The bupe WD is a bitch and there is no easy answer. It can cure WD from any other opiate, but it's hare to control WD with bupe with other opiates until some time has passed. It binds so tightly to the receptors and stays so long and other drugs cannot start to take over for a few weeks. Be careful you don't trade one addiction for another. It's the long term aches, pains, feeling poorly, and general muddleheadness that is the worst.
BTW I tapered down to 1/8th of a mg and I still suffered for months. At this point I did occasionally supplement with a short acting opioid which I will not mention. Anyways, I see no reason you cannon stay on bupe for the rest of your life. It seems to me the best decision. You have mentioned your health problems and a relapse would be devastating.
Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to post--the problem has been solved, at least for the foreseeable future. I admitted to my original doctor that I'd run out early, but by the time I saw him it wasn't that long before I was due and I said I'd just run out. (I wasn't going to tell him about the kratom!) He had thought (and charted) last time we met that I had decided to stay on Sub. I didn't remember it that way, but since it's what I've decided now, just agreed with him. The only reason I was seeking another doctor was because of him retiring. He said he'd keep seeing me as a self-pay patient--and he doesn't charge me much at all--indefinitely, which is cool.
He's also changing my diagnosis from addiction to pain, so that if something should happen to him, I only have to find a doctor who will prescribe it for pain, and any doctor CAN do that. In fact, he may switch me to Subutex next time because it's cheaper. After all, I've been with him for at least ten years, have never sold my strips and never ran out early until my dose was just too low to keep me well. He also doubled my dose back up to 1/4 strip (1/2 mg; I'm using 2 mg strips) every other day. Since I'd been taking a lot of kratom, it's just barely doing the job, and taking kratom on top of it does nothing except right at the end of the second day. I do take a couple of capsules then if I can't sleep, but now that the Sub is getting back into my system it should only be a few more days before it holds me long enough.
I do intend to stay on it the rest of my life, however long that is. It's just not worth going through the withdrawals, the insomnia, restless legs, back pain, etc., that comes from getting off it. Whether it was withdrawal or if it's just that I've been on opiates of some kind for so many years that it's abnormal for me to be without them, it really doesn't matter. I'm very glad to have had the support from all of you here and I intend to stick around and hope my experience can help someone else. At the moment, I'm relatively content. I had another lung exacerbation recently, with coughing and shortness of breath, but that's getting better now. I'm getting out and getting things done finally, and getting back to my regular life, or what passes for a regular life for me. Talk to everyone later!
the only adrenaline rush you’ll ever need. I know what you mean when you say how much you can get off from copping, with all the risk involved in being an established professional or having a public image. Stuff like DMT, iboga, DXM, etc definitely made me see the bigger picture more clearly when I’d start craving and fantacizing about copping. It is very interested how it works.