Opioids What can opiate withdrawal be compared to?

[thesameoldfears]

Glad to hear other people get the sneezes and/or incredibly horny. I thought I was just wired wrong with that last one.

 

[manboychef]

Opiate withdrawal for me is like being a guppy going belly up in a bowl of ball sweat soup while I toss benzos into my mouth like a frantic game of hungry hungry hippos played by sadistic methheads.

I pray I need not ever feel that depravity again.

 

[RodRamsey]

Hospitals are worthless for any pain relief. I think the doctors are higher than anyone,, paging dr. House. I went it 20 mins from death with 3 gun shoots to leg and they giving my perc 10. I telling them those dont work for me so now red flag this guy an addict. I had girls bringing my real meds from the streets better than what hospital had. I then moved to suboxone and now withdrawing from that in 100 degree weather. This sucks, I do however have enormous amount of benzos, mostly klons and some xans. They really dont help too much honestly. Still feel like crap. My antidote is taking alot of benydryl with the benzos and try sleep as much as possible. Hopefully after few days feel better. Those suboxone films suck by the way but somehow I still withdrawing. The whole time on sub film I felt nothing at any milligram. Tablets work much better.

 

[TimKT9]

Along with all the physical pain that is almost indescribable comes the emotional turmoil. I cannot call it depression because depression does not do it justice. It's much deeper than that, it's almost like my soul is vomiting up every horrible memory, everything I'm ashamed of, every mistake I've ever made and every horrible feeling I've ever felt times 10.... repeating over and over and over again until I feel paralyzed.
Also the isolation and extreme fear of being around people during withdrawals is horrible. I feel like I'm completely alienated from the entire human race.

Exactly. Perfectly said.

 

[TimKT9]

Obviously this is not the worst symptom by FAR, but something i find very annoying during withdrawal is the constant yawning. I seem to yawn literally like 20 times every 5 minutes. Its just so annoying. Worst symptom for me is definitely the severe anxiety and RLS.

 

[dankJ]

2 words:

PURE HELL

Plain & Simple.

But I don't think that your question, as it is worded, can really be answered. simply because there is nothing that compares.

everything hurts. everything sucks. everything seems like an insurmountable task.

youre too tired to do anything, even walk around...but at the same time, youre too restless to sit still. so when im going through it...i will sit down for a minute or 2 until my restless legs become unbearable...then stand up and walk around the room...trying to stretch my legs...can manage for a minute or 2 before i feel so exhausted that i have to sit back down...so i sit down for another minute or 2 again until my RLS becomes too much..stand back up...etc etc...repeat repeat repeat. and for as tired and exhausted as you are...you cannot sleep at all. For me, the restless legs are the worst symptom of w/d's...and i have found NOTHING that helps it. the only thing that brings the smallest amount of relief is lying a heating pad across my foot stool thingie on my lazy boy recliner and lying my legs on top of the heating pad (under my calves). helps a very very little bit. Also soaking in a bath as hot as you can stand it helps a bit too.

Another god awful symptom, for me, is the uncontrollable vomiting. When i would experience w/d's when i was taking pills...even at the peak of my daily intake of couple hundred mg's a day)...i would never have the nausea and vomiting issues. I switched to the H about a year ago...and any time im forced to go through w/d's from the H....i vomit a LOT...violently and uncontrollably. I'm talking multiple times an hour..non-stop at times. A couple of times it got so violent that i was literally choking from my own vomit. Literally choking to where i could barely suck any air into my lungs. man oh man it sucks. and i know that is disgusting...talking and posting about vomiting...but then again, there is absolutely NOTHING pretty about withdrawals.

You will do literally ANYthing while in w/d's to relieve the pain...including starting to get crazy suicidal thoughts in your head just because it would end the suffering. And don't get me wrong..i am not a depressed person in general, nor ever seriously (or even somewhat seriously) considered suicide. I have always felt that is the most selfish thing a person could do...to put others in misery because you couldn't cope with your problems. But thats how much control opiate addiction has over you and to what lengths you will go to to end the suffering. I remember being in the car with my parents on a 7 hour car ride in full withdrawals, the absolute WORST bout of w/d, on the way to a rehab facility after i broke down and spilled my guts to them telling them i was a heroin addict....but anyways...i remember on the car ride there, i was in soooo much pain and misery that i started considering just throwing open the back door and jumping out onto the highway at 70 miles an hour just to end the pain because i couldn't take it.

those are some of the reasons people STAY addicts for years and years and years...simply to avoid going through the withdrawals. THATS how powerful opiates are...that people spend years and years hooked on them simply to avoid the week of pure hell you would go through to get off them. (at least the full-on physical symptoms...you'd have residual PAWS and mental struggles for quite awhile after that 1st week)

Man...i opened this thread with the intent on posting simply what i started with: 2 words: pure hell ....now its turned into a novel!

