Opioids How long am I going to be like this? Long term effects of withdrawal.

[suessmayr]

Hi guys,

I'm looking for some advice from people who have kicked an opiate and stayed off. I started my cleaning up at methadone 90mg and am now on bupe 2mg. I went down by 10mg methadone weekly, then switched to 4mg bupe and went to 2mg after one week. I feel fucking terrible.

But it is a discrete sort of feeling, obviously not acute withdrawal. I am always extremely cold or extremely hot; my limbs are always very very heavy, so that I avoid having showers, getting food or going to the toilet because movement is just so difficult and unpleasant; I am unbearably anxious and can rarely even just speak to people in public as I find it too overwhelming and have too many panic attacks; I am nearly always sick in the stomach and have nausea; and, significantly, I am totally despondent and disinterested in EVERYTHING, nothing excites or motivates me, so I cannot do anything, but at the same time I want to be able to do things. There are weird tensions like this: wanting to be active but being unable to be; feeling very tired and lethargic but also very anxious and restless...

My question is, when I'm done (I'll go from 2mg to nothing after my exams) how long is this going to persist for? I'm concerned that if it doesn't abate the logical choice will be just to resume opiate use, because I can't live like this.

S

 

[Droppersneck]

IMO. When under using any form of opiate, including partial antagonists I am dead and frozen inside. And the period of time it takes for me to come back keeps getting longer and longer.

 

[suessmayr]

Sorry I didn't follow that; do you mean that for the amount of time that you are on an opiate you feel dead and frozen? And that the recovery time is determined by the length of addiction? I was on bupe 28mg for maybe 2.5 years, then methadone 90mg for maybe 2 months, then started reducing.

S

 

[headyblue]

First of all, that was a pretty quick methadone taper, so you might still be feeling the withdrawals from that, which without bupe can last 4+ weeks. how did you feel on 4 mg of bupe? you might have split that dose in half to quick, in which case its probably just a matter of a few days until your body adjusts to the 2 mg. If you decide to drop off the bupe from 2mg a day you're definetly gonna feel shitty for a little while. Probably at least a couple of weeks. if you think you can handle that you can probably be back to normal within a month. Your other choice is to do a slower taper with the bupe, lowering it a half millligram or so every couple of days, then swithching to every other day on a very low dose.(like 1/4mg). That will minimize withdrawal. I've been on and off bupe for a couple of years and I can tell you for me the gray, lazy, blah feeling usually goes away after being on a stable dose for a few days, and I can live a normal passionate life on subs and so can a lot of people i know, but if you're not on a high enough dose, you're probably just prolonging your withdrawals. I'd say either find a bupe does that you feel comfortable on and taper down or expect to feel pretty shitty for 2 to 4 weeks and leave it in the past all together. hope this helps and good luck.

 

[drewbocop]

If you jump off of Bupe at 2mg and you think you feel shitty now, you're in for a long, long surprise.

 

[Secobarbital]

Hi guys,

I'm looking for some advice from people who have kicked an opiate and stayed off. I started my cleaning up at methadone 90mg and am now on bupe 2mg. I went down by 10mg methadone weekly, then switched to 4mg bupe and went to 2mg after one week. I feel fucking terrible.

But it is a discrete sort of feeling, obviously not acute withdrawal. I am always extremely cold or extremely hot; my limbs are always very very heavy, so that I avoid having showers, getting food or going to the toilet because movement is just so difficult and unpleasant; I am unbearably anxious and can rarely even just speak to people in public as I find it too overwhelming and have too many panic attacks; I am nearly always sick in the stomach and have nausea; and, significantly, I am totally despondent and disinterested in EVERYTHING, nothing excites or motivates me, so I cannot do anything, but at the same time I want to be able to do things. There are weird tensions like this: wanting to be active but being unable to be; feeling very tired and lethargic but also very anxious and restless...

