I interviewed a person with a past history of pain pill addiction, and asked him about his success with Subuxone (buprenorphine). He has had astounding success in his recovery, and has been doing great for well over three years, relapse-free. Here is what he had to say.
JB: Please tell me about your experience with pain pill addiction and your experiences with buprenorphine (Suboxone).
XYZ: For me, my opiate addiction got so bad, I was taking two hundred and forty to three hundred and twenty milligrams of OxyContin per day, just to stay normal. It had gotten really, really bad. And it started out with a reason. I had kidney stones, and I was in all this pain, but then it got to the point where it solved some other problems in my life and it got out of hand. I tried a lot of different things. I went to detox, and they helped me, but it was…it was almost like I never came out of withdrawal.
JB: How long were you off pain pills?
XYZ: Even after being clean for thirty or sixty days, I would still feel bad. Bowels, stomach…really all the time.
JB: Did it feel like acute withdrawal or just low grade withdrawal?
XYZ: No, it depended on the point…I’d try to fix it myself, sometimes, and I would just put myself back where I was. It got to the point where I was making myself sicker and sicker and sicker. And then I got off of it, and stayed off of it for a hundred and twenty days, I guess…but still just sick. Just miserable, and not feeling right. I was miserable. I wouldn’t eat, I was losing weight…
It [buprenorphine] gave me something that replaced whatever was going on in my head physically, with the receptors. It took that [prolonged withdrawal] away, to the point that I felt well. All that energy I would spend getting pills…and I was going to the doctors almost daily. Because taking that much medicine, nobody would write me for that much, so I had to doctor shop.
JB: Did you go to the internet [to order pain pills]?
XYZ: I did. But on the internet, the only things that I found were hydrocodone, so it would take a lot of those. I was concerned about my liver, from the Tylenol in them.
My only life was going to the doctors, figuring out what pharmacy I could use. I had a whole system of how many days it could be between prescriptions, what pharmacy to go to. It was sick. I was just trying to not get sick.
JB: And you were working during that time?
XYZ: Yeah! I was working, if you want to call it that. I wasn’t a very good employee, but I held a job. I was a regional vice president for “X” company. I traveled a lot, so I had new states where I could see new doctors. That was bad. When I came off the road, I owed $50,000 in credit card bills.
JB: And your wife didn’t know about it?
XYZ: No. It all came tumbling down. And I had gotten into trouble, because they were company credit cards, and they wanted the money back! So, all of the sudden my wife found out that not only do I have a pain pill problem, but we’re $50,000 short, and I wasn’t very ethical in the way I got the money, because it really wasn’t my credit, it was my company’s credit card.
JB: So addiction made you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise?
XYZ: Absolutely. I lied to people, I took money from people, I ran up credit cards tens of thousands of dollars, and really put my family in serious jeopardy at that time. But buprenorphine took away that whole obsessive-compulsive need for pills, made me feel better, and took away all the withdrawal symptoms at the same time. I didn’t worry about it.
To be honest, I was such a hypochondriac before. I haven’t been sick in years now. I haven’t had a backache or headache that ibuprofen didn’t cure [since starting recovery]. I was fortunate it was all in my head. I would milk any little thing. I had two knee operations that probably could have been healed through physical therapy, but I was all for surgery, because I knew I’d get pain pills.
JB: That’s the power of addiction!
XYZ: I did some research about this [meaning buprenorphine].
JB: How did you do your research?
XYZ: Online. Actually, I had some good family members, who did some research and brought it to me, because they were concerned for me, and they brought it to me and said, “Hey, there’s a medicine that can help. Call this number,” and I found places out there that would do it [meaning Suboxone], but my concern was the speed that a lot of them were doing it. A lot of them said, OK come in, and we can evaluate you, and after a week you’ll be down to this, and after a month you’ll be down to this.
This was in 2005. And when I asked them what their success rate is, it wasn’t very high. It was something like twenty percent of the people who were doing it [succeeded]. So when I’d finally gotten a hold of “X,” [receptionist for Dr. Hall], she saved my life over the phone. Because she said, you can come tomorrow, and she said that whatever it takes, they’ll work with you. And I felt good about going to a place where it wasn’t already determined how long it would take. Because I already knew how I was feeling after I would come off of opiates. I didn’t want to do that again.
I saw Dr. Hall and felt better within twenty-four hours, although it took a little while to get the dosage right. I think we started off at a lower dose, then we went up on the dose and it kept me so level. I had no symptoms. It cured my worst withdrawal symptoms, my stomach and my bowels.
There’s always a kind of stigma in the rooms [12-step recovery meetings] because I’d been in NA for a little bit of time then [he’s speaking of stigma against medication-assisted treatment]. You realize who [among addicts in NA] is die-hard, one way to do recovery, and who is willing to be educated about some things and understand that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
And I was fortunate that I had a sponsor at that time, and still do, who was willing to learn about what exactly it was, and not make me feel guilty about it. It wasn’t necessarily the way he would do it, but he was a cocaine addict, so he didn’t understand that whole part of it.
He said, “Your family’s involved, you’ve got a doctor that’s involved, your doctor knows your history. If all these people, who are intelligent, think this is an OK thing, then who am I to say it’s not going to work?” He was open-minded. And there are not a lot of people I would trust right off the bat [in recovery], that I would tell them. [that he’s taking Suboxone]. I’ve shared it with some people who’ve had a similar problem, and told them, here’s something that might help you. I always preface it with, [don’t do] one thing or another, you’ve got to do them together. You have to have a recovery program and take this medicine, because together it will work. Look at me. I’m a pretty good success story.
One of my best friends in Florida called me, and I got him to go see a doctor down there, and he’s doing well now. He’s been on it almost eleven months now and no relapses.
To me, it takes away the whole mental part of it, because you don’t feel bad. For me, it was the feeling bad that drove me back to taking something [opioids] again. Obviously, when you’re physically feeling bad, you’re mentally feeling bad, too. It makes you depressed, and all of that, so you avoid doing fun things, because you don’t feel good.
Once I trained myself with NA, how to get that portion of my life together, to use those tools, not having any kind of physical problems made it that much easier to not obsess.
JB: So, how has your life improved, as a result of being on buprenorphine?
XYZ: Well, the most important thing for me is that I’ve regained the trust of my family. I was the best liar and manipulator there was. I’d like to think of myself as a pretty ethical and honest person, in every aspect of my life, other than when it came to taking pills.
JB: So, you regained the trust of your family, felt physically better…
XYZ: I gained my life back! Fortunately, I had enough of a brain left to know it had to stop. Once I started on buprenorphine, it gave me back sixteen hours a day that I was wasting. That’s when I decided I really don’t want to jeopardize my recovery, by going out and looking for a job again [he means a job in corporate America, like he had in the past], because I’ve got this thing, this stigma…they’re going to check a reference and I’m screwed. I’m not going to get a job doing what I was doing for the same amount of money.
…to be continued
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