I've been using tramadol daily since march 2006 for my chronic severe pain I've had from a motorbike injury. All the doctors back then were praising it for it's "non narcotic drug that gives somewhat close pain relief as narcotics. Non addictive yada yada yada blah blah blah"
The first dose I had I found was "fun", subsequently, every dose has just been pain relieving with no recreational or other (side) effects. Most friends who have tried it for recreational use have had the same experience, the first dose was fun but subsequent dosages were not fun at all, just there for pain relief. Though, one friend "gets off" on it most if not all sessions he has with it, usually 1-2 X 200mg SR tablet. He LOVES the feeling and is fairly well versed with the usual suspects of recreational drugs.
The worst thing about tramadol for me was it's WDs. It's the only drug I've actually had WDs. I was on up to600-800mg (maybe more, I was dropping 80mg OCs "like nothing" when I first sustained the injury and was in PAINSVILLE plus my GP was illegally prescribing them without authority for up to 6 months and then medicare/aussie health? caught up with him and spanked him somewhat hard for doing so much prescribing to me heh. Anyway.. I insta stopped the roughly 600-800plus? oxycontin for days/weeks with no obvious WDs, I was still taking tramadol so that could have been helpful.. Anyway, back on topic)
One Xmas, 2 or 3 years ago, I decided to stop my daily tramadol so I could see how I went with other pain meds. Woah, 2nd day off tramadol, BAD heavy flu like symptoms, bed ridden and I was shit house until I took tramadol again and WDs went away. Still on tramadol to this day, I do sometimes stop, 1 day at most, my BD is 1 X 200MG SR tab, sometimes 1 at night, I have had up to 400mg during a 4-6 hour period with BAD pain and not wanting to have oxycontin (Im using it again since I had major surgery and pain had been bad ever since). I will taper down with "insta hit" tramadol once I do decide to go off it, if my pain ever subsides enough for me to feel to do this.
The short, if you're on prolonged (daily) use of Tramadol HCL, be prepared for some nasty withdrawals. Interesting since ALL my doctors (probably had 8-10 specialists dealing with me and my brachial plexus [nerves in shoulder] damage. I had neurosurgeons, neurologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, 'managing surgeons/doctors' who found other doctors/surgeons whom were the best to see for my various treatments + recovery), all of them praised how good [and non addictive] tramadol "should be". Oh well, it's mucho easy to prescribe daily use of a drug if you're not the one taking it or a valued family/friend heh.
And excuse any hard to read grammar, I'm actually going for a job interview tomorrow, a kick arse managed network sysadmin at a 'high level IT security' joint, they know of my ongoing pain and injury, should be happy for me to work at home to do said managed work, I 'sit and wait' for alerts from the managed networks (monitored by nagios software afaik, I'll find out MORE tomorrow) and when I get any alerts, examine and/or fix what needs to be done. If I can't do it via remote login/VPN stuff, I'll drive/ride to the client and do the work there. So, I still have my mantra of being at home for my childs (well, children, second + final is on their way, May next year :D) upbringing/growing in their early years, I DO NOT want to be working "hard for the man" and missing their lives, no fuggin way... But a job like this, big $$$, work from home and a friend who recommended me for the job LOVES this workplace, he is FUSSY and has left quite a few "good jobs" simply because the workplace/attitude sucked in his view, so I _know_ I will love working here. If I don't get it, np, I have a fallback job from the place I'm at now, it's work from home but atm, it's LOW work, like 1-2 jobs in as many months which will eventually build up to full time work in 1-4 years as they grow and need me to be the network + system admin to build their networks.
So, my head is full of Cisco IOS + *nix commands + best practices, I'm routing for the team *boom tish*.. So, as said, sorry if this post is full of crap and hard to read, my head is in a "work" headspace, I'm not here often, atm I'd be watching some docos or _good_ movie or the seldom tv show we watch, or PS3 or reading. Not doing research on computing stuff I first started 20 years ago. It feels like year 12, cramming for my final exam tomorrow LOL. At least I'm told "It doesn't matter if you don't know it all, we just need to know you have a solid unix + networking foundation so we can train you in our propriety software and anything else lacking to bring you up to speed. Sounds great, lets see how tomorrow goes :D
I wish you all well who enjoy tramadol, it works great for pain relief for me actually. I get "better" pain relief (read, not the fun like I do with oxycontin), I actually get less pain relief from oxycontin but it helps "good" with the breakthrough pain after my morning dose of 200MG TRAMADOL SR tablet, sometimes 2 x 665mg paracetamol SR tabs and MAYBE iboprofen + codeine tabs if I am having a SHITHOUSE day, OC comes 3-5 hours later (around 11am-2pm) to sort me out for the day/afternoons jobs of cleaning, exercising, playing daddy, riding the mbike and whatnot that keeps me busy day to day.
*salute*, my 80mg temaz BD I just took before is kicking in, Im off to bed for a 5amish rise so I can refresh myself with the enable, sh ? commands of cisco along with route, netstat, nmap, lspci, dmesg etc stuff I'd use to see how an "unknown" computer I get a hold of is doing. Also arp, traceroutes, checking out /etc/init* rc.* etc, hopefully that quick stuff and mentioning cisco ACL and enabling root stuff will show I'm not a "gen x" linux GUI ubuntu lover who has no idea what "command line" actually means. Heh, sorry for the rant, my head is fll of geek stuff atm, I bid thee all farewell for now and I think I may keep my head inside of here, still seeing phase_dancer brings a warmth to my heart not that many other "net buddies" do
I dread spell checking, so I won't