 

[pretty polly]

i agree with alot of the recent posts.
I DONT believe In "hylands restless legs" as many of the poster here either work for hylands or promote them for benefit.
Id been going off of tramadol 14 times. in 10 yrs. In 2011 i finally kicked it after coming to the realization of what worked and what didnt .
1. Weaning and tapering DO NOT work. I would wean down to half a pill from 15 and the withdrawls were the exact same. All it did was give me a "prolonged" withdrawl..Months of hell instead of 3-4 days.
2. All the so called "medicines" (tylenol, theraflu,etc)to help you through withdrawals are nonsense. They might work in your head , but they have no value whatsoever.
3.Do NOT trade one drug for another. Remember, the reason you got off tramadol is because you have NO control over substances that make YOU feel good.. taking xanax because you think it will lesson your withdrawal, Yes it will lesson it because your taking an equally addictive drug. Cold turkey is the only thing that has EVER worked for me. Go ahead and take suboxone or clonopin or xanax or gabapentin. But youll only be hurting yourself as well as wasting time.
take sympathy from fellow posters on this site. But if they offer "remedies" to make it easier. Realize, there are NONE.!
take your 3-5 days of pain (you deserve it dont you?) and remember the pain and frustration. Maybe that memory will be the ONLY thing that keeps you clean...like it did for me..

 

[Mr.Scagnattie]

i agree with alot of the recent posts.
I DONT believe In "hylands restless legs" as many of the poster here either work for hylands or promote them for benefit.
Id been going off of tramadol 14 times. in 10 yrs. In 2011 i finally kicked it after coming to the realization of what worked and what didnt .
1. Weaning and tapering DO NOT work. I would wean down to half a pill from 15 and the withdrawls were the exact same. All it did was give me a "prolonged" withdrawl..Months of hell instead of 3-4 days.
2. All the so called "medicines" (tylenol, theraflu,etc)to help you through withdrawals are nonsense. They might work in your head , but they have no value whatsoever.
3.Do NOT trade one drug for another. Remember, the reason you got off tramadol is because you have NO control over substances that make YOU feel good.. taking xanax because you think it will lesson your withdrawal, Yes it will lesson it because your taking an equally addictive drug. Cold turkey is the only thing that has EVER worked for me. Go ahead and take suboxone or clonopin or xanax or gabapentin. But youll only be hurting yourself as well as wasting time.
take sympathy from fellow posters on this site. But if they offer "remedies" to make it easier. Realize, there are NONE.!
take your 3-5 days of pain (you deserve it dont you?) and remember the pain and frustration. Maybe that memory will be the ONLY thing that keeps you clean...like it did for me..

Many people have tried to quit that way and still gone back to using.. in fact, cold turkey withdrawal is one of the least effective methods for the majority of people from what I have personally seen.

Tapers with drugs with longer half-lifes like suboxone, methadone, or valium (for benzo withdrawal), (or librium for booze) do work. Like all detox methods though, they are not perfect.

There is no "best" way to get clean.. and putting down any particular method because it didn't work for you is very arrogant and counter productive.

Also keep in mind that while you were able to deal with the cold turkey withdrawals from tramadol... the severity of symptoms from much stronger opiates like heroin, oxy, or any benzo, is 10x as bad. Not so easy to just suck up and deal with for "3-4 days" (by the way, the vast majority of withdrawals from harder drugs last way longer than that)

 

['medicine cabinet']

True that. Im sure tramadol wd is weird bc its not a traditional opiate, but the wd from smack is pure death for a week then a little less hell for about a month. Im currently tapering down from 140mgs of methadone 2mgs a week. Once i got to 110 i had to stop bc i started to feel like shit. Ive managed to drop another 14mgs so im on 96mgs and i cant imagine what the rest of this is going to be like. Ive been on fast short meth tapers before but not mmt, and i know this is going to suck donkey balls for the next few years. But thats the price for playing for well over a decade. I was thinking about having someone snow me out in a versed coma put a diaper on me and pump me full of narcan for a few days. Maybe intubate me and put me through dialysis. Wake up a month later with a beard and really long nails lol.

