Positive The Tapering Support Thread v 2.0

In the USA we have Dr/patient confidentiality. It’s illegal for a Dr to tell the police anything unless they would be stopping a future crime. So if you already committed a murder and told a therapist, they can’t say anything. If you plan to commit a murder, they must inform the authorities.

Maybe you can be totally honest but replace ‘poppies’ with diet soda, or coffee. Addiction doesn’t need to be something illegal and the treatment is the same. A friend years ago went to a fancy re-hab. There was a guy in there who couldn’t stop drinking milk. It sounds crazy but he was there with the heroin addicts in the exact same 90 day program.
but thank you for the suggestion, I think that might just work. I can easily tell them "You'll guess it's not really coffee I'm talking about, but with the law how it is I'm keeping it that way." I imagine the counsellor would be glad to be told at the start they won't be put into that position and I'm aware of the limitations of counselling where we live.
 
but thank you for the suggestion, I think that might just work. I can easily tell them "You'll guess it's not really coffee I'm talking about, but with the law how it is I'm keeping it that way." I imagine the counsellor would be glad to be told at the start they won't be put into that position and I'm aware of the limitations of counselling where we live.
My guess is that it would also help you determine if the counselor is someone you can trust. If they get all political and act like the ‘crime’ is more important than the treatment, you’ll know to try a different therapist.
 
Milk? Unless he's lactose intolerant hard to see the problem!
If I remember correctly, he was seriously lactose intolerant. Like the kind where you don’t leave the house without a change of clothes. It seemed like an easy problem to solve. But I guess addiction has very little to do with the ‘what’ and everything to do with the ‘why’
 
but thank you for the suggestion, I think that might just work. I can easily tell them "You'll guess it's not really coffee I'm talking about, but with the law how it is I'm keeping it that way." I imagine the counsellor would be glad to be told at the start they won't be put into that position and I'm aware of the limitations of counselling where we live.
I’m sure you mentioned it before, but what part of the world are you in? I’m in California USA
 
My doctor once told me testing for viruses are extremely unreliable because it's complicated. Gook luck with dealing with the disease.
How’s it going Ghostrae?

I think I wasn’t clear. I don’t have any virus. I was giving an example of the progression of excuses you could use to explain away your wd symptoms. Covid is a good one mainly because people all seem to know that it can be serious, contagious, and they will want to leave you alone. Before the pandemic I used “the flu”, but now I would use Covid if I were in your situation.

Assuming you have stuck to your plan… does this mean your past the 72 hour mark? Right now would be about the worst you will feel (physically anyway). It should start getting better soon 🙏

Just remember that everyone reading this is already proud of you. Even if you fail this time. The only way to lose is to stop trying and we have all failed. Some have stopped trying. It’s a war and you’re already a hero!

Also…. You might already know this but opiate wd causes more problems than what’s listed on any website. Shortness of breath, loss of appetite, hot flashes, etc. It’s like menopause, the flu, severe depression, and food poisoning, all brewed in the same pot of rotten eggs.
 
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How’s it going Ghostrae?

I think I wasn’t clear. I don’t have any virus. I was giving an example of the progression of excuses you could use to explain away your wd symptoms. Covid is a good one mainly because people all seem to know that it can be serious, contagious, and they will want to leave you alone. Before the pandemic I used “the flu”, but now I would use Covid if I were in your situation.

Assuming you have stuck to your plan… does this mean your past the 72 hour mark? Right now would be about the worst you will feel (physically anyway). It should start getting better soon 🙏

Just remember that everyone reading this is already proud of you. Even if you fail this time. The only way to lose is to stop trying and we have all failed. Some have stopped trying. It’s a war and you’re already a hero!

Also…. You might already know this but opiate wd causes more problems than what’s listed on any website. Shortness of breath, loss of appetite, hot flashes, etc. It’s like menopause, the flu, severe depression, and food poisoning, all brewed in the same pot of rotten eggs.
Thanks for the words of encouragement!
 
How’s it going Ghostrae?

I think I wasn’t clear. I don’t have any virus. I was giving an example of the progression of excuses you could use to explain away your wd symptoms. Covid is a good one mainly because people all seem to know that it can be serious, contagious, and they will want to leave you alone. Before the pandemic I used “the flu”, but now I would use Covid if I were in your situation.

Assuming you have stuck to your plan… does this mean your past the 72 hour mark? Right now would be about the worst you will feel (physically anyway). It should start getting better soon 🙏

Just remember that everyone reading this is already proud of you. Even if you fail this time. The only way to lose is to stop trying and we have all failed. Some have stopped trying. It’s a war and you’re already a hero!

