing and “zero tolerance” is the norm. I don’t worry so much about the dilaudid because I do have a valid prescription for it and I take no other pain medications or “recreational” drugs. If I did get fired for using dilaudid it would be like Darth Vader striking down Obi Wan Kenobi. I would essentially win the discrimination lawsuit lotto lol.
Anyway, after a particularly bad episode and trip to the ER I decided I had to do something else. Back to the internet I go and started researching. I discovered that dilaudid pills were easily converted into an injectable liquid and that liquid had a very high bioavailability to it. However I had one more problem. Track marks were out of the question. I could not do it intravenously and the associated risks were just too high for my liking. Also, my goal was not to get high as taking it IV certainly would do. It was at this point that I discovered in one obscure forum that some ER nurses inject pain medications subcutaneously (I wish I had saved the link so I could show it but I’m sure if you search you’ll find it) in patients for a slower release with a milder yet prolonged effect. I also saw that some people had some success administering pain medications intramuscularly as well. It was settled. I was going to attempt to turn my dilaudid pills into an injectable solution.
After a few more weeks of research I decided to finally give it a try. As I am also a diabetic I had access to needles already. I’m going to save all the details of my methods of conversion for another post but the point is I was successful in converting the pills and using them intramuscularly/subcutaneously. The “high” effect while present was minimal and only lasted a short while but the ongoing pain mitigation from injecting the diladued was a godsend. I’ve been injecting since mid 2013 and while I have been sick several times since then I’ve always manage to control the pain and stay out of the ER. It works.
I realize that what I’m doing is risky at best. As I said I’m not going to go into detail here about my methods and procedures but I will say that I started out crudely with two shot glasses, two syringes, a cotton ball, and distilled water from the store. Now though I have a pretty sophisticated method with quite a bit of equipment to streamline the process and reduce risk as much as I can in my home. I managed to find just the right dosage that allows me to control the pain and experience no high (consequently it works out to about 1.3mg per .5ml syringe if you were curious) I can hear some of you now “WHAT A WASTE!!!” but again my goal is not, nor has it ever been to get high. Unfortunately while the dosage has gone down the frequency has gone up. I think the dilaudid is starting to lose it’s punch and I may need to go to the next higher strength soon. My stomach has been pretty bad the last few months. I’m still keeping an average of about 4.5mg of dilaudid a day which from reading around is still very low but I don’t like to take risks when it comes to dealing with this pain so I will soon hopefully be able to switch to the next higher concentration and adjust accordingly. I’ve also read about some other medications out there that supposedly reset opioid resistance and make lower dosages potent again for people who have chronic pain and rely on narcotics to function “normally” in life. I will be discussing this with my doctor as well.
Anyway, that pretty sums up my story up until now. A few people in my life know most of it but so far this is the only place that I’ve shared the development of injecting my medication. Only one other person besides my doctor even knows that I take dilaudid. I don’t dare tell anyone else about the injection part for reasons which I’m sure you can fathom.
So to answer the unasked question of why I am here, I’m here to learn more and to hopefully help others.
And so here we will part. Catharsis achievement unlocked. If you read all of that you deserve a medal lol.
Everyone has a “story” so here is mine. I tend to be wordy so if you’re one of the “TL;DR” short attention span types then you may just want to click your back button now. Or read it over a few sessions. I didn’t write it in one sitting so I wouldn’t expect you to read it all in one sitting. This is going to be long. Very long. I’ve never attempted to share my entire story before so I have a lot of pent up ideas and emotions I want to convey. This is mainly for my cathartic benefit but I figure some of you may be bored enough to read this anyway. I consider myself fairly proficient with written English so I will make this as easy to read as possible for those of you brave enough to attempt reading the whole thing. I’ll try to make it interesting but it may get a bit dry in places.
In November of 2003 my life changed. I won't say it was for the worse, and it certainly wasn't for the better. I try not to dwell on my circumstances only on getting through the day, one day at a time. I just say that things changed.
I don't remember what day it was exactly I just know that it was a week day in early November. I had gone to lunch with a co-worker. We went to a Chinese buffet. I had my fill and everything was going fine until just after we left. I remember that my co-worker had to stop someplace to purchase something. During the few minutes we drove from the buffet to the store my stomach started bothering me. All jokes regarding Chinese food aside it felt like I was extremely hungry again even though I just ate. I told my co-worker that I would just wait in the vehicle. As I sat there the discomfort turned into outright pain and slowly intensified. I thought I was going to throw up. But after sitting still for a while the pain subsided and I was able to finish out the day without incident. Little did I know that this foreshadowed many years of intense misery to come.
