Withdrawal from Oxycontin

In September 2009, I had major surgery to replace both knees. During surgery and for three days after, I had an epidural to limit pain and when the tube came out accidently, I had morphine for a day. The side effects were so bad that eventually I was put on slow release oxycodone tablets called Oxcontin, supplemented by a "breakthrough" oxycodone called Endone.

After release from hospital, I continued with both types and the slow release tablet was increased from 10mg at night to 20mg, as I kept waking with pain. I continued with the slow release variety morning and evening for 4-5 weeks before deciding that I wanted to quit.

I had no understanding of this drug and so I simply went "cold turkey" (against the advice of my wife). In hindsight I should have asked the doctor for advice and done the withdrawal in reducing doses under his care. What followed was a nightmare.

I had never "done drugs" and so I did not realise that I had become addicted to this medication and the effects of withdrawal were going to be like that of a heroine addict.

The first day was not so bad, as the drug was still working quite strongly in my body. However, by the evening of the second day, I started to experience some terrible sensations in my body and in my emotions. The first noticeable thing was that I couldn't keep my legs still. They were incredibly restless. This was followed immediately by a sensation on my skin (especially the chest) as though it were crawling or alive with movement. It was as though millions of crawling creatures were moving over me. This was accompanied by sweating and clamminess.

What really rocked me was the terrible sense of anxiety and distress. I wanted to call out to someone for help but I felt locked away in some cell of despair. I have never been a depressed person, neither have I ever suffered anxiety for no apparent reason. Yet both of these things came to visit me during my withdrawal period which lasted for 25 days.

The first two weeks were the worst. I didn't feel these symptons all of the time, but mainly at night, although not exclusively so. Unfortunately, I would usually have an episode soon after lying down to sleep for the night. I was extremely tired and so I would often try to go to bed early, around 9:30pm or so. However, after one or two episodes, it was usually around 1:30am or 2am before I fell asleep. I would often sit on the side of the bed or sit on the couch trying to distract myself by watching TV. I usually would hold my arms around myself in an attempt to alleviate the effects. I would be incredibly restless and want to move, claw my skin, shudder and shake myself. Emotionally I was often a mess during this time, crying out in despair and distress.

Everyday i would pray that it would be the day it all stopped and I would be free. At night while awake, I would search the internet for information on what was happening. I was surprised to discover that very little is written and posted about Oxycontin withdrawal. My information was garnered from blogs, bulletin boards - personal testimonies such as this. Each tells of the same horrors of the effects of this drug. Oxycontin is considered the most abused drug in the world today. It is an opiate based drug and it is akin to using heroine or opium. I was very surprised that in a country like Australia I was not educated about the drug before it was administered to me. I know that I should not have gone cold turkey, but I simply didn't know how powerful it was and how captive I was to it.

After about two weeks the episodes became less severe, but they still persisted on a daily basis. I looked forward to the 21st day, as all the information I could find indicated that withdrawal takes between 5 and 21 days. However, for me, 21 days came and went and it was day 26 before I had my first day without any episode. I slept for 7 hours straight. As I write this blog I am on day 28 and I experience only very mild tingling in my legs and feet.

The hangover for me is in my mind and emotions. It has left me feeling flat emotionally and wrung out physically. I hope that I never have to take this medication again, or anything similar.

My purpose in writing this blog is to to offer some help and comfort to some poor soul who may be sitting up in the night, searching the internet for some information to help them. If so, I hope that this helps in some way.

GL

Tangalooma Holiday

In Gaza, the real enemy is Iran

Israeli attacks must not stop until Iran's proxy, Hamas, is defeated.
By Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren
January 4, 2009
Reporting from Jerusalem -- The images from the fighting in Gaza are harrowing but ultimately deceptive. They portray a mighty invading army, one equipped with F-16 jets that have bombed a civilian population defended by a few thousand fighters armed with primitive rockets. But widen the lens and the true nature of this conflict emerges. Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting: Iran. And Israel's current operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism.

