Recovery from Long-Term Opiates?
Dear Reader (there is only one of you),
I was unable to finish the post I had planned for this week.
It was an extremely exciting week here at Casa de LessFlexible. Maybe all my dreams will come true? No comment yet, but sometimes I cannot believe my luck... This week I have been busy, getting close to almost having the life that I want.
I have another dream I will just throw out there now:
What if I could have a drink with Justin Bieber and Post Malone!
Are they underage? I hear they are friends. That would be E-P-I-C.
You must stay focused on your dreams.
Be sure to dream crazy big.
You should have heard Clippers owner, Microsoft billionaire, Steve Ballmer shout at us (he said techies are a better crowd than we were! Booo!) at this Clippers Season Ticket Holder Old Time Church Revival at The Novo by Microsoft Theater in DTLA, we recently attended. I swear absolutely nothing over-the-top was said about how far this team can go! Yeah!!
Electrifying evening of grandiose goals.
But aren’t we all not-too-secretly glad that Austin Rivers is gone! And isn’t Pat Beverly is a refreshing slice of awesome? So maybe in some parallel universe, Steve Ballmer’s dreams could possibly be! Yeah!!
The Clippers leave this spotlight on all the time, day and night, at their training center in Culver City, because one day it will be shine on the NBA Championship banner, right? Can I get an amen!
I have another crazy awesome dream:
What if I got physical rehabilitation with a professional sports team!
The day Mr. Pennington took that pic, I got close.
I sat in the lounge where DeAndre Jordan used to sip a green smoothie and play X-box. I did a row on the same TRX Blake Griffin used to use.
Then I really drooled... over the $300,000 antigravity treadmill which I bet my feet and knees would love-love-love! Hidden back there, they have a basketball hoop in a pool with an elevator platform and a cryotherapy chamber. And OMG all the exercise equipment! Heaven! My joints felt better just being there. No pics allowed in rehab area.
Sometimes I start writing a post, and it turns into three or four posts, which is terribly annoying, as I already have a huge backlog. Then I’ve got to go through my 15,000+ selfies to properly illustrate my points. It is a lot of work, being a self-absorbed blogger. I highly recommend it. Especially if you have nothing better to do.
Sometimes writing gets very emotional and I have to put my head down on the desk and cry while my fish swim around, comforting me, as happened with my planned post this week. I just didn’t have the emotional energy to finish it.
Oh, bad news I should tell you, Fat Tomato was assassinated. We went on a trip, and when we came back, a strange small blob of white cartilage (was it?) was sinking in the tank, Fat Tomato was no where to be found, and the vacation food pellet had hardly been touched. What happened? I think I know.
Fat Tomato’s ego had become unbearable after I told him the post about him went viral. Five humans clicked on that page, and what does he know about human population? I bought a couple of live aquatic plants to celebrate. Fat Tomato nearly burst with excitement when I dropped those plants in the tank. He immediately took up residence on a leaf and sat there, no longer exploring the tank, no longer swimming into the water return. Even worse, he chased away his BFF Striped Dawg Fish whenever he came by to hang. Fame changes you.
We all remember the French Revolution. Here I am at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris.
Excesses of wealth and narcissistic abuses of power only lead to revolution and the guillotine. And so it went with Fat Tomato: dethroned from his leaf and pecked to death by his aquariummates as soon as the humans packed their bags and piled into an Uber. I hope Fat Tomato did not suffer much. It seems the other fish had a fantastic meal.
I got a new fish this week. That kept me busy, too.
Meet Phat 2Mato
Phat 2Mato and Striped Dawg Fish at the leaf where Fat Tomato lived his last days.
Phat 2Mato is no Fat Tomato. He is so dumb he cannot find the surface to get the food I drop in. Not everyone in life can be a superstar. Perhaps I will grow to admire something about him? If I am honest, I might wonder if it is my grief over Fat Tomato that makes me dislike him.
I have another outrageous dream:
What if I recovered from long-term opiates!
In my two hour session today, my therapist suggested I stop suppressing the totally obvious rage I have about that chapter of my life: being on long-term opiates, getting off long-term opiates, and the post acute withdrawal from hell that never quite ended. “And maybe even talking about your anger could help others?” she suggested, while I sat on her living room couch, playing with her cats.
“No thanks,” I said. “I prefer my defense mechanism of pretending everything is so fabulous.”
No one tell her I wrote this post, okay?
I am and have been F*CKING FURIOUS about what prescription opiates did to me. I try to suppress it because I don’t really have anyone to be mad at and I guess it all worked out okay because here I am now working on my fabulous blog, so whatever. Why waste energy complaining about what cannot be undone? Life is horribly unfair, duh, and suffering is everywhere. I am lucky to have gotten off that stuff alive. Plus I would never never never dump my feelings on a doctor because my appointment time is too valuable. But I am so mad, it makes my head hurt! Or does it hurt from that black hole the long-term opiates left?
I mean, I just feel so rotten. I do not score on the depression screening, although, as my psychiatrist pointed out, maybe that is because I do not know any different. I would never ever ever not get out of bed and do something if I had even one drop of energy because the devil of EDS is always chasing me.
I am proudly off the charts on the anxiety screening, but that is just EDS, right? Who could be this relaxed and have so much anxiety? Only one of us! Have you met the AnxietyZebra?
There is new research on opiates and the human brain.
It blew my mind.
Pub Med junkies, get out your tweezers and medical dictionary. You will want to take this apart.
This article is the first description I ever read of the opiate induced emotional hell I have been in. PS - it never ended. Even I couldn’t quite put it into words, but here, they did, wrapped up in all that cute medical jargon.
I also really like that this article asks if recovery from long-term opiates is even possible, because I have been running around Los Angeles since the end of my titrate off morphine and Vicodin 4+ years ago, paying doctors to listen to me ask that question, which they cannot answer but it sure does make them uncomfortable.
Autistics and Fibryomyalgia Victims, you are going to appreciate the research about you in here, too, in addition to all you heroin and oxy addicts, and those of us Ehlers-Danlos Sufferers who got steered down the road of prescription opiates by doctors who only wanted to ease our suffering and had no idea the prison they were putting us in.
You will want to read it all yourself. Several times through. To catch every nuance.
I have a lot to say about what an amazing drug naltrexone is, the ways I have dosed it and what happened, with the advice of a very kind of doctor who does not run from the room but tries to understand my EDS problems.
So hard to find a doctor who can take on EDS problems.
Those posts are buried in my backlog but coming. Naltrexone is now my favorite drug, along with coffee and Ascor.
Also, per this paper, you had better get yourself some psychoanalysis because you are going to have to get your defense mechanisms dismantled so you can feel your emotions so your internal opiate system can heal. Yes, all of you: addicts, pain disease sufferers and autistics.