• Sturgist@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    Yeeeesh! Yeah. That’s… that’s definitely a reason to get a new Dr.

    Half my life ago I was doing…alllllll the drugs. At levels and mixes that quite honestly should have killed me. Of the friend group I had at that time, 7 of us, there’s myself and one other that aren’t dead, or been in the clink for 15 years and looking at a minimum of another 20.
    When I saw the way I was headed, after the first of our group had died, and while I was serving a frankly very lenient non-custodial criminal sentence, I detoxed off coke/crack, meth and heroin (smoked not injected) all at the same time.
    I can tell you, not exactly how bad or in what way, it’s gonna suck. I really really feel for you. Just make sure you follow advice on how to safely come off it, there’s a lot of drugs, legal and not, that can easily kill you if you just stop taking them.
    Be safe fam.

    So I’m in the UK, and while there’s a bit of leeway to see a GP that’s not in your catchment area, the next closest to where I live is really far. Also it’s not really the GP’s fault. They’re required to follow protocol dictated by the NHS. He walked me through it. There’s a program, you punch in the symptoms, follow the questions down the flow chart, it gives you a likely cause. Things like the intensive testing I’ve been told to try and get? He’s really just not authorised to refer me for that. We’ve had quite a long chat about it, and it really just isn’t something that he’s able to do. That would have to be something that a specialist sends me for. I’ve been on the waiting list for 25 weeks, so only 20ish more to go.
    The results of decades of underfunded health care systems…

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      Hah yep - I actually tried cold turkey-ing it about a month ago, which was not awesome, and then tried titrating down by halving my dose, but ended up just going back to the original within about a week and a half. Mental state was very markedly better, but the withdrawal stuff was pretty balls. Going to be working with a new PCP, psych, and medication coordinator to get off that shit and find a better pharmaceutical balance that works for me.

      • Sturgist@lemmy.ca
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        16 minutes ago

        The aforementioned detox was cold turkey, and I absolutely get how hard it must have been. When you have your new team as support, it might be helpful to give a trusted person a bulk of your meds to be given back on an agreed schedule. Might make sticking to weening off easier. Knowing you only have a set amount until the next time would help me(personally) to not go over what the arranged lower dose is, with the assurance that it is actually available if you say… accidentally dropped half a week’s worth down the sink drain opening the container. Which has absolutely happened to me with antibiotics once.