withdrawel from oxycontin

I was using oxy 40 mg about 15 times per day for a couple of years. I have gone through detox, and have been clean for 18 days now. My problem is I cannot sleep, I still am having alot of anxiety and I am just so jumpy and irritable. I have joined a support group of intensive out patient therapy ,we meet 3 days per week for 3

 hours, but I still feel like i am going through hell!!! I never want to use again! I never want to put my body through this anymore. I also feel soooo tired!!!! I am also walking and taking vitamins and eating well. Does anyone out there know how long this will last?

PaL,
You were polite. I don't think I could have been. But I do commend you.
Pamela

Dear HelloKitty,
Most people who take opiates and other medications for chronic pain or other conditions do NOT become addicts. We do, however, become physically dependent on these medications and that's the nature of how they work in the body. What can happen is that we may develop a physical tolerance, and so the dosage may need to be adjusted over time. A good pain management specialist should understand this, but it's not to be confused with addiction. After 15 years it is possible that a pain condition may worsen and more medication may be needed. This is something to discuss with your doctor, rather than to simply start taking more medication on your own. For many reasons - ignorance being one of them - even doctors may not be willing to prescribe so that pain is not undertreated, and undertreated pain may lead to abuse. I'm not condoning that; it just means the CPP needs to do what most of us have to at one point or another - search for a doctor who can and does treat the pain adequately.

Remember for most of us as we age our pain condition is likely to slowly worsen (of course that depends on the specific problem), and that in itself may require adjustments in medication and have nothing to do with dependence or tolerance. But add all those factors together and those of us on long term management for pain should expect we'll need to make changes over time.

PaLady

Kitty,
Remember that genetics play a strong role in who becomes addicted, so if you see a lot of tendency to truly become addicted (that takes a professional assessment to know the difference between addiction and dependence) genetics is one likely culprit. If you read a lot of these threads, you'll see a lot of PCP's won't treat chronic pain, although some do. There are a lot of reasons why, and some legitimate as doctors get increased scrutiny when they start writing scripts for opiates.

Sounds like your cousin probably has had a few bad experiences with pain patients (or addicts masquerading as pain patients), but unfortunately that ends up tainting the truth about chronic pain patients, which is when pain is adequately treated people rarely become addicts unless they were already addicts before, and/or have some genetic predispositions they're not aware of. In those cases a chronic pain patient needs to work with an Addictionologist, who is a doctor with a specialty in Addiction Medicine, to have their pain treated.

PaLady