Until now, the Iranian revolution has appeared unstoppable. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s ended with Iranian troops occupying Iraqi territory. Iranian influence then spread to Saudi Arabia's heavily Shiite and oil-rich Eastern province, and to Lebanon through Hezbollah. Since the fall of their long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein, Iranians have deeply infiltrated Iraq. Syria has been drawn into Iran's sphere, and even the Sunni sheikdoms of the gulf now defer to Iran, dispatching foreign ministers to Tehran and defying international sanctions against it. Iran has co-opted Hamas, a Sunni organization closely linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a jihad against the Jewish state. But Iran's boldest achievement has been to thwart world pressure and approach the nuclear threshold. Once fortified with nuclear weapons, Iranian hegemony in the Middle East would be complete.

All of which helps explain the public statements from moderate Arab leaders, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, who have blamed the end of the tenuous Israel-Hamas cease-fire on Hamas. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has even called on the Arab world to stop using the U.N. as a forum for blaming Israel alone for the fighting, surely a first. Those leaders understand what many in the West have yet to grasp: The Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state but about preventing the region's takeover by radical Islam. Indeed, Palestinian statehood is impossible without neutralizing the extremists who oppose any negotiated solution.

If Israel successfully overthrows Hamas in Gaza, it would strengthen anti-Iranian forces throughout the Mideast and signal the region that Iranian momentum can be reversed. The Israeli military operation could begin the process that topples a terrorist regime that seized power in the Gaza Stripin 2007 and has fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli neighborhoods.

And whether or not Hamas is ultimately overthrown, Israel can achieve substantial goals. The first is an absolute cease-fire. Previous cease-fires allowed Hamas to launch two or three rockets a week into Israel and to smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels. To obtain a cease-fire now, the international community should recognize Israel's right to respond to any aggression over its international border and monitor the closure of Hamas' weapons-smuggling tunnels.

Above all, the goal is to ensure that Hamas is unable to proclaim victory and thereby enhance Iranian prestige in the Arab world.

Yet even those limited goals are far from guaranteed. An earlier opportunity to check Iran -- during Israel's war against Hezbollah in 2006 -- was squandered through a combination of Israeli incompetence and international pressure. Hezbollah manipulated the Western media by grossly inflating the number of civilian casualties and even "recycling" corpses from one bombed site to another.

The international community responded by imposing a cease-fire before Israel could achieve its goals and installing a peacekeeping force that has since allowed Hezbollah to more than double its prewar arsenal. Though the Israeli army killed a quarter of Hezbollah's troops and destroyed its headquarters, Israel was widely perceived as the loser. The winner was Iran.

Israel learned the bitter lesson of Lebanon. For the last two years, the Israeli army has gone back to basics, rigorously training and restoring its fighting spirit. Israeli leaders drew on that spirit to attack Hamas bases in one of the most impressive airstrikes since the 1967 Six-Day War.

Yet the question remains whether the international community has learned its Lebanon lesson, or will once again allow the jihadists to win.

Hamas is attempting to portray the Israeli invasion as a war against the Palestinian people. Television viewers are being presented with heartbreaking images of dead and injured children and supposedly indiscriminate devastation. Palestinian doctors claim that Israel has blocked the supply of vital medicines, and humanitarian organizations warn of imminent starvation. In fact, many of those claims are exaggerated.

Though civilians have, tragically, been hurt, about three-quarters of the 400 Palestinians killed so far have been gunmen -- an impressive achievement given that Hamas fires rockets from apartments, mosques and schools and uses hospitals as hide-outs.

Israel has recently allowed nearly 200 truckloads of food and medicine to enter Gaza, even under shellfire. It is in Israel's urgent interest to minimize civilian suffering and forestall international criticism. For that same reason, Hamas welcomes the suffering of Palestinian civilians. According to a BBC report on Dec. 30, dozens of ambulances were dispatched by Egypt to its border with Gaza, only to remain empty because, according to Egyptian authorities, Hamas wasn't allowing wounded Palestinians to leave.

The international community must not be duped again. If Hamas is successful in manipulating world opinion into the imposition of a premature cease-fire, it will proclaim victory and continue to stockpile long-range missiles for the next round of fighting. That would mean another triumph for Iran.

No less crucially, the international community must not allow the Gaza crisis to divert its attention from the imminent -- and ultimate -- threat of a nuclear Iran. Intelligence sources now measure that threat in months rather than years.

President-elect Barack Obama has declared his intention to confront Iran through diplomacy. Ideally, that process should begin in the aftermath of an Iranian defeat. If Israel is allowed to achieve its goals in Gaza, the Obama administration will be better poised to achieve its goals in Iran.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Michael B. Oren is a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center and a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University.