Later on that evening my fiancé at the time said that we needed to go to the grocery store so I went along. Towards the end of our shopping I started feeling the “hunger pain” feeling again. This time it intensified to the point where I was actually walking hunched over.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to describe in detail what my pain is like. Imagine you haven’t eaten in some time and you’re hungry enough that the hunger sensation is actually physical (Many people say “I’m hungry” when in fact they’re just bored). You’re really hungry, so hungry that your stomach is actually bothering you enough that you can’t think straight. Now multiply that by a factor of about 10. The sensation is somewhat dull and diffuse but when the ER nurse asks you “Where is your pain?” you indicate an area in your central abdomen between your naval and the bottom edge of your sternum and seems to come from deep within. The pain itself, while dull is unrelenting. Once it starts full swing it is continuous. It feels somewhat like a cramp and bloating at the same time. Since you technically aren’t “Sick” you don’t suffer from the side effects of a viral bug or food poisoning but the constant pain begins to make you nauseous and you start throwing up from the pain. You learn quickly that in the absence of any kind of medication the act of throwing up (hence forth to be known as an “event”) somewhat relieves the pain for a short while due to the fact of your stomach muscles being “worked out” (There is a reason behind this which will be apparent later) and that the more intense the event the more relief you get albeit very brief. After a few hours your stomach no longer has anything in it but whatever you put in (I eventually learned that if I kept a mild flavored Gatorade handy and drank some just before it wasn’t as hard on the throat/esophagus when it came back up and helped in keeping me hydrated) just before an “event” and you are now throwing up every 30-45 minutes.
Pain is of course highly subjective and can be hard to clearly quantify in words but that is the best way I can describe it short of writing a novel. Even though I am doing just that with this post lol.
Back to the evening shopping trip. Towards the end of our shopping my stomach had begun to bother me again and it caused me to walk with a hunch and contorted face. My fiancé was of course concerned and since I didn’t know any better and had no prior experience like this I just thought I was extremely hungry again or maybe even “sick” with something. We finished our business and went home. I managed to help bring in and put away the groceries then attempted to eat something. It didn’t go well. I eventually threw up and went to bed thinking I just needed to rest. The next morning when I woke up I didn’t immediately feel bad so I figured it was over and began to get ready for work. Within 30 minutes I started to feel the sensation again and decided that I would call in sick and rest the day. I’ll skip all the gory details but I’ll just say that seven days later yes, seven days. I was finally well enough to return to work. I had lost about 25lbs and was still a little queasy but the worst was over. I guess it’s worth noting that for this first full episode, being the typical stubborn young male I was I did not go to the hospital or visit a doctor. That would soon change however.
Several weeks went by and my ordeal was an unpleasant memory. Christmas was only a few days away and since I judged myself to be a good boy that year I had ordered myself some extra goodies that I was eagerly waiting for. I don’t remember exactly what day the next episode hit I just know that it was shortly before Christmas and I was once again in excruciating pain. I was once again missing work and irritated for it because as I work in IT, Christmas time at the office is like being on vacation because all of my “customers” are out on vacation so traditionally it’s goof off time. Not that it’s not goof off time 80% of the time in IT (You’ll understand if you are in the business) but still, I take my holiday goof off time very seriously. But I digress. Back to the latest episode. This time I decided to go to the emergency room. Once there and triaged in the doctor that finally saw me was having a hard time figuring out what exactly was wrong. They did all the normal tests that are performed for abdominal pain but they all came up empty. They only thing they knew for sure is that I actually was in pain as my blood pressure and vitals pretty much painted a neon sign. “Dis mofo B hurtin 4 certin yo”
Morphine. My first taste. It was everything I had heard about and more. I also didn’t particularly enjoy it. I don’t mean to sound “uppity” but I am a fairly sharp individual, I think fast. While on morphine I discovered that while I was still fully aware and alert to my surroundings my reactions and mental reflexes for lack of a better term were somewhat slowed down. I can see the appeal and don’t begrudge people who enjoy “being high” (or whatever colorful euphemism you want to call it) but it just isn’t for me. Also, I found out what “Morphine Itch” was first hand. Or face as it were. It did help with the pain however. Spectacularly so once they dialed in on the correct dosage. But unfortunately there was also a new discovery made from that first encounter. Fate it seems slapped me with a ‘Draw Four’ and declared ‘Blue’ when all I had was ‘Red’ and no color change cards (Reference to the card game of Uno) It turns out that I am naturally resistant to medicine. All medicine not just narcotics. As such to get any kind of relief from the pain through morphine they had to give me the maximum allowed dosage. (Which at the time I believe was 5ml every 4 hours) This without any previous exposure to morphine or any other narcotics. I ended up being admitted to the hospital proper for 3 days and during nearly the entire time they kept me on a steady stream of the maximum dose of morphine every 4 hours.
