They Taste " Terrible" -those suboxones

Hi, I am brand new to this site or any site like this, and I am sure glad that there are places like this out there!
I reinjured my back about 10 years ago so severly that I could not even put on my socks or walk one step without excruciating pain.
I am a poker dealer and have been for 28 years now. I originally injured my back swinging a golf club 22 years ago. I went to a chiropractor, a shiatzu doctor but it took 3 months to get 90% better. I suffered around 6 times a year for about a week straight each time my back went out for 12 years straight.(And when my back went out , each time, it was brutally painful and I was helpless) One of these times my back went out around the time I was dealing the World Series of Poker in 2003, I had a friend who had a serious neck injury and offered me a 500/500 hydrocodone. IT WAS AMAZING!!!! FROM NOT EVEN BEING ABLE TO WALK, I WAS SKIPPING, AND JUMPING MY WAY TO WORK, ABOUT A HALF HOUR OF TAKING THIS PAIN PILL. And it lasted about 5 hours. I was in shock that there was something out there that could completely take away my pain, and I also felt pretty good. (That is why I call them "Happies", because I felt an inner loving feeling taking them) I cannot completely explain it, but I found myself talking and helping complete strangers, and even people I didn't care for. The hydrocodone did not make me dopey or anything like that, quite the contrary. I felt strong, quick and sharp with my movements. I was dealing poker, better than ever!! I bought two pills a day from two different people to help me get through this poker tournament. And, without them, I couldn't have endured the pain.
Okay, 3 months later my back went out again, and I was crippled once again. I contacted my friend with the neck injury, and I ended up paying for a new doctor visit for him and I would split the pain pills with him. ( I even paid for the prescription) This time we got 180 norcos. They were twice as powerful as 500/500. They were 10mg. I used these up in the course of a couple of months.
Now that I have found a miracle drug, I wanted to have some for myself for emergencies when my back went out in the future.
I met this doctor at a casino, who was hooked on blackjack. He was willing to write a prescrition for anything I wanted for $40 with 3 refills, so that he would have gambling money. I was soon getting a lot of pain pills stock piled up for emergencies. Because I had so many now, and they did relieve all my aches and pains, and they made feel "Happy", I started taking 2 and 3 at a time three or four times a day. Finally the doctor was arrested . He was 79 years old and I guess he didn't care anymore, but I could not get anymore pain pills from him and I had a 12 a day Norco 10/300 habit. So, I went doctor shopping. Let me set the record straight.
I am 52 years old today, but all my life I have been racing motorcycles, surfing, playing basketball, and mountain biking etc...
I have always been very athletic , and I have had over 20 broken bones, and my knees are shot. I saw an orthopedic surgeon 6 months ago, and he said I need to have both knees replaced. My back was the only injury that overwelmed my body.
For the last 5 years I have increased my norco intake to around 24 a day. I was taking 4 at a time because my tolerance level was that high for this medication. That's right, I have been taking 24 pills, the 10/300 Norcos for 5 years now everyday.
I was diagnosed with heart disease 6 years ago. (Cardiomyopathy-hypertropic, sick sinus syndrome, and my heart has been in afibleration for over a year now. I quit drinking alcohol 6 years ago , because my heart would go balistic when I did drink.
I smoke 2 packs of cigerattes per day and have for 34 years now.
There are side effects to taking hydrocodone for me. I have lost alot of my sexual desires. I know that taking this many Norcos per day is very bad for your liver.
On the hydrocodones I have been able to remain athletic, I played doubles tennis for 5 years now, I have gone snow skiing 5 winters in a row about 15 times a season, and I have got my golf game down to a 6 handicap. Not bad uH?
Without these pills I would never have been able to do all these sports, and even with them I only suffered some mild pain, especially after skiing for 4-5 hours each time I went.
Last year, I approached a new doctor and told him that I was taking 24 pain pills a day, and he prescibed 2- 8mg Suboxones per day. I wanted to reduce the amount of pain pills that I was taking each day. I went one week without taking any Norcos at all, and just taking the Suboxones twice a day. I was told that I would go through withdrawls . (From friends) but the Suboxone did what it was supposed to do. I stayed home thta week on the Suboxones and I did no sports. On the 8th day, I went to play tennis with my buddies, but I couldn't take the pain. My knees were not strong enough. So, I stopped taking the Suboxone, saved the ones I was going to take, and went back to my Norcos. Three months ago I quit my job, and made a plan to move to Las Vegas, and get back on the Suboxones and see if after a long period of not taking them, I could get to a normal dosage all over again. Plus, I want to have my sexual appetite back. I am on day 2 now on 'Suboxones and I doing okay, my back is real sore, which is odd, because i haven't had any problems in over a year a half(and back then it was minor, and the Norcos made it go away without issue)
I am torn between being able to lead a sporting life with Norcos, or a sexual life without them, with no sports -hardly
I have decided to tough it out, and endure the pain as much as possible, stay on the Suboxone and get my body healed. Sort of.
It's a catch 22 situation for me. I was told that if I had the knee replacements, that my knees would not be any better than they are today, and I wouldn't be able to do the sports I love, but I would not be bone on bone and in as much pain as today, Kraig

