Originally Posted by Esmerelda

Thanks for sharing your story and to everyone else who has posted on the subject of oxycodone. I am 39 and have been on opiates for pain management after back surgery (and the complications that came with it) for around 7 years. I began a slow taper in early November and wanted to post about it because I didn't find many success stories when I looked for them early on. Of course I am not totally successful YET as I'm still tapering but...when I began the weaning process I was at around 150mg a day (20mg 4x a day & 60 mg oxycontin at night plus usually an extra ten oxycodone for breakthrough at some point.) As of this writing I am down to about 38mg altogether a day. It has NOT been easy. But, it's been doable. In the beginning I took tizanidine (which I never see mentioned anywhere) to help with the leg cramping and it did help but made me extremely sleepy and dizzy and gave me horrible dry mouth. I also was having terrible insomnia (despite that sleepiness) and would wake up every couple of hours and stay awake for sometimes 1 to 3 hours at a time. It was like having a newborn except the baby was me. At some point, fairly recently in the tapering process, I feel like I crossed a threshold and it got a lot easier. I would say I am now in LESS pain that I was when I was on 3x the amount of opiates. My dr. says this could be attributed to Opioid-induced hyperalgesia (which I tried to post a wiki link for but apparently I haven't earned that privilege here yet). I suspect he's right. I can't help but feel deep regret for the amount of my life these pills stole (or that I gave away, depending on how I look at it) in that case, convincing me i needed more and more to manage my very real physical pain all the while actually making me much more sensitive & susceptible TO pain. Anyway, I switched from the tizznidine to flexerill a couple weeks ago and that has helped me a lot--I can finally fall asleep and stay there through the night only waking up once or last night I think maybe not at all. This morning for the first time since I can remember I woke up at 10 something without thinking about needing to take a pill. To me that's a miracle and I'm so grateful. I know that I am not out of the woods and wont be until I am completely off, but I finally have real hope for that becoming a reality sooner rather than later. And I would just urge anyone out there reading this that it CAN be done. I tried once before years ago and couldn't do it, partly because I was working in an office and taking the tizanidine then meant I couldn't really function at my job. This time I had the luxury of being self-employed and because my absolute priority was getting off the meds I bit the bullet and allowed myself to do whatever was reasonably necessary (including staying in bed all day) to keep at it. I absolutely think it's like any addiction ( a word which, while I am honestly not so comfortable with given all the stigma attached to it, I accept is indeed what happened to me with these meds) in that you have to be really truly ready to quit. Anyway, pookie, I was originally responding to your post and I'm wondering how you're feeling now. I also would love to hear from anyone with a similar story about what the end stage of their taper felt like, as I, perhaps naively, thought I could avoid the more hardcore symptoms pookie described at the end of hers by coming off so slowly. Thanks and blessings to all of you. This stuff is SO hard and its communities like these, not the doctors by in large, that are helping people reclaim their lives.