My question is, when I'm done (I'll go from 2mg to nothing after my exams) how long is this going to persist for? I'm concerned that if it doesn't abate the logical choice will be just to resume opiate use, because I can't live like this.

S

It DOES go away. You came off kind fast from 90mg of methadone. I think you are in a bit of a hurry. You should have worked your way down on the methadone, and taken a small amount, 10mg or so, for a couple of months. Then switched to subs, and gotten down to a teeny tiny amount and taken that for a long time, again a month or so. I would get down to below .5mg per day. Start skipping days when you can, break the chemical dependence as much as possible.

As for how long this will last... I tapered down to about 250mg of suboxone per day. I acutally snorted lines that maybe weighed less than 100mg for over a week. It took me 3 months to stop freezing all the time. It also took about 3 months before I was motivated enough to shower more than once per week. I didn't want to do anything. It DOES all pass though. Never as fast as you want, but depending on your body makeup, it will all be gone within several months. Those minor little things like sleeplessness, cold, hot, sweating, and nervousness last the longest. I recommend taking calcium and magnesium to help with the anxiety, I recently tried that and it works wonders. We all understand what you are talking about, we have all been there. It destroys relationships because its so hard to communicate. My girlfriend is a saint for understanding that I just don't want to be touched a good portion of the time. It sucks all the life out of life. I have recently started trying very hard to find ways to avoid the nervousness etc so I can put a permanent end to my opiate problems. Feel free to PM me if you need to talk (I understand you may not want to talk, I don't want to talk much of the time, but I am more than willing to help in any way I can.

 

[StaffWriter]

This is post acute withdrawal syndrome and it is known to last as long as six months to a year. This was the hardest part for me to stay clean. My acute withdrawal is really not too severe, but this is the part that always kicked my ass. I stayed on Suboxone for about three years just so I'd have some clearheaded motivation and live my life "normally" but eventually, even after bupe, there will be this lack of motivation. As for your other physical symptoms, they are probably from your quick methadone taper. It takes a lot of time, man. Good luck.

 

[mr. mudd]

I jumped off from 140-200 mg of methadone a day after a very large morphine/oxy/methadone habit to sub for three weeks (8, 6, 4, 2, 1, 0). I feel your pain, believe me. It was a week of crazy bad withdrawal (only time I could sit still was in the tub, so I took six baths a day), three weeks of not sleeping more than an hour and BAD RLS and anxiety/mania, then four weeks of sleeping about two hours with RLS and mania. I couldn't take anything that helped me sleep just because nothing worked, short of maybe 8 temazepam (which make me twitch anyway) and I didn't want to prolong things by switching addictions.

So: a little over two months later I feel better. My work productivity sucks, as my attention span is all over the place. I can't sleep till about 3 no matter how early I rise. I exercise a lot and that helps. the RLS is still there. I still orgasm with very little stimulation. but I feel myself again and i know it's getting better. I think at six months to a year I'll be baseline, whatever that is now.

hang in there.

 

[DivineMomentsofTruth]

I just recently kicked oxys in the past two months. I was doing them pretty heavily for a year, almost always IVed and anywhere from 3-10 30's per day with very few days of less or nothing. I almost never got sick (until I quit, duh) because I almost never didn't have them.

When I kicked, however, I had two 10 mg methadone and an 8 mg suboxone to help me through. That's it. Needless to say, it wasn't pleasant, but the upside was since I was almost going cold turkey, withdrawals were shorter. Even so, I found that after the main withdrawals faded, I still had that general "shitty feeling"; dysphoria. Nothing was interesting or exciting, I was depressed almost always, and in general it just felt like life sucked, and was going to continue sucking for, at the very least, a long time. I'd get these flash cravings that made me want to do shot so bad, I almost couldn't take it.