Hello and welcome to the forum. I'm not really sure if you're asking should you continue to take Norcos or stay on Suboxone, so I will share my experience and you can take from it what you will.

I'm 36 years old and a mother of 3 wonderful children. Like you, I wasn't looped when I took my pain pills...quiet the opposite. I had taken them for so long that I needed them to function...hence the reason I am an addict. I was on rediculous amounts of oxycodone and I allowed my need to feed that habit destroy nearly everything in my life. At first, I accomplished what I wanted to by taking them, much as you've described. But addiction is a progressive, deadly disease that can't be cured. It starts out good then gets horrible. You say you have a choice to stay on Norco and play sports, etc. or take the Suboxone and have sex. I would say that you have a choice as well....you can choose to deal with your addiction now and stop the inevitable downward spiral, i.e. you are doctor shopping and getting illegal scripts now and it will progress to much worse criminal activities if you continue....or you can choose to continue on and face what addiction always ends with, jails, institutions, or death. Only you can decide where your bottom is and in my experience people only stop using when the pain of using becomes too much for them to bear. If you are at that point, then get into a treatment program and start to work on recovery. If not you will either get to the point that you want to stop because it hurts too much to continue on or you will continue in active addiction until you die. I hate to sound this way, but you don't have a choice between sex with sub or no sex with norco. Your health is already deteriorating and the choice you have to make is whether you want to live or die period.

Suboxone is a tool that is great to stop withdrawal symptoms and allow people to work on the real problems that started them using drugs in the first place. I'm sorry but the way I read your post it sounds as if you have no idea of the actual magnitude of addiction and of your habit with Norcos. To say that taking 24, 10/500s a day is rough on your liver is an understatement to say the least, and sounds like classic denial to me. Do you realize that the tylenol alone could kill you at any moment. You act like it's a joke, but it's not. It's life and death. Until you receive what those of us in recovery call the gift of desperation, suboxone won't really do much other than keep you going physically. If you don't do something more than replace one drug with the other, you will still be living in active addiction and the bonds that entails. Please get into a comprehensive recovery program and learn to deal with life on life's terms. I'm honestly not trying to come down on you or anything like that, I just want you to understand that you have a disease that will kill you unless you get serious about treating it.

You can continue to do what you're doing, and unfortunately the pain you've experienced is only the tip of the ice berg. Or just for today, you can decide to do something different. You can decide that instead of just taking a chemical to feel better, you want to learn how to live a better life. If that's your goal suboxone is a wonderful tool to help. But if all you want to do is take something that will make your pain go away, you are selling yourself way short and it really won't matter whether you take hydrocodone or suboxone. Addiction isn't really about the substance you are injesting, it's about how you react to and deal with life's challenges. Do you want to try to face life as it comes or do you want to continue to numb yourself and settle for just being out of pain. I'm sorry if this seems harsh but I really do believe you have a very important decision to make and it's not whether to take one drug or the other, it's whether you want to try to do something to end the endless cycle of your addiction. If you want to try recovery, I will help you in any way possible, but if all you are looking for is approval for you leaning on some drug for the rest of your life, I'm afraid there is nothing I can do to help you but pray that you will get into recovery some day. We don't take suboxone to get our body healed, we take suboxone to try to heal our spirits from this disease, the fact that we don't have to go through the withdrawals of stopping all opiates is a bonus or at least that's my experience.

If you want to recover from this disease, I'm here to help and support you. But if all you want to do is treat suboxone treatment like just another pain pill then I wish you luck and I will keep you in my prayers. I hope you choose life.