My Journal

Date: 11/07/08
Title: In Whom Have Confidence?
Scripture: Ps 146:3 Don't put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there. 4 When their breathing stops, they return to the earth, and in a moment all their plans come to an end. 5 But happy are those who have the God of Israel as their helper,...
Ps 147:10 The strength of a horse does not impress him; how puny in his sight is the strength of a man. 11 Rather, the LORD's delight is in those who honor him, those who put their hope in his unfailing love.


Observation: For some reason we so easily default to putting our trust, hope, confidence in man/people rather than in God. We don't say that we do, but our actions say otherwise. It seems that our faith extends only to a level of worship and belief. We're often happy to leave it there and put our confidence in man for most of our needs.

When we're sick it is simpler and easier to trust doctors and medicines. When we need finance or possessions we trust in sweat and toil.

I read also in the NT scripture today:
Mt 21:21 Then Jesus told them, "I assure you, if you have faith and don't doubt, you can do things like this and much more. You can even say to this mountain, `May God lift you up and throw you into the sea,' and it will happen. 22 If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."

Faith at times seems so foreign to us. Yet God has called us to live by it and to put ALL of our confidence in Him.

Application: God will require that His people live by faith. I must live by faith. Not just when it is convenient, but every day. In the small things and in the large. I must teach people to do likewise before God removes the things we love to trust in.

Prayer: Lord, help me change defaults and walk in such a manner as to default to faith, confidence and soaring in the Spirit ... every day. Amen

Today's Journal

Date: 02/07/08
Title: "Prayer for a God Invasion"


Scripture: Isa 64:1 Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!

Observation:
Hear the cry of the prophet's heart here. I hear a groaning cry. A cry that is tired of religion and form. Here is a prayer that invokes an invasion of God upon the earth.

Whoever heard of mountains trembling? Perhaps during a volcanic eruption - but mountains usually represent grandeur, strength, even pride and arrogance. The scripture speaks of mountains being made low before the coming of the Lord.

Only God can make the mountains tremble! That is why the cry of this prayer is not for anything except the mighty power of God's own presence.

Application: This is the cry that I feel welling within me. In fact I feel and believe that this is the kind of prayer that God is causing to well up within His church worldwide.

We must give ourselves to this prayer. A prayer that firstly groans then cries out... Oh that heaven would invade us!

This prayer came from looking upon the desolation of the temple...
Isa 64:10 Your sacred cities have become a desert; even Zion is a desert, Jerusalem a desolation. 11 Our holy and glorious temple, where our fathers praised you, has been burned with fire, and all that we treasured lies in ruins.

Surely this depicts the state of the church in our day.

Prayer: Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!

Tribute to NZ's most famous person...

Sir Edmund Hillary was never able to say exactly how he came to be the first man to conquer Mt Everest.

Because it was there, was the best he could offer by way of explanation.

"I can't give you any fresh answers to why a man climbs mountains. The majority still go just to climb them," he once said.

Indeed, Sir Edmund never set out to be the first man to set foot on the top of the world.

As he explained one day, it just sort of happened.

"I never had a vision to climb Mt Everest. As with everything else it just more or less grew," he told the US Academy of Achievement in 1991 in an expansive interview about his life.

Imbued with an irrepressible sense of adventure – and an unshakable restlessness – he was drawn to mountaineering from a young age, regularly escaping into New Zealand's rugged terrain from the time he was 16.

"I was extremely restless, and being restless can be an unhappy sort of existence, even though it often stimulated me into getting involved in energetic activities," he said.

"I certainly never was a happy teenager. I was not lonely, but I didn't really have many friends, and I used to go on long walks.

"I was a very keen walker and, as I walked along the roads and tracks around this countryside area, I'd be dreaming. My mind would be miles away and I would be slashing villains with swords and capturing beautiful maidens and doing all sorts of heroic things, just purely in my dreams.

"I really have no idea why I wanted to keep dashing on in these ways. I realised that it wasn't the normal attitude of the majority of young people. They were more interested in going to the movies or the beach or something or other. I really wasn't all that great on that sort of stuff. I just wanted to get out in the hills."

As Hillary matured, his climbing pursuits became more serious.

"I got more competent and I climbed harder mountains (in New Zealand), and I made a number of first ascents and I had a year in the European Alps and I climbed there," he said.

