My life collapsed helplessly down the rabbit hole; but now it's time to climb out.

[d3athadone]

I hear you loud and clear. The thing is you dont have to be like that. You can travel the world practicing. You can open your own holistic style healthcare centre. You can be like gabor mate. You could be the best methadone dr and change peoples.lives. you could do so many things that are not the mainstream. Those r the best doctors but they had to tick the boxes and play the game before they could do their own thing. Just sayin whatever u do im sure it will be good.

 

[What was it?]

Update: Today is Wednesday, 23rd of December and I am two weeks clean!


​

This is fantastic. Are you still going strong? For me it's day 13 off opiates and it's been a breeze this time.

 

[CyanThorn]

Hey there! I'm alright - it's a struggle and hard, but I keep telling myself that Rome wasn't destroyed in a day and took even longer to rebuild. The boredom and monotony are definitely starting to get to me a little, but keep in there! We can do it!

 

[What was it?]

Hey there! I'm alright - it's a struggle and hard, but I keep telling myself that Rome wasn't destroyed in a day and took even longer to rebuild. The boredom and monotony are definitely starting to get to me a little, but keep in there! We can do it!

I read a lot, watch netflix, post here, go the the gym every second day, small walks and take a bit of dexamphetamine for energy. However the dex has prolonged the GI issues so I'will take a few days off it after today. All in all, this recovery from opiates is by far the best I've had in 5 years.

Good to hear you are still going strong man!!

 

[CyanThorn]

Update:

Hello everyone. So after doing so well, I managed to stay clean for a few weeks: I relapsed. A few days before christmas I caved and had a 0.2, but told myself that I'd not do more. Of course, a couple of days later, I found myself back in the fold. I tried my hardest to keep my habit down to a 0.2 a day, but I failed miserably. I ended up using way more than before. It fell to chaos - I was using a ridiculous amount, and ended up turning to prostitution to fund my heroin use and everything. My mental health declined rapidly, and my life once again became a whirl of being either too off my face to care, withdrawing horribly, or in the darkest state of depression I've ever felt in my life; suicidal levels of depression.

It was chaos. I had "clients" rape and beat me, while the police did nothing. I needed help. Figuratively on my knees, I realised I couldn't do this alone, and couldn't continue living that way. I relinquished my pride, and went to my local NHS addiction services.

Now I had been to the recovery hub's drop in once before a while back. When I had a baby habit of a 0.2 every day or other day, as i knew at that point I was at the point of no return and I could either get clean, or graduate into a full-blown addiction, and basically after triage what I was told was in effect "your habit isn't that bad yet and you're barely an addict, we'll help you when you reach rock bottom. We don't think you're ready for help." This was after I'd admitted I was an addict, and told them I wanted to change my life before it got to that stage. I was sent away to continue down the road to self-destruction. I did so - and in a way, I half didn't care.

Now I went again, using around a gram a day, working as a male escort for creepy old men, living for drugs. My life empty, unfulfilling, consisting of drugs and that's about it. I thought perhaps now they'd consider me at a point "ready for help". I was warned by my fellow addicts that the recovery hub and their methods and such were an absolute nightmare to deal with; I personally didn't quite believe them and accounted it to my peers not taking the NHS services seriously and messing them around. I mean - if you need help and ask for help, this is what they're there for, right? Even though I'd been in a position practically refused help before, I thought they were exaggerating. I went to the triage and I kid you not, the level of nonsense I have experienced involves the following for my FIRST ASSESSMENT appointment:

