I had a horrible experience with pain med addiction recently. I had emergency surgery and a new stoma (my third in under a year) due to a blocked intestine which perforated. I have very little memory of the days before and after the surgery, but I do remember being in intensive care and not being particularly uncomfortable. Later I was moved to another ward, and I had oxycodone through an IV in my arm, and a button to press when I wanted it. A pain specialist nurse came to see me, and she said I should push the button as often as I wanted; she said don't wait until you get pain, push the button at any discomfort, before it develops into pain. So I did. A couple of days of this, a different pain specialist nurse came to see me, and he said they should take the button away now. Since I didn't seem to have much pain, just a bit when I moved, I said fine.
Later that day, I wasn’t in much pain, but I was so uncomfortable, I couldn’t keep still, couldn’t sleep, and the restlessness was just unbearable. I know that sounds strange to say – that restlessness is unbearable, it sounds like something much more minor, but it really was terrible. Each minute dragged by like an hour. I begged them for the button back, and they gave it to me. And I felt so much better – I felt right again.
But the next day, they took it away again, saying I had to come off it some time. I wanted to cut down gradually, but they said no. Later in the day –same thing – I couldn’t stand it, and all I wanted was the button back. They called the pain specialist back again – the second one, not the woman who’d told me to use it as much as I liked. I told him I needed the button back, but when he asked me if I was in pain, I had to be honest and say no. He said if I wasn’t in pain, no painkillers. I told him I was addicted to the oxycodone, and that it was the withdrawal I couldn’t stand, but he was very uncaring and just told me I’d not been on it long enough to get withdrawal. The following night was awful, of the whole of that emergency admission, it was the hardest to get through, it felt like an eternity. If I’d known some way to get the oxycodone myself, I would have done it, and I think I drove the nurses up the wall asking them to give me something that would help.
Luckily the withdrawal did end. When I saw the pain specialist again, I told him that no matter what he said about my not being on it long enough to be addicted, I knew that I had been addicted. He really didn’t seem at all interested in what I had to say though.
I spoke to doctors about it though, and they said that the only thing with worse withdrawal than oxycodone was heroin. My codeine addiction was nothing to them – they were quite happy, once I was off the oxycodone to give me plenty of codeine and oral morphine. (When I was off everything, I realised I did actually have quite a bit of pain, but the morphine and codeine kept it under control. They gave me paracetamol too, though I’ve never noticed that actually having any effect on pain.) Because this surgery was an emergency, I didn’t discuss pain relief beforehand – by the time I was with it enough to know what was going on, I think I’d already been having IV oxycodone along with some other things for a couple of days. But if I ever do need surgery again, I honestly think I’d rather the pain than the withdrawal from painkillers. I’ve had many surgeries before and had no pain relief after them – my surgeon didn’t want to risk any opiates as they slow down bowel function; they did give me paracetamol, but as I said, I don’t count that as pain relief. The withdrawal was definitely worse.