 

[dankJ]

(by the way, the vast majority of withdrawals from harder drugs last way longer than that)

yeah....a LOT longer. When i went to rehab...I managed to stay clean off of the dope for only 44 days...a little over 2 weeks after getting home (i wont say completely clean because i smoked a couple of times, including the night i got home, and drank a couple of times...which is different for me because i rarely ever drink...but i just HAD to alter my state of mind). I did a 14 day subutex taper at the facility (8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 6, 6, 6, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2) and i still got bad restless legs at nighttime for several weeks after the taper and couldn't sleep at all. I went 14 nights (the last 2 weeks of the 28 day program until i went home) with getting literally 3 hours or less of sleep a night. majority of those nights was around 1 1/2 to 2 hours of sleep . I just tossed and turned the rest of the night with my legs killing me. (strange part was...my legs were, for the most part, ok during the day, but as soon as i tried to go to bed..the legs kicked in big time). Thankfully once i got home, i was to sleep easier...although not great.

excuse my babbling on, but the point was trying to make was that even being clean off of my DOC for 44 days...even on day 44 i still had some residual w/d effects....such as not sleeping very well, total lack of energy and motivation, anxiety (which i had NEVER had issues with before), and sweating profusely. It was absurd how much i would sweat. and this was in winter time. And wont even get into the mental aspect of it..was referring to strictly the physical side.

so yah...w/d's of hard stuff lasts fooooooorever!

 

[dankJ]

lol...just looking over the timeline of this thread is kind of fascinating...10 or so posts today to the thread...before that was 1 single post in middle of june..then 3 or 4 posts in early march...ton of posts back in late january....then skips back to may of last year...and the original post was waaaaaay back in 2004! nice..posting on a thread thats been going for 9 years! lol

 

[StephenColbert]

In my experience, the worst part is not being able to sleep and the craving. The restless legs, sneezing, body aches, diarrhea, etc are bad but those are physical symptoms which to me, arent as bad because they are easier to comprehend and it is like having the bad flu which when you have, you suck it up and wait to heal.

However, usually when you are sick, you are able to sleep because your body wants sleep. But, withdrawals, it is tossing and turning and even when you sleep, it isnt SWS or REM sleep so t is practically worthless.

The worst is the craving though. The thoughts of what you would do to get some even though you know you need to get through it and just not being able to take just one more pill, hit or whatever is just torture. It is what I imagine it is like mentally when you are literally starving to death and do not have access or the ability to get any food. The craving to me, is by far the worst part.

 

[StephenColbert]

i agree with alot of the recent posts.
I DONT believe In "hylands restless legs" as many of the poster here either work for hylands or promote them for benefit.
Id been going off of tramadol 14 times. in 10 yrs. In 2011 i finally kicked it after coming to the realization of what worked and what didnt .
1. Weaning and tapering DO NOT work. I would wean down to half a pill from 15 and the withdrawls were the exact same. All it did was give me a "prolonged" withdrawl..Months of hell instead of 3-4 days.
2. All the so called "medicines" (tylenol, theraflu,etc)to help you through withdrawals are nonsense. They might work in your head , but they have no value whatsoever.
3.Do NOT trade one drug for another. Remember, the reason you got off tramadol is because you have NO control over substances that make YOU feel good.. taking xanax because you think it will lesson your withdrawal, Yes it will lesson it because your taking an equally addictive drug. Cold turkey is the only thing that has EVER worked for me. Go ahead and take suboxone or clonopin or xanax or gabapentin. But youll only be hurting yourself as well as wasting time.
take sympathy from fellow posters on this site. But if they offer "remedies" to make it easier. Realize, there are NONE.!
take your 3-5 days of pain (you deserve it dont you?) and remember the pain and frustration. Maybe that memory will be the ONLY thing that keeps you clean...like it did for me..

You're making a lot of absolute statements in your post which is really misleading and unfair. Every single person is this world has a different body chemistry and just because it didnt work for you doesnt mean that it doesnt work for anyone else. You need to realize that people can react vastly different to medications and treatments. What doesnt work at all for one person can work wonders for another.

Tapering does work for some people. Also, even though your withdrawal symptoms may not have been less when you tapered, doesnt mean it didnt help with other areas of your health when quitting the medication. There are millions of things going on in your body at any given moment and most of them, you never notice. So, tapering might help with millions of your bodily processes in that period of time but you just happen to not see them reduce your physical symptoms or maybe you felt like it didnt help.

Not tapering can be dangerous for people so for you to post something so absolute such as "DO NOT work" is really unfair to people when dealing with something so serious. Tapering could make the different between a person having a life altering seizure and not having one.


As far as using something else to lesson withdrawal, I have personally found weed to help out. I am not codoning anyone else doing it. But, I really dont like weed or being high on it so there wasnt a chance I would get addicted to it but it would help me to not thinking about it and be able to sit and get sucked into a movie for a couple of hours without thinking about or noticing what I was going through. The main thing I want to do when going through it is to be able to get sucked up into a movie, TV show, Book or whatever so I have my mind off of it and weed helps me do that.

