I'm a 21 Year old Male and I have just finished up receiving chemotherapy and radiation therapy for Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. During the course of this treatment, I was on many various painkillers, including Percocet, Vicodin, Oxycontin, (IV)Dilaudid, Duragesic Fentanyl Patches, and (IV)Morphine once, mostly, though, I was on Vicodin 7.5/750. One of the things I enjoyed about the painkillers was the feeling of euphoria they produced in addition to relieving pain, Because of this there were a number of times I experimented with them and combined them with other medicines that I had been prescribed, such as ativan or hydroxyzine.
About a month ago, my oncologist gave me one last prescription to wean off the Vicodin over a 4 week period. I was doing realy well at first, there were a lot of things distracting me during the period so I was easy not to think about the pills. But I hit a dry spot around two weeks ago where there was almost nothing going on at the moment, and though I was down to about half - 2 halves a day, my stupid brain figured why the hell not have a good time. A few days later I did this again, then again and again, and before I knew it I was back to where I was before.
This past weekend me and my family went away to visit some relatives, I brought the pills with me--stupid in hindsight I probably could have actually gotten decently close to getting off the damn things--and continued to abuse them up there, this time with alcohol, since I tend to drink a lot when I'm with that half of my family.
After we got back from the trip I realized I had about 7 pills left, enough for a week if I took them once a day. But my impatience got the best of me and they were gone in 2 days. Yesterday was the literally first day I've gone with no types of opiate in the house, and the cravings were fairly intense. I ended up settling them down with Ativan, lots and lots of Ativan. Basically half a mg for every hour I still felt a craving, ended up having about 5.5mg or so of Ativan, and I also had a glass or possibly two of wine, since my memory of last night is a bit fuzzy. So I woke up this morning after blacking out at some point from all that **** and had some slight cravings, which i took about 2mg ativan for. Eventually all my cravings went away and I had thought that I was past the worst part of it. Throughtout the day I've started feeling more and more tired. So I go to the bathroom and for whatever reason I was feelin around my skin and found that I had placed a Fentanyl patch on myself at some point during the previous twenty four hours.
And now I'm posting this from work, afraid of what will happen when the patch comes off or wears off... I told the palliative care doctor I was doing great with the tapering, I don't realy want to go back there and tell him that I ****** up when I've barely been doing any of the things he's been telling me to do...
Not really sure what kind of advice I'm asking for, I'm just not in a position that I feel like talking to people I know about.