This lasted for a month strong, and gradually from that point, got a little better. Most days I'd wake up feeling like shit, but every once in a while I'd have a good day. Only in the past week or two has it really felt like things are getting better, and my cravings have died down. I've also started taking a few nootropics (vinpocetine, huperzine a and DMAE), so that probably has something to do with it. I imagine that if I stay clean, it will still be a little while before I feel fully recovered.

Your situation is different than mine and unfortunately your time-frame is probably going to be longer. This is because you tapered off which, while no doubt being a much less terrible method and oftentimes essential, means that you've been keeping opiates in your system all this time. Thus, even though you're taking small steps in the right direction, your body isn't really recovering a whole lot. Once you aren't taking anything at all, then things will start to get moving, and you'll probably experience all that I've described above.

It's true that the real difficulty isn't so much getting clean (although it is indeed very unpleasant) as it is staying clean for two weeks, one month, six months, etc. This is because it's very easy to get discouraged in this time period. You think, "I've been clean for a month already, and I still feel like shit, and life's not getting any better than it was when I was getting high...in fact, it's getting even worse!" You wonder, "what's the point in staying clean if life isn't any better?", and it can be really hard to overcome those thoughts and not cave. Without a doubt, the only reason I made it this long is because I moved 4000 miles away from where I used to live, and I have nowhere to get any opiates. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have made it more than a week, at the most.

If you're serious about quitting, I recommend you try to cut off contact with your connections. Tell them, "I quit, please don't sell me anything anymore, even if I come back begging in a week". Hopefully they'll respect that, though some won't. If it's a viable option, move somewhere where you can't find anything even if you tried. Other than that, try to keep yourself well fed and nourished, try to make it a habit to drink plenty of liquids, get some vitamins and maybe some nootropics like I mentioned above, try to focus on important things that you've probably been neglecting, like your health, and just try to be strong. Try to find a hobby or something you like doing that you can devote your attention to. This is key. If you lie around all day thinking about how much you wanna get high, I guarantee you won't last long. Just try to find other ways to enjoy yourself and have fun. Easier said than done, I know...if you're having trouble with this part, you might want to check out some NA/AA meetings. I was in rehab once and it was mandatory to go to about 5 or 6 meetings a week. After 2.5 months of going to a meeting basically every single fucking day, I can't stand them, and I didn't really find them very helpful in the first place, but some people swear by them. And I can see how it would help to be able to talk to others who are going through the same thing as you.

One last thing: the last thing you want is to substitute one addiction for another, but I find that doing other drugs CAN be beneficial. Again, it also can be very detrimental. Don't kick opiates just to get hooked on benzos. Don't give up being a junkie just to become a tweaker. But I smoked a pretty good bit of weed throughout all of this, and I found it to be very helpful. When I wasn't overdoing it, I found it would help to break up the monotony of the day and help with the dysphoria. If I'd smoke it all day then I'd just get lazy and eventually I felt like it wasn't really helping. I also would drink from time to time, which was nice, but again, I'd regret it if I overdid it. Overall, if you're going to use any other drugs, especially if they have the potential for addiction (which I don't recommend unless you're positive you can handle it), my advice is this: stay sober as much as you can. Save getting high for those "holy fuck!" times, where you panic and start freaking out, depression hits you hard, and suicide actually starts looking like a nice alternative. Most of the time, a nice joint/bowl (if you smoke) or a drink or whatever will help you to snap out of it.

And that's about all the advice I have. Good luck, and remember that people kick drugs every day, and some of them do stay clean, at least for a long time.

 

[Pegasus]

First of all, that was a pretty quick methadone taper, so you might still be feeling the withdrawals from that

I agree, this could easily be why you feel so bad right now.

 

[suessmayr]

Wow - everyone, thank you so much for all the immensely helpful advice. It's good to know that one is not totally alone in things like this.