However, I found the best thing that helps get through it is to stay busy. Make a list of things to do and do them. Yes, it will be miserably hard to get started and stay on task but I have found when I sucked it up and just did a to do list, it helped out the most.

 

[dankJ]

It is what I imagine it is like mentally when you are literally starving to death and do not have access or the ability to get any food. The craving to me, is by far the worst part.

heh...interesting comparison. and after thinking about it for a moment...i think i would rather be starving to death (not that i know what it feels like or anything...)...i would imagine with starving, only your stomach hurts and your weak and devoid of energy. whereas opiate w/d's...EVERYTHING hurts. yeah...would rather starve to death

 

[dankJ]

2. All the so called "medicines" (tylenol, theraflu,etc)to help you through withdrawals are nonsense. They might work in your head , but they have no value whatsoever.

i dont mean to be rude or anything like that...but im sorry...that is a completely ridiculous comment. Your mental state of mind and attitude/outlook towards something plays a HUGE role. i mean, after all...EVERY physical sensation that you feel, including pain, originates in your mind and is your brain sending the approproate signals to that part of the body whether it be the sensation of touch, pain, whatever....it ALL originates in the mind.

 

[RodRamsey]

I've withdrawled from just about every opiate as a chronic pain patient. The last 3 years I switched to suboxone because no amount of oxy would even work for me. The insurance I had finally ran out and cant afford the redicilous pricetag on one bottle of suboxone so decided to taper off and now in withdrawl at the early stage. Trying to do excersise is the best as it creates similar chemicals naturally that help with detox. My other way to deal is use benzos and couple bong hits in the a.m. We see how it goes, maybe this time I will actually be able to deal without any opiate in my system. Just have to make it thru that first week of hell then should start feeling better. This heatwave def not helping the cause but I still trying to excersise because that helps the most during withdrawl of any opiate.

 

[StephenColbert]

i dont mean to be rude or anything like that...but im sorry...that is a completely ridiculous comment. Your mental state of mind and attitude/outlook towards something plays a HUGE role. i mean, after all...EVERY physical sensation that you feel, including pain, originates in your mind and is your brain sending the approproate signals to that part of the body whether it be the sensation of touch, pain, whatever....it ALL originates in the mind.

Exactly. Your mental outlook and attitude can do more to alleviate the symptoms then pretty much anything. That's why I was talking about staying busy and finding a task to keep your mind off of it above. There have been a few times where I started working on something and got so sucked up into it, I forgot that I was going through withdrawals. If you can find something that can provide that escape for you, it can make a world of difference. If you are in a lot of pain and cannot move, a really good movie, a season of a good TV show on video, or even an engaging video game can help. Plus, I have found that taking some stomach meds like anti-diaherrea meds, some Excedrin, vitamins, a healthy diet, and perhaps most of all- fresh air, can make all the difference in the world. I usually force myself to go on a walk. I put my headphones on to some good, yet relaxing music, shut off my brain from telling me I am miserable and walk as long as I can hold out. It may not be much use afteward but once I get going, I can usually escape it all for as long as the walk last.

If you have the attitude that nothing is going to work, then nothing is going to work even if it does. If you have already made your mind up then you are basically screwing yourself to even start.

 

[RodRamsey]

Ya alot of it is mental and staying busy to keep mind off the fact your withdrawing. Tramadol never worked for me at any dose so cant imagine wd's being that bad. Its diff for everyone I guess. Sleeping is the hardest part for me. Sleep patterns get all twisted when withdrawing. Try using benydryl mix with benzos. Excersise helps the most but with this heat wave thats not happening. Usually I can ride bike for couple hours then passing out alot easier at night.

 

[QUARE]

Its real pain, anyone who plan on using opiates/ or opioids should read this thread. It is really a must.

You will at first start to have physics symptom that I find to be the worst;
- Hot and cold flashes
- Spasms, Twitchs
- Bad body sensations
- Nausea, Vomiting
- Diharea
- Difficulty eating, drinking > which lead to worsten the symptoms

The psychological symptom which I find to be easier to tolerate EVEN if they are really bad;
- Deep depression
- Difficulty to get pleasure from thing to usually do
- Insomnia > which also worsten the symtoms

Good luck to anyone who go throught it and remember that your condition is temporary.

 

[RodRamsey]

Ya the depression makes the whole ride thru wd hell way harder. I guess people with insurance and doctor supervision have it easier. I trying it the old fashioned way just stop and live or die trying to survive.