Hello and welcome to the forum

Thats quite a story you told !

I can sure relate to having gone from 1 or 2 pills a day (I also called them Happy pills) to 20-30 a day. I would get my script of 150 Norcos per month. If I picked up my script on a Friday, they could easily be gone by Tuesday. Give or take a day.

So you can see your not alone here.

I had a similar situation with pain. After back surgeries and taking so many pills and towards the end, not knowing if it was pain from wanting more pills or was it my real back pain. Surprisingly enough, once I started on the Suboxone, my pain decreased by 90%.
Now I work out at the gym and I'm trying very hard to get stronger and build up muscle and build my core up, and see if that helps do. So far, its amazing.
I'm on 12mg of Suboxon and I couldnt be happier.

If you noticed we have chat 2xs a week, we'd love for you to join us and get to know you better. Its Monday and Thursday nights 7:30pm EST. If those nights dont work for you let me know, we'll see what we can do, we are working on coming up with a meeting during the day perhaps, and maybe on the weekend too.

Again, welcome, we are happy to have you here !

I wanted to say that I too can identify with the progression of use that you describe. I in no way was trying to attack you. I just hope that you can understand and see that you are selling yourself short by only using suboxone to relieve the physical stuff. We are all here to help you in any way we can. I was just a little confused by your post. I'm not sure if you are looking to end your addiction to opiates or substitute one for the other. Like blue mentioned, once I started to get the opiates out of my system, my pain became much more manageable. I have several ruptured discs and a disease called demylinating disease that is similar to ms except the lesions only occur in my brain which causes severe headaches. I can manage all of it with ibuprofen now. Taking large amounts of opiates over long periods of time screws up our brain chemistry, and while suboxone is a type of opiate, it seems to allow the brain chemistry to start to return to normal, by that I mean that we start to produce our natural pain fighters again. Give yourself a chance to level off and don't switch back and forth from suboxone to norco. I'm sure that you will realize soon enough that there is a whole new world out there waiting to be enjoyed. I hope you will choose to allow yourself the full benefit of suboxone treatment. I look forward to getting to know you better. Once again, if I came off mean or judgemental I didn't mean it that way. I just take addiction very seriously. I've buried too many people because of this disease and sometimes I can be a little intense when I think someone's life is at stake.

Welcome Happies
You are not alone as you can see. Your story is like so many of ours. Opiates in the beginning relieves pain so that we are able to function. Somewhere down the line that starts to lead in a different direction and it starts to relieve other pains. Both physical and emotional. We feel strength and have energy that seems to come on out of nowhere and we can do things we couldn't do in the past. Such as talking to people we don't know or didn't even like before. We are able to get our work done with time to spare and the list goes on- until the day we start to feel like crap and have to take them just to make it through the day.
For me by the time I got to the point to taking them just to make it through the day I had already blown through so many doctors that I couldn't find one to even see me as a patient who wasn't drug seeking. Doctor's knew my name so I started going out of town. At one point I had moved out of state, way out of state and was traveling once a month just to pick up my prescription and go back home which was over 1,000 miles away. Seem impossible? It is the truth. I had a doctor but moved down south and every month I traveled just to pick up that prescription. I did what I thought I had to do at the time. Looking back I can't believe that I had gone to that extreme. All I really wanted was to be out of pain and be able to feel good, work and get along with other people. Going to extremes to get medication.
I thought I could get to a point where I could also lower my dose to a point that I could handle it. Not over take it and at the same time continue on with my life.
Eventually the harsh reality hit me. I would never be able to control the amount of opiates that went into my body. Ever time I tried I would slowly start to increase my dose. Mentally I would tell myself that if I took another pill I would feel better.
I was an addict. And it sucked.
No amount of will power could help me control my use and the sooner I admitted that to myself the better off I would be. I'd like to be able to say that I had an overnight revelation but that's not the way it happened.
Over time I started to feel bad even while taking pills. No amount could make me feel good. I started to take them just to get through the day. Forger about controlling pain I needed to just make it through another day.
I was tired and beat when I decided to get serious about stopping. I knew the only way to do that was to stop altogether. No more trying to control taking opiates. I had to say no for good.
I made several appointments for treatment but at the last minute I would back out because I knew if I went in I would have to make an agreement with myself to not ever take another pill.