Also…. You might already know this but opiate wd causes more problems than what’s listed on any website. Shortness of breath, loss of appetite, hot flashes, etc. It’s like menopause, the flu, severe depression, and food poisoning, all brewed in the same pot of rotten eggs.
Well, here I am feeling cheezy😳🧀. I lasted 29 hours.
I thought about ignoring my "fall". Changed my mind. The benefits of playing it straight. Of honestly participating outweigh any embarrassment I might feel.
I will stop taking pain medicine. I didn't this try, but I will. At least I went over 24 hours. The longest period of time in many months.
Starting Monday I hope to skip every other day. Use my meager victory. If skipped 24 hrs I can do it again.I haven't thought beyond that plan. Every spring I suffer from the worst kind of flare up. No excuse an observation.
Thanks..
 
Well, here I am feeling cheezy😳🧀. I lasted 29 hours.
I thought about ignoring my "fall". Changed my mind. The benefits of playing it straight. Of honestly participating outweigh any embarrassment I might feel.
I will stop taking pain medicine. I didn't this try, but I will. At least I went over 24 hours. The longest period of time in many months.
Starting Monday I hope to skip every other day. Use my meager victory. If skipped 24 hrs I can do it again.I haven't thought beyond that plan. Every spring I suffer from the worst kind of flare up. No excuse an observation.
Thanks..
Do you have springtime allergies causing flare ups? Some antihistimines are very helpful at countering withdrawal as well, hydroxyzine helps calm things down and some others are marketed for sleep, ny-tol is one I think. Those might help you doubly if it's a seasonal thing.
My last withdrawal started suddenly, finished suddenly just as I was about to give up.
It always is that way for me, if I make it through withdrawals it's only just by the skin of my teeth, never with room to spare. Always as I'm sobbing, freezing, sweating, wet, miserable, sleepless and wishing to die in general, then a few hours later it's got better and is bearable, then later I'm wondering what all the fuss is over, that was easy. Until I recall my actual thoughts, then I realise it was bad.
Like any pain, the memory fades.
For this pain we lie to ourselves as well.
I've not commented in a few days for the same reason, I'm slipping backwards, but I am going to try some more and get it under control again. I've had none since Friday, it's Monday, had mild withdrawals over the weekend, started losing weight again, I feel so sick most of the time, I don't want that, I get really skinny if I'm not careful, then any cold or pain is ten times worse.
 
If I remember correctly, he was seriously lactose intolerant. Like the kind where you don’t leave the house without a change of clothes. It seemed like an easy problem to solve. But I guess addiction has very little to do with the ‘what’ and everything to do with the ‘why’
People can really crave things they are allergic to, I guess the craving is for some reaction inside the body, not a clue what though.
 
Well, here I am feeling cheezy😳🧀. I lasted 29 hours.
I thought about ignoring my "fall". Changed my mind. The benefits of playing it straight. Of honestly participating outweigh any embarrassment I might feel.
I will stop taking pain medicine. I didn't this try, but I will. At least I went over 24 hours. The longest period of time in many months.
Starting Monday I hope to skip every other day. Use my meager victory. If skipped 24 hrs I can do it again.I haven't thought beyond that plan. Every spring I suffer from the worst kind of flare up. No excuse an observation.
Thanks..
Every step forward is exactly that…. It’s a move in the right direction. What I have experienced though is that one day off, every once in a while, really doesn’t move the needle much if at all. Maybe use this experience to lower your tolerance a bit and start a long taper?
 
People can really crave things they are allergic to, I guess the craving is for some reaction inside the body, not a clue what though.
I think cravings can have a lot more to do with being a slave to an old routine than we realize. Obviously if something makes you ‘happy’ it can just be that you’re reminded of better times and want the happiness back. But it can just be that it’s a pacifier.
 
I’m tired of feeling like crap every morning. I’m back to drinking most evenings. It’s good that I no longer have access to the really good pills, but those at least didn’t leave me with a hangover every morning. Although, a hangover lasts for a few hours and can be partially cured with some greasy food and a Coke. There’s nothing that makes opiate wd’s much better.

Today’s fun fact: Coca Cola is the exact same ph level (acidity level) as a healthy human stomach. So a hard night of drinking that ends up with a queasy stomach the next day can be almost cured with a Coke because the carbonation helps reduce the amount of acid in there, and the ph level of what’s in the can helps to return the whole system back to normal. Other soda brands also help…. But Coke works the best.
 
I have bern tappering for a few days. At 1 q 12 hours. I expect success this time. Few weeks ago only lasted 29 hours during cold turkey.
I am making some psychological progress.
I can do this. I am going to avoid a long tapper. Plan to stop the immediate search for replacement. I realized my avoidance of WD was more "what replacement can I find and use".
Thanks for the cola tip.
Lots of luck!
 