I have been told by others as well that my taper was unnaturally fast. But I just saw all of a sudden with such frank clarity what I had turned into: junky scum. I used to be so active and happy but threw it all away. It started for me when I had a whole series of operations one after the other. This, combined with the fact that I looked absolutely innocent and respectable, allowed me to amass terrible amounts of mainly oxycodone but occasionally morphine. The memories of these times haunt me constantly; what total bliss! What downfall.

Dysphoria would probably be - as someone suggested - the best word to describe my present state. I wake up every morning bathed in some BIZARRE-smelling sweat and then take at least 3 hours fully to wake up. Everything is repugnant and all movement is torturous. On the upside, since I started to get clean I have been doing SO much better at uni - I'm a law/philosophy student - and it is helpful to have something academic to focus on completely.

I have heard from a few people that the 2mg - 0 reduction is killer with bupe; but these people have always seemed to be American. I'm not sure whether here, in Australia, they even do this. Certainly no doctor has ever indicated to me that we do.

It is incredible how totally I related to many of the things people said: instant ejaculation; the preclusion of suicide by family and so forth. It is not an option for me, however, to go anywhere near benzos and I had a long term benzo addiction previously and as a result really despise them.

Thanks again,

S

 

[CitioKid]

You still have a good amount of withdrawals ahead of you, but lots of that can be mitigated by herbal/OTC substances like kava (rather euphoric in the right amounts I've recently discovered), Gotu Kola and phenibut. Be careful with the phenibut, however, as many people online have described experiencing severe WD's upon cessation after daily use of 14 days or more.

Prescription drugs like gabapentin and lyrica can also be a big help, but they come with some risk of addiction.

But the best thing you can do is excercise! I'm currently several weeks clean, and it took me awhile to gain the motivation to go running - but when I did I was amazed at how well it lifted my mood and increased my energy levels.

NA meetings can also help expedite the PAWS process. Its hard to explain why, but I have met several long term opiate addicts at NA meetings who seem happy as clams with only 45 days clean. Maybe its the sense of belonging, or maybe its just the sense of accomplishment of actually going to the meetings on a regular basis. Either way, they definitely help.

I wish you and your recovery great success! You can do it- these bad feelings are only temporary and will eventually give way to an incredible sense of accomplishment and pride. And your natural happy chemicals will start to return, and with time you'll be feeling better than you ever did on the opiates.

 

[caseface99]

I kicked suboxone in Late December/early January and i still have a mild form of RLS where my arms/upper body feel hot at night when im trying to sleep. It sucks, 5 months later and all..

Everybody's different though, it really depends on your body. I know people who have kicked suboxone no problem. Plus you have methadone involved, and the length of time you took each drug effects withdrawal as well. It really just depends, don't expect something as bad as what im experiencing but be open to the possibility.

 

[isStellablue]

Reading These Make me Think

I am now doing only about 40 mg of hydroco a day for pain and it is not/barely enough. At times it would seem easier to just get a bunch of H and screw the doctors. I've always been afraid of getting strung out because being an alcoholic
I could get well for a few bucks. Opiates just cost so much.

Thinking that if I could get a good deal on some decent H could just use it in small bits to just kill the pain, but I would really wonder if I could hold it to that.
Reading some of these posts makes me wonder. Acute alcohol withdrawal is actually worse than acute opiate withdrawal. The long term was not that bad except
there is a depression that hangs on for a long time. The long term opiate w/d seems much worse. I thought it was mainly methadone that was so bad to w/d and took so long.

 

[Secobarbital]

I am now doing only about 40 mg of hydroco a day for pain and it is not/barely enough. At times it would seem easier to just get a bunch of H and screw the doctors. I've always been afraid of getting strung out because being an alcoholic
I could get well for a few bucks. Opiates just cost so much.

Thinking that if I could get a good deal on some decent H could just use it in small bits to just kill the pain, but I would really wonder if I could hold it to that.
Reading some of these posts makes me wonder. Acute alcohol withdrawal is actually worse than acute opiate withdrawal. The long term was not that bad except
there is a depression that hangs on for a long time. The long term opiate w/d seems much worse. I thought it was mainly methadone that was so bad to w/d and took so long.