I’m not sure if you’re supposed to hallucinate or anything while on morphine but I distinctly remember an instance where I was lying in bed, with my eyes closed but could still “see” the room around me except for the area that I looked directly at. The area that I focused my gaze could only be described a dark pulsating “blob” that moved around as my eyes moved, everything around it was clear, or as clear as I remembered it.
So I celebrated Christmas 2003 in the ER. 2004 was a rough year. Several more visits to the ER and numerous clinical visits for every kind of test you could image to pinpoint the cause of all the pain. In the meantime I was prescribed several types of so-called “pain medication” with little to no success. I don’t recall all of them but I know the “usual suspects” were there. Gabapentin, Marinol, Tramadol, etc, etc along all sorts of other medications designed to treat various abdominal issues. Zelnorm, various IBS drugs and the like all with virtually no effect on the pain while at home. Finally my gastro doctor decided to have me try 7mg Vicodin pills and I was finally able to get some relief as long as I took some immediately at the first signs of symptoms.
I settled into a pattern of sorts with my pain cycle. At first I would go approximately a month of “good times” followed by a full 7 days of misery a few days of shaky recovery and then fine for about a month again until the cycle repeated. As you might imagine I missed A LOT of work in 2004. Thankfully I was never in danger of losing my job but due to missed work I effectively took a 30% pay cut for 2004.
In late 2004 I was finally diagnosed with gastroparesis. If you aren’t familiar with gastroparesis I can sum it up in a few words; basically the muscles in the stomach walls don’t function like they should causing your stomach to empty slower than normal if at all for periods of time. You would think that this shouldn’t cause any more than some mild discomfort as food just sits there waiting for the muscles to work and process it like it should but it can cause chronic, unrelenting pain as I have described above. If you do a cursory google search for “gastroparesis pain” you will find that it causes many people diagnosed with it chronic debilitating pain. Some lucky people have it relatively mild, others are nearly crippled by it. As much pain as I experience I count myself lucky that I don’t have it as bad as some.
Anyway, the Vicodin was able to mitigate some of the pain and downtime. I was able to attend work more regularly and only had to visit the ER a handful of times. 2005 came and went and resembled the previous year. In 2006 two major changes occurred. I finally got married to the fiancé I had mentioned from ’03. I also had a surgery related to my issue. I’m not going to say exactly what it is because I don’t think too many people opt for it so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to narrow me down but it was supposed to help make my stomach work like it should again. If you have gastroparesis yourself you may have an idea of what I’m referring to, if not then you aren’t missing out. I can’t really say if it helped me out as I still had episodes afterwards and they were still fairly regular. By the way by now I had settled into a fairly predictable pattern of being okay for 2 full weeks followed by one full week of “episode” and then 2 weeks of “okay” again. I’d like to think that the procedure helped keep the episodes from getting any worse but the jury’s still out. I understand that for some people the procedure was like night and day. I don’t begrudge them.
The next 3 years was pretty much more of the same. Fairly predictable cycle. Occasional visits to the ER when the Vicodin didn’t work or I ran out before my next refill and so on. One thing I did notice was that the effectiveness of the Vicodin was beginning to wane. As I mentioned earlier I seem to have a natural resistance to medications so they aren’t as effective on me as most other people. I don’t really enjoy being high for reasons I mentioned earlier so abuse was never an issue for me. My body just needed more of it to make it effective.
In 2010 I got divorced. It was for various reasons. Things just didn’t work out. My ex did a lot of things but to her credit my health issues did not factor into our parting. I had another divorce of sorts in 2010 as well. After 6 years I finally declared to my doctor that the Vicodin was no longer useful to me. I had done some research to see what other gastroparesis patients used for pain management and made a short list of various medications that worked for others one of which was dilaudid. It was also around this time that IV administered morphine also no longer did the job when I was deep in the throes of a full episode so the ER staff tried IV dilaudid on me which worked wonderfully. Armed with my list of medications I went to my doctor and told him that I needed to try something different as the Vicodin was no longer cutting it. He looked at the list and remarked that dilaudid was probably the next best thing. I mentioned to him that they used it on me in the ER with success and he essentially said “Well that settles it.” And so it was that I was prescribed a generous amount of 4mg dilaudid pills.