"Then we decided we'd like to go off to the Himalayas. Not Everest – we went off to the Indian Gahwal Himalayas and we were pretty successful.

"We climbed a half-a-dozen new peaks of well over 20,000 feet, and it really wasn't until then that we read in the paper that the British had got permission to do a reconnaissance to the south side of Mt Everest through Nepal which, up until those days, had been completely closed to foreigners.

"The idea that 'Gee it would be fun to go along on that reconnaissance,' certainly entered my mind, and we contacted the organisers in London and two of us were invited from the expedition to join up with the party and go into the south side of Mt Everest.

"You know, it's almost like a football team. If you're pretty competent and if you don't make any grave errors, once you're in, you're in. You're sort of appointed next time."

The Everest reconnaissance was a success and the group went back the next year for more successful climbs.

"Then in '53 we were invited to join the summit attempt. It was a growing process and a learning process.

"Never, in my early days, did I ever think of attempting to reach the summit of Mt Everest."

But that was to be his fate on May 29, 1953 when Hillary and his mountain guide Tenzing Norgay stunned the world with their feat.

He wrote of the pair's final ascent to the top of the world: "Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.

"Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation – these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed," Hillary noted.

"But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar (high school) and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn't believe it."

The pair spent just 15 minutes on the summit, as they were running short of oxygen but took the time to take a series of photos as proof that they had, indeed, stood at the top of the world.

Sir Edmund later recalled his surprise at the huge international interest in their feat of "just climbing a mountain".

And he never placed himself among top mountaineers.

"I don't regard myself as a cracking good climber. I'm just strong in the back. I have a lot of enthusiasm and I'm good on ice," he once said.

While those 15 minutes defined his life and made him a hero and inspired climbers all over the world, humility was Sir Edmund's constant companion.

"I still regard adventure pretty much as a hobby to tell you the honest truth, and I think this approach to it keeps one refreshed almost," he said in 1991.

". . . I've always regarded myself in a sense as a competent amateur."

Humble as he was, there were hints too at the pride he kept so well hidden.

"I really like to enjoy my adventures. I get frightened to death on many, many occasions but, of course, fear can be, also, a stimulating factor.

"When (it) is a stimulating factor, then I think you can often extend yourself far more than you ever believed possible. And instead of being just a mediocre person, for a moment anyway, you become someone of considerable competence."

2008 - The Year Ahead

Christians everywhere need to consecrate the year ahead to the Lord. A re-consecration of lives is important.

I believe that this year will see some big progressions in the Church of Jesus Christ. It is a time to be vigilant and dedicated. It is time for the church to move into a new level of walking in the Spirit and living in the Spirit.

The time for " doing church" is over - it's time to seek the Lord in earnest and when we do, he will come and reign righteousness on us.

Isaiah 52:11 Go now, leave your bonds and slavery. Put Babylon behind you, with everything it represents, for it is unclean to you. You are the LORD’S holy people. Purify yourselves, you who carry home the vessels of the LORD. 12You will not leave in a hurry, running for your lives. For the LORD will go ahead of you, and the God of Israel will protect you from behind.

Security from Yesterday. “… God requires an account of what is past” Ecclesiastes 3:14And I know that whatever God does is final. Nothing can be added to it or taken from it. God’s purpose in this is that people should fear him. 15Whatever exists today and whatever will exist in the future has already existed in the past. For God calls each event back in its turn.
At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise when we remember our yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God’s grace tends to be lessened by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present.

“Leave your bonds of slavery. Put Babylon behind you, with everything it represents, for it is unclean to you.” This then, is the determination to turn from sin, bondage – as you turn God’s grace becomes “amazing.”

Security for Today. “You will not leave in a hurry … .” As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, forgetful delight, nor with the quickness of impulsive thoughtlessness. But let us go out with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us. Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us. It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ.

Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.

Security for Tomorrow. “… the LORD will go ahead of you … .” This is a gracious revelation—that God will send His forces out where we have failed to do so. He will keep watch so that we will not be tripped up again by the same failures, as would undoubtedly happen if He were not our “rear guard.” And God’s hand reaches back to the past, settling all the claims against our conscience.

So, let us come to the altar of consecration. For two reasons:-

1) to Consecrate ourselves here – consecrate = to dedicate, to set apart.
2) To receive His blessing, His Holy Spirit anointing for service.

Like a volunteer soldier – first he steps forward and signs up. Next he is equipped.