Originally posted by magkelly Only time I've ever been totally high was after the dentist yanked my wisdom teeth and after neck surgery when they gave me Oxy and I'm pretty sure doing grass is nothing like that experience. Opiods are rather evil, IMHO. I don't like taking them even when I have to. They don't really make me giddy or high or anything fun really. I just get nauseated and the pain dies down to a tolerable level.
I have been taking Oxycontin almost as long as it has been available. I use it to treat chronic neck, mid and low spinal pain. The physician who started me on it many years ago was a "pill pusher", a fact I did not know when I chose her name from the list of participating providers in the insurance plan directory. Every few months she would bump the dosage up, and at some point she also started giving me the instant release version for "breakthrough pain".
At some point I realized that I really did not need the drug at the dosage levels she had me on. I had been getting treatment for the low back pain as a result of an on the job injury, so there was a registered nurse who was managing the L&I case. I discussed this with her, and we decided that I should see a pain specialist and get started on a "pain cocktail" to wean me off of the Opiates.
The process of getting off of the pain meds was awful. Somehow there was miscommunication about just how much of the Opiates I had been taking daily, and the pain cocktail was too weak. This resulted in me going through withdrawals, a very unpleasant experience.
I did manage to get through it, and fired that doctor.
After kicking the pain meds I went about 6 months with nothing more than aspirin and Ibuprofen. The daily pain level was really too much for me, so I selected a different doctor (actually a nurse practitioner) from the insurance provider directory, made an appointment and discussed using the Oxycontin again for pain management. We talked about how I wanted to keep the dosage low, and resist the tendency to ramp it up as I developed a tolerance to it.
That was about 15 years ago, and I still take the stuff everyday. The nurse practitioner retired, and again I had to find another physician to work with and have a pain contract. Overall things have worked well. The dose has gone up, starting at 10mg, bumping to 20mg, 30mg, 40mg, and a couple years ago I voluntarily dropped back to 30mg.
I would like to get away from it completely, but as I age the degenerative disc disease has nearly crippled me, affecting every disc in my spine. It is most severe at the neck and lumbar areas, where I have had several bad injuries.
I hyper-extended my cervical spine way back in high school. I was doing somersaults on the trampoline in gym class. Going for a triple somersault I made it two and a half turns, landing upside down on the back of my head. The bounce tossed me onto the mat adjacent to the trampoline, unconscious. When I came to the entire class was standing in a circle around me, wondering if I was dead or not. Back then first aid was not like today, and as soon as I could I was directed to stand up and report to the school nurse, who called my mom. She came and took me to the hospital at the Navy base we lived on, and a corpsman (the Navy equivalent to a nurse) gave me a bottle of muscle relaxers and sent me home.
No x-ray, no examination, just the muscle relaxers.
I have injured the lumbar region of my spine numerous times over the years, and have two ruptured discs. All of the lumbar injuries have been work related. There has been countless visits with specialists, MRI's, etc.
I also had a compression fracture of two thoracic vertebrae, in the mid 1980's. Again. some x-rays, MRI's, lots of consults.
Not a single surgeon will admit that there is injury severe enough to warrant the risks of surgery.
So I am doomed to a life of using Opiates to control the chronic pain. Actually I do not view it as a bad thing like so many people do. For me, with judicious management, it is a way to have a reasonable quality of life, a way to be able to still function somewhat normally.
The most difficult part is the stigma that goes with the Oxycontin. The significant increase of abuse of it by those looking for a "high" does make using it for pain management troublesome. There are times when the pharmacy does not have enough to fill the prescription. There are times when I am traveling (this was especially problematic when I was driving a truck for a living and would be 3,000 miles from home when it was time to fill the prescription) when I will need to find a pharmacy that can fill it. My physicians have always been willing to write 3 prescriptions in advance and post date them, with the proviso that if I ever violate the pain contract they will not only never do that again, they will cancel the contract and I will be left out in the cold, with no one to manage the filling of the prescriptions.
One last thing to mention.
Except for when I was getting these meds through that first doctor, the pill pusher who had me taking large quantities of the stuff, I rarely feel a "high" form them. One physician I consulted with put it like this: "If your have real and true pain, you will not feel the euphoric effects of the medication."
Oxycontin does not make me drowsy. It does not affect my ability to function, operate vehicles or machinery, except to enable me to do those things without pain, or at least to do so with a greatly reduced degree of pain.
As I said, I expect that I will take it for the rest of my days.
And I am OK with that.