1. I receive a voicemail stating an appointment on Tuesday at 4pm with a staff member and being asked if I could call back to confirm.
2. I phone back to confirm and they tell me no such appointment or member of staff exists, and that I must be confused. I relisten to the voicemail jut in case, but there is no confusion whatsoever. Upon calling the clinic back, they basically fob me off as if I am somehow out of my mind or absolutely stupid claiming that I MUST be mishearing it because they have no record of said phonecall, appointment, or staff member.
3. I go to my GP with my mother to discuss my opiate misuse problem. Personally, I didn't want to do this as I knew the GP is unable/unwilling to prescribe for addiction issues, and would simply refer me to the clinic where I had been for triage. However, I made the appointment and went (the Thursday before this "nonexistent" appointment on the Tuesday) with her. While there, I mentioned the issue about this mysterious appointment to my GP, who pulls up that he received a letter stating that I DO have an appointment on said Tuesday that the voicemail said, but at 9:30am, instead of 4pm! He prints off a copy of this letter for my reference, and also implies that I am somehow stupid for not knowing I had this appointment or the time, despite the efforts I'd gone to try to confirm it. He promises me he'll phone up the clinic the next day and clarify with them, and if there were any issues, he'd call me to let me know. If he did not call me back, I was to assume that the appointment was on on Tuesday at 9:30 and he'd clarified.
4. I receive no phone call from the GP, so on the Tuesday I go to the clinic at 9:30am for this mysterious appointment, armed with the letter the GP had printed out for me as well as a letter I received in the post to my home address of the same information ON THE DAY OF THE APPOINTMENT. The reception staff once again claim ignorance of this appointment and treat me like I'm stupid. Infuriated, I present them with the appointment letter and continue to wait while they call around the centre.
5. At 10am (half an hour after appointment was supposed to be) a worker comes out to speak to me to tell me that there has been confusion on their end, and that I do have an appointment on that day, but at 4pm as the voicemail had said. I am mildly chastised for turning up at 9:30am, despite the fact that the letter I received stated 9:30am and my GP had confirmed this.

Sorry that that's a lot, but I really want to highlight the absolute nonsense I had to go through just to get my first appointment, and this is not to mention the appointment itself. In which I was patronised, mildly insulted, outrightlied to - the worker herself tried to tell me things about how ORT and methadone worked which were completely fallacious. When I called her out on these things, she claimed she is an expert and knew more than me, despite the fact that at University I studied pharmacology with an interest in addiction treatment and wrote PAPERS on the specific aspect of methadone we were talking about. All in all the whole experience was infuriating, but I played along, and was told the waiting list to see the prescribing team was TWO MONTHS. Personally, I was feeling suicidal with the state of my life, and the danger I was getting myself in, and didn't think at that point I even had two months left in me at all. They managed to "push me up the waiting list" and I've only just had my first appointment with the prescribing team (read: a mental health nurse).

Now even then, the way it works is that said mental health nurse is permitted to prescribe methadone or suboxone themself, but first has to complete the paperwork to "admit you". The paperwork itself takes around 1.5 hours to do in total (even though most of it you could do yourself if you had more than one brain cell working) but appointments are only around 30mins long. So you have to have 3 appointments to simply get that done, and there is about 2 weeks between appointments where they drug test you to "prove dependency to opiates".

Frankly I Find this utterly ridiculous and an utter farce, that there I am in an absolute mess, begging for help, ready to stop, but needing the tools to do so, but having to (if I didn't jump the queue) wait about 3 months before they will do anything.

So in the meantime, since it could be quite some time until I see a script, I managed to buy some Suboxone from a contact I have, and induced it myself last week. So far I'm doing well, and having spoken to my nurse on friday where we filled out some of those pesky forms, she told me she thinks it's definitely for the best that I did so, but still they cannot prescribe for me for another month or so, so I'm going to have to try to find some myself on the streets, which frankly, is harder than finding heroin. I explained this to her, and that I could end up in a situation where I have to (Well you knwo what I mean) Take heroin again since I can't access the medication (subs) that I need and I didn't want to. Of course, while she sat there, perfectly licensed to write a script for it, didn't. As we "need to do this properly!". This properly, could mean letting someone go back to heroin.

In general I feel like at every step of the way, I've been made to jump through hoops, misled, given misinformation, misled and fobbed off to an extreme degree. I half cannot believe that this kind of treatment of a patient looking for help is considered acceptable in any healthcare setting.

I'm extremely frustrated to say the least, but on the optimistic note, at least I am for now, not taking heroin. Hope you're all well, and hope I can find some more suboxone, as I only have another 2 days supply!

CyanThorn.