Old 04-18-2009, 05:31 AM
  # 19 (permalink)  
SteppingItUp
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If you're having pain issues, the best thing to do is to speak with your doctor and be honest about your history. It would be very unlikely that this would be the first time they've encountered this kind of situation. If you've had a serious medical situation to deal with, and it sounds like you do, you might be dealing more with pain reduction to the point of getting more comfortable rather than total pain elimination.

How strong is Percoset?

*Warning: opiate use described in the following paragraphs*

When I was in college, I was very badly burned in a scalding accident involving a boiling cup of tea and my lap. It was really bad; luckily I'm okay now, I have no bad scars and no permanent damage. I did not have a history of addiction at that time. I had never taken pain killers before, and I was suddenly flooded with scripts for Percoset, Vicodin and something that I think was like Codine 3 (not sure on the last one). I was told to take 2 Percoset (or the others) every 4 hours. I followed these instructions for 2 weeks and then gradually reduced the dosage, and I was off the protocol by about 3 1/2 weeks. I wasn't conscious of any withdrawal symptoms.

For the most part, especially in the beginning, they helped to manage the pain, but they didn't make it disappear. I was still attending all of my classes at the time. The pills gave me a feeling I learned to like, and to be frank, the burn situation was depressing enough that I was relieved to have a "boost" from somewhere. Percoset became my "favorite" of the bunch, and it was the one that I was most prescribed. At some point in the first few days, I decided that I liked the feeling they gave me, and I decided to "enjoy" that aspect of it (yet still taking them as they were first prescribed). This is where the story gets serious. Two or three times during those first two weeks, I went into a minute or two of life-like hallucinations during my classes. I wasn't scared and there's no way anyone else knew that I was hallucinating because I was just seated calmly in my chair, but I knew that the Percoset had caused them, and I was so Perc-ed up that I really didn't consider the seriousness of having such hallucinations. There were no other drugs in my system. In my doped up mind, I thought it was nice of the Percosets to do that when I was in so much pain. They certainly had influenced my thinking; I knew I was taking the meds as prescribed, so I wasn't worried. I now find that to be very scary. I don't think that hallucinations from Percoset are common, but others here might have a better idea about this situation.

This is obviously a warning. I wasn't given any warnings about addiction or anything else for that matter when I was prescribed those pills. I had never even heard the names of these drugs before. I now believe that Percoset is a much more serious medication than it appears to be to most people. It is also highly addictive.

In any case, as I wrote earlier, I tapered the dose at around 2 weeks and I stopped taking any of them after about 3 or 3 1/2 weeks when my burns were less severe. However, I had been given an enormous amount of pills, and I wound up with about 200 of them leftover. Being young, naive and stupid, over the next year or two I wound up taking one or two recreationally every now and then and giving many of them away to friends. The last time I took them about a year and a half later, I went in a totally different direction because of the people I was hanging out with, and I wound up taking 13 of them in one night. To me, that's mind blowingly bad. It felt very much like left-field behavior, and I never did it again. In fact, I never sought out, desired or took another pain killer in pill form again.

However, in my story, after four or five years, I was introduced to smoking heroin. I had tried a number of drugs in the past at a "recreational" and infrequent level, but (barring a year or two in which I was frequently smoking marijuana), I hadn't felt that I had a problem with drug addiction. What went very wrong, though, was that I classified heroin as another opiate, which I associated with the "enjoyment" I had experienced with the Percoset situation in the past. I consciously linked heroin to pill form opiates, most specifically Percoset, and it helped the part of my drug-interested mind to excuse my move into smoking heroin abuse. For me, Percoset was very much like a gateway drug. In time, I developed a serious addiction to smoking heroin, and it took a long time and a serious battle to stop.

Percoset and other pain killers have earned their place in the medical world for being significant and even necessary aids in pain management.

However, as a warning to anyone who needs to take them, especially if any kind of penchant for addiction is involved, please be very, very careful, and do treat this medication as a serious one.

BetterMe, I sincerely hope you get well soon, and I wish you the best in your healing.

:praying
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