I have bern tappering for a few days. At 1 q 12 hours. I expect success this time. Few weeks ago only lasted 29 hours during cold turkey.
I am making some psychological progress.
I can do this. I am going to avoid a long tapper. Plan to stop the immediate search for replacement. I realized my avoidance of WD was more "what replacement can I find and use".
Thanks for the cola tip.
Lots of luck!
I definitely recommend that you ‘stabilize’ at the new dose before you tackle another reduction. Otherwise you’ll be in perpetual wd for the entire taper. And the best kind of taper I ever tried started with reducing down to two doses per day 12 hours apart for two weeks (better even if you can do once per day, but that’s pretty miserable). Start by figuring out the two best times to NOT be suffering, such as just before getting to work and just before bedtime. And remember that it might take a month to really get used to the new lower amount.

Ultimately it was always the anhedonia that made me go back to my pills. Even after months of abstinence, it felt like I couldn’t enjoy anything without some ‘help’.

I tried once breaking my pills into quarters and dosing every 3 hours…. biggest mistake ever. My body got used to a perpetual stream of opiates and tapering was hopeless. I was always in some sort of wd and my tolerance never lessened. It’s really unbelievable how quickly tolerance goes back up to previous levels and just how slowly it falls.
 
I definitely recommend that you ‘stabilize’ at the new dose before you tackle another reduction. Otherwise you’ll be in perpetual wd for the entire taper. And the best kind of taper I ever tried started with reducing down to two doses per day 12 hours apart for two weeks (better even if you can do once per day, but that’s pretty miserable). Start by figuring out the two best times to NOT be suffering, such as just before getting to work and just before bedtime. And remember that it might take a month to really get used to the new lower amount.

Ultimately it was always the anhedonia that made me go back to my pills. Even after months of abstinence, it felt like I couldn’t enjoy anything without some ‘help’.

I tried once breaking my pills into quarters and dosing every 3 hours…. biggest mistake ever. My body got used to a perpetual stream of opiates and tapering was hopeless. I was always in some sort of wd and my tolerance never lessened. It’s really unbelievable how quickly tolerance goes back up to previous levels and just how slowly it falls.
It could be that your size is not helping you. You said you are a big guy so you'll likely have a faster metabolism than us old hens here and your body sounds like it removes the opiates from your system very effectively, as fast as it's absorbed it's gone and you're in constant withdrawals at a constant dose.
Grapefruit can help or berberine or lots of weed, those slow the metabolism of opioids.
Have you ever tried a slow release pill from the doctor? It's clearly not going to hit the same spot as the instant stuff and might help it be a less miserable experience.

I'm only saying because it's not my experience with a slow release opiate I stay nice all day, it's just I know life can get much cosier and I want more, that is the problem with opiates for me. Tolerance rises scary fast, especially when your body is completely soaked in it for days on end. I got happy on Friday, it was a week since the last time and I really wanted to. I was still good yesterday and today I woke feeling my guts churning and my temperature is all over the place, hot & cold together. Tomorrow I won't feel great at all then I'll get back to normal by about wednesday.

Except I've a little pile of bupe patches here to put on if I think it's safe yet, if I don't do that then Wednesday won't be normality in any way.
 
It could be that your size is not helping you. You said you are a big guy so you'll likely have a faster metabolism than us old hens here and your body sounds like it removes the opiates from your system very effectively, as fast as it's absorbed it's gone and you're in constant withdrawals at a constant dose.
Grapefruit can help or berberine or lots of weed, those slow the metabolism of opioids.
Have you ever tried a slow release pill from the doctor? It's clearly not going to hit the same spot as the instant stuff and might help it be a less miserable experience.

I'm only saying because it's not my experience with a slow release opiate I stay nice all day, it's just I know life can get much cosier and I want more, that is the problem with opiates for me. Tolerance rises scary fast, especially when your body is completely soaked in it for days on end. I got happy on Friday, it was a week since the last time and I really wanted to. I was still good yesterday and today I woke feeling my guts churning and my temperature is all over the place, hot & cold together. Tomorrow I won't feel great at all then I'll get back to normal by about wednesday.

Except I've a little pile of bupe patches here to put on if I think it's safe yet, if I don't do that then Wednesday won't be normality in any way.
I got the timed release oxys after my second surgery. Up until that point I was taking 60mg per day and the new Dr wrote me a script for 2x30mg timed release + 3x30mg instant release oxy per day. I used my first time release oxy at night and I felt like I had struck gold. I slept like a baby and woke up a bit stoned, but soooo happy. I don’t think I had felt that good in my whole life.

