Name: The agony of opioid withdrawal — and what doctors should tell patients about it | Travis Rieder
Uploaded: 2020-07-03T03:46:05.000Z
Duration: 14 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

"How much pain medication are you taking?"

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

That was the very routine question that changed my life.

about two months after I nearly lost my foot

So I was back in my orthopedic surgeon's office

"About 115 milligrams oxycodone," I responded.

I was nonchalant, having given this information to many doctors

You need to think about getting off the meds now."

In two months of escalating prescriptions,

this was the first time that anyone had expressed concern.

Indeed, this was the first real conversation I'd had

What happened next really came to define my entire experience of medical trauma.

I was given what I now know is a much too aggressive tapering regimen,

according to which I divided my medication into four doses,

dropping one each week over the course of the month.

The result is that I was launched into acute opioid withdrawal.

The early stages of withdrawal feel a lot like a bad case of the flu.

had increased pain in my rather mangled foot;

I developed trouble sleeping due to a general feeling of restlessness.

That's because I didn't know what was coming.

my internal thermostat seemed to go haywire.

I would sweat profusely almost constantly,

and yet if I managed to get myself out into the hot August sun,

I might look down and find myself covered in goosebumps.

The restlessness that had made sleep difficult during that first week

now turned into what I came to think of as the withdrawal feeling.

It was a deep sense of jitters that would keep me twitching.

But perhaps the most disturbing was the crying.

At the time they felt like a neural misfire,

Sadiye became concerned, and she called the prescribing doctor

who very helpfully advised lots of fluids for the nausea.

When she pushed him and said, "You know, he's really quite badly off,"

the doctor responded, "Well, if it's that bad,

he can just go back to his previous dose for a little while."

Now, there's no way that I was going to go back on my previous dose

unless I had a better plan for making it through the withdrawal next time.

And so we stuck to riding it out and dropped another dose.

thanks to the jitters that would keep me writhing all night.

The tears that had felt like a misfire before

Several times a day I would get that welling in my chest

and with them came desperation and hopelessness.

I began to believe that I would never recover

either from the accident or from the withdrawal.

Sadiye got back on the phone with the prescriber

and this time he recommended that we contact our pain management team

and we were shocked when nobody would speak with us.

The receptionist who answered the phone advised us

that the pain management team provides an inpatient service;

although they prescribe opioids to get pain under control,

they do not oversee tapering and withdrawal.

Furious, we called the prescriber back and begged him for anything --

"my initial advice to you is clearly bad,