Vicodin is like Heroin-Lite. The only difference is that, while everyone and anyone will tell you how dangerous and addicting and horrible heroin is, vicodin is prescribed by your doctor to help you. Here is this wonderful, caring person, who has eight years of schooling and four or more years of internships and specialized training under his or her belt, and they’re giving you this little white oval shaped pill and telling you it will take away your pain. What they’re not telling you is that it is highly addictive, and if you become addicted, you’ll go through all seven levels of hell to get off of it. So much for the hippocratic oath.
You take your medicine like a good little girl or boy and eventually you run out, or you decide to quit on your own. And then a magic surprise happens. You feel terrible. Depending on how long and how regularly you’ve been taking vicodin your terrible can range from “I feel kinda blue and tired today” to “I’m having a panic attack and my entire body is in excrutiating pain and I can’t sleep and I really just want to cry and throw up and die all at the same time!” Most people ask, since it’s so wonderful and so readily available, either by prescription or through that friend of a friend of a friend, why bother to quit at all?
We all know that vicodin causes euphoria, happiness, and just a darn good time. What most people don’t know is that it can also cause heart palpitations, nausea, altered mental status, seizures, hallucinations, severe weakness, jaundice, bleeding, bruising, stomach pain, sweating, hot flashes, itching, and, according to wikipedia, “liver damage can manifest ranging from abdominal pain to outright liver failure, and can necessitate a liver transplant to avoid death.”
Sounds like a good idea to quit right? Right. Until the withdrawls kick in. Then you’re thinking, “A liver transplant can’t be that bad, wonder if Uncle BillyBobRay or Aunt LouAnne will give me part of theirs?” As I stated before, withdrawals from opiates (including vicodin, percocet, oxycontin, etc) can range from the mild blues and slight achyness that most people who have taken it for longer than a day will experience, to total opiate withdrawal. John Lennon wasn’t lying when he wrote “Cold Turkey”.
Some of the wonderful things this author has experienced when trying to quit are: nausea, vomiting, feeling really cold all the time, headaches, pupil dilation causing light sensitivity (at one point the glow around traffic lights seemed to extend to about 10 feet around each individual light), cold sweats, severe and debilitating anxiety, restlessness, pain so severe it feels like one has been thrown out of a second story window (the worst part is the bone pain, it literally feels like breaking a bone), severe depression, shaky hands, exhaustion to the point of not being able to sit up straight, panic attacks, diarreah (too severe to describe), restless leg syndrom, insomnia, runny nose and other cold symptoms, and the inevitable random other illness that usually shows up about a week after quitting, just for funsies.
Enter stage right: Suboxone. In my next installment I will tell you, the reader, all about the “miracle” drug suboxone and how it’s used to treat opiate addiction. I will also tell you how it is working for a certain person who has found themselves addicted to prescription painkillers.
Vicodin is like Heroin-Lite. The only difference is that, while everyone and anyone will tell you how dangerous and addicting and horrible heroin is, vicodin is prescribed by your doctor to help you. Here is this wonderful, caring person, who has eight years of schooling and four or more years of internships and specialized training under his or her belt, and they’re giving you this little white oval shaped pill and telling you it will take away your pain. What they’re not telling you is that it is highly addictive, and if you become addicted, you’ll go through all seven levels of hell to get off of it. So much for the hippocratic oath.
You take your medicine like a good little girl or boy and eventually you run out, or you decide to quit on your own. And then a magic surprise happens. You feel terrible. Depending on how long and how regularly you’ve been taking vicodin your terrible can range from “I feel kinda blue and tired today” to “I’m having a panic attack and my entire body is in excrutiating pain and I can’t sleep and I really just want to cry and throw up and die all at the same time!” Most people ask, since it’s so wonderful and so readily available, either by prescription or through that friend of a friend of a friend, why bother to quit at all?
We all know that vicodin causes euphoria, happiness, and just a darn good time. What most people don’t know is that it can also cause heart palpitations, nausea, altered mental status, seizures, hallucinations, severe weakness, jaundice, bleeding, bruising, stomach pain, sweating, hot flashes, itching, and, according to wikipedia, “liver damage can manifest ranging from abdominal pain to outright liver failure, and can necessitate a liver transplant to avoid death.”
Sounds like a good idea to quit right? Right. Until the withdrawls kick in. Then you’re thinking, “A liver transplant can’t be that bad, wonder if Uncle BillyBobRay or Aunt LouAnne will give me part of theirs?” As I stated before, withdrawals from opiates (including vicodin, percocet, oxycontin, etc) can range from the mild blues and slight achyness that most people who have taken it for longer than a day will experience, to total opiate withdrawal. John Lennon wasn’t lying when he wrote “Cold Turkey”.
Some of the wonderful things this author has experienced when trying to quit are: nausea, vomiting, feeling really cold all the time, headaches, pupil dilation causing light sensitivity (at one point the glow around traffic lights seemed to extend to about 10 feet around each individual light), cold sweats, severe and debilitating anxiety, restlessness, pain so severe it feels like one has been thrown out of a second story window (the worst part is the bone pain, it literally feels like breaking a bone), severe depression, shaky hands, exhaustion to the point of not being able to sit up straight, panic attacks, diarreah (too severe to describe), restless leg syndrom, insomnia, runny nose and other cold symptoms, and the inevitable random other illness that usually shows up about a week after quitting, just for funsies.
Enter stage right: Suboxone. In my next installment I will tell you, the reader, all about the “miracle” drug suboxone and how it’s used to treat opiate addiction. I will also tell you how it is working for a certain person who has found themselves addicted to prescription painkillers.
No comments:
Post a Comment