A year later and I had a new surgeon. He yelled at me and said the time release pills were a huge mistake. Of course I ignored him. By that time I had learned to chew them and I was still liking the pills. Later, after tons of research and plenty of ‘accidental experimentation’ on myself, I believe I discovered what that Dr was trying to tell me: If there’s constantly any drug in your system without any break for a long time (months), then it becomes the new baseline. “Normal” becomes you+oxy. Not even getting anything good from it anymore, and not high or getting any pain relief- just “normal”. It made me totally dependent on the drug just to not hate everything. I now believe that that first Dr did it on purpose to get me hooked and create a good customer. And I think we can all agree that it’s easier to quit something you do occasionally than something that you do all day, every day. Kind of like the difference between getting drunk every night vs drinking all day, every day.

There’s no question that I fall into the category of someone who was born partially immune to opiates. I can take 500mg of oxy today and feel basically nothing but comfortable. It’s been a problem from the beginning because my Dr’s assume my tolerance is due to a hidden addiction, but it’s been that way since my first Norco script. My first surgery followed 9 months of 3 Norcos per day. After surgery they gave me so much IV morphine that they said any more would be fatal…. and I felt nothing but pain.

I have always been to drink 3 times the alcohol as my drunk friends and still remember the whole night, even drive straight (stupid but it’s notable). I must have the strongest liver in human history. No doubt you’re correct Papercuts, but it seems to be more because of my chemistry than size.
 
And I tried grapefruit. Didn’t help at all. All I got was heartburn
Grapefruit is a proven action that people on statins are told about, they can't have grapefruit because it causes that drug to stay in the body too long and build up dangerously in old people who are the ones who get statins. By the same action morphine will hang around longer too, increasing your dose, but you'd need the grapefruit already well into your system and top up more with your opiate as well. I notice more if I forget the grapefruit, then I'll wonder why I'm coming down already. THC is in the same queue to exit the body as grapefruit and morphine, (Is it the CYP pathway?) so that's handy, they can all delay the removal of each other until only morphine is left, last to leave apparantly.

What is it about mango? Is it the mycene terpenes like in weed or something else causing me to crave mangoes more than opium? Seriously, cravings for cigarettes and cravings for mangoes are equally strong in the few days after my last one. It easily compares to former cravings for alcohol, but I'm not a foodie person, I've barely eaten in days now because I wrecked my jaw chewing through five packs of dried mango!
 
Grapefruit is a proven action that people on statins are told about, they can't have grapefruit because it causes that drug to stay in the body too long and build up dangerously in old people who are the ones who get statins. By the same action morphine will hang around longer too, increasing your dose, but you'd need the grapefruit already well into your system and top up more with your opiate as well. I notice more if I forget the grapefruit, then I'll wonder why I'm coming down already. THC is in the same queue to exit the body as grapefruit and morphine, (Is it the CYP pathway?) so that's handy, they can all delay the removal of each other until only morphine is left, last to leave apparantly.

What is it about mango? Is it the mycene terpenes like in weed or something else causing me to crave mangoes more than opium? Seriously, cravings for cigarettes and cravings for mangoes are equally strong in the few days after my last one. It easily compares to former cravings for alcohol, but I'm not a foodie person, I've barely eaten in days now because I wrecked my jaw chewing through five packs of dried mango!
I tried grapefruit a couple of times. But I consumed the fruit after the oxy. Probably a good thing I screwed it up because the last thing I needed back then was MORE effect of my pills.

I’m 100% serious when I say that I have a lot less pain now than when I was using oxy every day. It’s been 23 months now without my happy pills. I thought they were my salvation and I just needed more. And it took more than a year without them to start feeling better. But now I can see that they were killing me. I get some wd’s from Kratom, but it’s really working. I could not believe it back then but the best thing that could have happened to me was getting in trouble and being forced to stop. Too bad the only way to find out if the suffering could end is to suffer even more, for a whole year.
 
I’m 100% serious when I say that I have a lot less pain now than when I was using oxy every day.
You've said this so often, I have to believe you, but it really doesn't seem like it from where I am. I'm still on a higher dose of Bupe than prescribed, but it's gradually coming down and I'm off all my other meds now except an AD, that way they'll work when I need them again.
I'd pods last Friday, now it's Wednesday and I feel fine. Yesterday the cravings were shit so I had Kratom and on Sunday I had a little smoke of opium because I'd found it in a jar I'd forgotten about and then couldn't get the fricking thing out of my mind. Ran out of candles, couldn't get the thing cooked properly for ages, got there in the end.
So I'm being really honest and it's all going well. It's been two whole months since I kicked the daily habit and I can say I could be cut off from everything except my buprenorphine and not suffer very much at all. It's just tempting when I have stuff lying around, in fact a little kratom now would just pick me up and stop the sodding pain in my jaw from hurting me so much. Can't even give a BJ at the mo FFS :ROFLMAO:
:ROFLMAO: :ROFLMAO:
 
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