Suboxone is a tool. It won't cure you but it will help stop the withdrawal and cravings to take pills. It helps us get a handle on what needs to be done in order to save ourselves from ourselves.
We are here for you anytime.
Anytime that you have a question, please don't hesitate to ask. That is what we are here for. We are not here to judge you, only to support and share out experience.

I still have some crappy days when I am in pain but I would rather feel that pain then be where I once was.

You talked about all of the physical things you can do while you are taking hydrocodone. Maybe all of those pills are covering up some injuries that you don't realize you have. You need to give your body some time to heal and go from there. There is nothing wrong with being active not by no means. Take time, take care of yourself.
You have landed here because you have questions and probably need the support. Now that your here, please stick around.
Dee

Hello Happie555,

I just wanted to post to you and see how you are doing.
You posted a week ago and we haven't heard back from you.

Just wanted to let you know we are here for you and we do care.

If you see this, I hope you can let us know how you are doing now.

Take care and be well,

Blue

Hi Once Again,
I've been on Light at the end of the Tunnel site now for 10 days, and on Suboxone for 10 days as well. First off, again I want to thank all those who have taken the time to write to me with their experiences , advice and concerns. It is important for some reason to me to try to understand the path I have chosen, and what direction I want to be headed in.
I started 10 days ago on Suboxone , taking 3- 8mg pills per day. That was for 2 days. On day 3 ,I have cut my dosage down to 2 pills per day and that seemed to be enough to work for me. In fact the last 2 days, I have taken one full pill in the morning and around the late afternoon I now take just a half a pill. (Total now 1 1/2 pills per day.
For those who don't know me, I was taking 24 Norcos per day, everyday without fail (the 10mg yellow or white ones) I have doing this for around 6 or 7 years up until 10 days ago. I have decided that I want a different life for me. Taking all that many hydrocodones per day, I was slowly losing my sexual desires. Plus, the fact that this is a ridiculous amount of pills to take each and everyday, with all the doctors, the money,the damage to my liver, the inablility to be able to travel for any length of time, because I needed to take 300-500 pills with me each time and went on vacation. Just an awful circle!!!
These past 10 days I have been in a tiny bit of pain. (Nothing that I cannot deal with), but I am regaining feeling in my body. Even my bowels are changing and going back to normal. I have slowly but surely been able to connect with my body once again. I even feel my sexual appetite coming back for me. (Let this be known, One of the main reasons I have decided to quit hydrocodones is that I was slowly losing my male desire to mate. ) I just didn't have the baby batter in my brain!!!
I am going to learn to face my pain like a man, and if that means for now that certain sports are out, then so be it. There is nothing more important to me than to have a reason for living. (And having , finding love is a pretty good one.)
I will make an effort to be there with everyone else on the chat nights. And, again thankyou Kraig-Happy to be off happies

Kraig,

Your post made me HAPPY !!!
I love to hear how well your doing after 10 days and that you took the steps you did
to get your life back (and your sex drive is an added bonus !!).

I look forward to seeing you in chat tonight if you can make it. It's a great way to meet others that are going through what you are. We have a few other new members that I'm sure you can relate to.

Once again, welcome to our forum, I cant wait to hear from you again !!

Blue

Let me first say that 3 weeks ago, I was where you are. I was taking as many 750 vics as I could afford,borrow, steal or lie to get. It gets worse. I started out with 3 a day and ended up with as many as 15 a day. I prayed for an answer everyyday. I couldnt sleep, eat or function without em. At the end, I coulnt do those things on em. I hated my self so bad. I heard a commercial on the radio and when I heard about sub I thought yeah right Im too bad nothing will kill the cravings..WRONG. I have been clean without the help of sub for 17 days. I have had no w/d what so ever. I feel great. I sleep all night and eat all day..lol. I love being me again. Without the help and support of the people on this site I would of never made it this far. Please take what they say to heart. If you properly dose from the beginning you have no reason to regret making the jump. I have actually joined in outside activities, went and visited people hell I have even ansewered the phone more. A month ago all I cared about what how many vics I had left when my drug guy was coming to town and If I should buy toilet paper or pills, let me say we used towel paper alot. Im being honest with you. Think about it like this, where do you see yourself in a year??? If you choose the pills, you will be chasing the money to chase the pills to make it through the day and then your day is over. Im here if you wanna join the chat tonight we will be here at 7:30 hope to see you then.

Happie,

Just wanted to check up on you and see how your feeling.

Let us know when you have time !
Hope your well.

Blue