20 & addicted to opiates...Please help me.

[brit2006]

So I am definitely new here & have no idea where to start. I'm assuming that most of you were the same way in the beginning. I'm 20 years old, I'll be 21 in June. I'm not even legal to drink yet, however I have been snorting percs, oxy's, and any other opiate I could get my hanRAB on since I was 14. I have been addicted to pain pills since I was 14 years old. I hate drinking and I've never even tried a cig, but for some reason, pain pills have got me heavily hooked & addicted. I cant function without them. I try, but I just give up by the end of the day. I have been snorting around 6 perc 30's a day, which is a lot less than what I am used to anyway. About a year ago I was snorting 10-15 percocet 30's a day. I'm scared that I'm going to die if I don't stop, I dont think my body can handle much more. My family knows but they think that I am clean now. I don't know how, they do. Maybe they just choose to ignore it? I am in so much debt that I dont even want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work because I feel like it is a lost cause. I feel hopeless, but more than anything, I feel alone. I went to my first NA meeting a week ago & it helped so much just to get it out. But the sad part is that I was so high during the meeting that I kept nodding off. The longest that I have been clean since I was 14 is a week and a half. That felt like death to me. I took suboxone for a week a few months ago and it was a miracle for me. It was AMAZING. I only took 1 a day which I never thought would help, but it did. However, suboxone is so expensive and the street price where I live is $15-$20 a piece for suboxone. Even with it being so high, I would buy it if I could find it. It's very rare to hear of. I know that I can quit. I truly believe that with all of my heart. I am just so scared of what is to come. I was in a car wreck last Deceraber and it crushed my L1, which controls the nerves in your legs. So the tingling/burning/crawling sensation that people feel when going through withdrawl is multiplied for me--& as it was for most of you, that is the absolute WORST part. How can I try to control that or stop that? Someone please help me or I'm going to die. Sorry for the long post but I already feel 10x better. Thank you.

 

[pingeye2]

brit it is heartbreaking to hear your story and I feel for you, just know that as bad as it seems and as overwhelming as it seems it is never too deep of a hole to clirab out of. Think of it as a puzzle, when you are doing a puzzle you cant put it together all at once, you have to put it together piece by piece and when you start the puzzle it is just a bunch of shattered pieces and it seems like it would be imposible to get back together but you simply put one piece together at a time and before you know it you are making progress.

this is how I approached my addiction to oxycontin. I too was in debt and I always would spend money on pills before my car payment or my rent payment or credit card payment, and before I knew it I was in a lot of debt and I had creditors calling my phone every day. I felt that I was stronger than the addiction and I could just quit cold turkey, I tried numerous times and sometimes I would make it as long as a week and other times I wouldnt even make it until the afternoon. I had such feelings of shame and hoplessness, I felt that I had buried myself so deep that it wasnt even worth it to clirab out of the hole, but then a miracle happened. I had never heard of suboxone and I was not sure what it did, but i heard an advertisemetn on the radio and I looked into it and I feel that it saved my life.

I know that it is expensive to buy off the street and on top of being expensive it is also imposible to predict if it will always be available, sometimes it might not be available when you need it the most and your only option to avoid getting sick wil be drugs. Also when buying it off of the street you cannot maintain a constant program where you eventualy taper down your dose and try to get off of it. When you depend on drug dealers to get your suboxone dose, you will not have a succesful program.

My advice to you is to look into treatment online, if you look hard enough there are places where you can enter your zip code and they will tell you what doctors are in your area that are prescribing suboxone. I know that this is expensive especailly if you do not have insurance, I dont think you mentioned if you have health insurance or not. If you do not have insurance then let me ask you this, if you are able to afford the drugs that you are using than I am sure you can afford to pay for a doctor, there are doctors that I have heard of that charge 100-200 per visit, of course this may be even cheaper depending on the doctor. As far as the suboxone prescription goes, for a time I did not have health insurance and the suboxone cost me about 7.50 for an 8mg pill, at that time I was taking 4mg a day so one pill was a 2 day supply for me. That works out to be about 3.75 a day, I would go to the pharmacy every 2 days and simply buy one pill. When you think of the this cost compared to what I would pay for the drugs that I was abusing (70.00 a day) it really is worth it.

So this is my advice to you. I know it seems bad right now, but you have to try and take baby steps. As far as your debt is concerned just try to chip away at it withouth getting overwhelmed, before you know it a month will go by and then two months will go by and you will realize how much easier it is to pay your bills when you are no longer abusing drugs. I will be rooting for you and I am sure everyone else here will also, keep us posted on your progress and nuraber one dont be ashamed of yourself, in one form or antoher everyone here has dealt with addiction probelms and it doesnt make you a weak person, as a matter of fact most recovering addicts are stronger than most people because they have fought hard against addiction and won. Remeraber that you can beat this, and you can use other peoples success as motivation. Good luck!