From the start the pills were only marginally better than the Vicodin but they worked for the most part so I was happy. I never sought out a high from my medication so I kept my usage to only when the pain started up. Unfortunately the pain was becoming to be pretty constant and intense again. For the next couple years I managed to mostly keep out of the ER by using the dilaudid and sometimes doubling up when the pain got really bad. The only downside was the fact that sometimes I’d run out before I could get any more. Those times usually landed me in the ER for a couple days. While in the ER they would administer the dilaudid via IV and it would work it’s magic. Once the pain was brought under control and I was hydrated things would usually calm down after about 48 hours and I could go home.
Fast forward to 2013. It was around this time that I started doing more research into pain medication and bioavailability and determined that in order to get the kind of potency to keep me out of the ER I needed something that was more effective. At this point you might be wondering why I don’t just try marijuana. I would in a heartbeat. I think it would greatly help me. But unfortunately I don’t live in a “medical marijuana” friendly state in fact, I think that even if the entire united states made marijuana legal my state would be one of the last, if not THE last state to legalize. Even then it would probably only go so far as to decriminalize it. Also, I work in an industry where random drug testing and “zero tolerance” is the norm. I don’t worry so much about the dilaudid because I do have a valid prescription for it and I take no other pain medications or “recreational” drugs. If I did get fired for using dilaudid it would be like Darth Vader striking down Obi Wan Kenobi. I would essentially win the discrimination lawsuit lotto lol.
Anyway, after a particularly bad episode and trip to the ER I decided I had to do something else. Back to the internet I go and started researching. I discovered that dilaudid pills were easily converted into an injectable liquid and that liquid had a very high bioavailability to it. However I had one more problem. Track marks were out of the question. I could not do it intravenously and the associated risks were just too high for my liking. Also, my goal was not to get high as taking it IV certainly would do. It was at this point that I discovered in one obscure forum that some ER nurses inject pain medications subcutaneously (I wish I had saved the link so I could show it but I’m sure if you search you’ll find it) in patients for a slower release with a milder yet prolonged effect. I also saw that some people had some success administering pain medications intramuscularly as well. It was settled. I was going to attempt to turn my dilaudid pills into an injectable solution.
After a few more weeks of research I decided to finally give it a try. As I am also a diabetic I had access to needles already. I’m going to save all the details of my methods of conversion for another post but the point is I was successful in converting the pills and using them intramuscularly/subcutaneously. The “high” effect while present was minimal and only lasted a short while but the ongoing pain mitigation from injecting the diladued was a godsend. I’ve been injecting since mid 2013 and while I have been sick several times since then I’ve always manage to control the pain and stay out of the ER. It works.
I realize that what I’m doing is risky at best. As I said I’m not going to go into detail here about my methods and procedures but I will say that I started out crudely with two shot glasses, two syringes, a cotton ball, and distilled water from the store. Now though I have a pretty sophisticated method with quite a bit of equipment to streamline the process and reduce risk as much as I can in my home. I managed to find just the right dosage that allows me to control the pain and experience no high (consequently it works out to about 1.3mg per .5ml syringe if you were curious) I can hear some of you now “WHAT A WASTE!!!” but again my goal is not, nor has it ever been to get high. Unfortunately while the dosage has gone down the frequency has gone up. I think the dilaudid is starting to lose it’s punch and I may need to go to the next higher strength soon. My stomach has been pretty bad the last few months. I’m still keeping an average of about 4.5mg of dilaudid a day which from reading around is still very low but I don’t like to take risks when it comes to dealing with this pain so I will soon hopefully be able to switch to the next higher concentration and adjust accordingly. I’ve also read about some other medications out there that supposedly reset opioid resistance and make lower dosages potent again for people who have chronic pain and rely on narcotics to function “normally” in life. I will be discussing this with my doctor as well.
Anyway, that pretty sums up my story up until now. A few people in my life know most of it but so far this is the only place that I’ve shared the development of injecting my medication. Only one other person besides my doctor even knows that I take dilaudid. I don’t dare tell anyone else about the injection part for reasons which I’m sure you can fathom.
So to answer the unasked question of why I am here, I’m here to learn more and to hopefully help others.
And so here we will part. Catharsis achievement unlocked. If you read all of that you deserve a medal lol.