Alcohol w/d is more dangerous. Long term, opiate withdrawal is more painful. It's the energizer bunny of w/ds, it goes on and on and on. It works your mind for the rest of you life. Everything is a trigger, I get ready to go to work... wishing I had a pill to snort. I wake up, wish I had a pill to snort. Getting ready to do anything any day... wish I had a pill to snort.

 

[aleyna]

you'd be surprised about that jump from 2 to 0. it is harsh. it's more of a mental/anxiety/insomnia thing, or at least it was for me. i ended up relapsing i was going so crazy and immediately went back to my doc for more bupe. i ended up just shaving off slivers of the pill... and really trying to take as little as possible. it's hard to really tell what you are taking, but you can half and then quarter the pills. and when you are done with the quarter dosage, start shaving off bits of the med and holding it under your tongue. remember, for pain patients they give them bupe in MICROGRAM dosages... and we are taking MILLIGRAMS... 2mgs of bupe is a lot when you think about it. that's why i recommend doing 1mg, then .5mg, then start shaving a bit off a pill. just enough to stave off the nastiness... if there's any other questions you have, feel free to pm me. you also said you are looking to stay clean for good. there has been some really awesome advice given in this thread. i would also find a good support group and also see a psychiatrist just to make sure nothing else is out of whack and maybe make sure you weren't self medicating to cover something else up. also educate yourself on PAWS - post acute withdrawal syndrome. even after we get over the initial opiate sickness there's still symptoms that last for six months to a year. that's why i recommended seeing a doctor. maybe they can help you with the depression and anxiety and sleep problems that can subsisted in the PAWS period. bravo on the work you've done so far though! and again just pm me if you have any other questions....

 

[_Dead_head_]

Hi guys,

I'm looking for some advice from people who have kicked an opiate and stayed off. I started my cleaning up at methadone 90mg and am now on bupe 2mg. I went down by 10mg methadone weekly, then switched to 4mg bupe and went to 2mg after one week. I feel fucking terrible.

But it is a discrete sort of feeling, obviously not acute withdrawal. I am always extremely cold or extremely hot; my limbs are always very very heavy, so that I avoid having showers, getting food or going to the toilet because movement is just so difficult and unpleasant; I am unbearably anxious and can rarely even just speak to people in public as I find it too overwhelming and have too many panic attacks; I am nearly always sick in the stomach and have nausea; and, significantly, I am totally despondent and disinterested in EVERYTHING, nothing excites or motivates me, so I cannot do anything, but at the same time I want to be able to do things. There are weird tensions like this: wanting to be active but being unable to be; feeling very tired and lethargic but also very anxious and restless...

My question is, when I'm done (I'll go from 2mg to nothing after my exams) how long is this going to persist for? I'm concerned that if it doesn't abate the logical choice will be just to resume opiate use, because I can't live like this.

S

Man I kicked the stuff too it's hard for sure the main thing that helped me is basically using any type of crutch, basically give up one addiction for another I'm a smoker and when I was on opiate I smoked way heavier so when I gave the stuff up I smoked even heavier than before if you can last 30 days clean it's a great start and trust me it's worth it. Btw for some motivation that shit makes your dick stay at half mast and you can't cum it's terrible and takes about a month or more for me before my dick worked again

 

[Mr.Scagnattie]

Heyyyy alright! Another +1 for resurrecting long dead 3 year old threads.

 

[bukweat]

Is dude still tapering?

 

[adder]

Yeah, I was just about to write my piece of advice which seems completely unnecessary. Why are you people responding to a thread that is dead for over 2 years? There's a big Suboxone/Buprenorphine thread, and there are threads for methadone too, a lot of places where I'm sure everyone will welcome anyone having problems with opioid dependence. Someone will hug you for sure!