Drug Free!

 I made it; 7 months from surgery and I’m finally off of the pain medication! I had no idea that it would take this long to wean off the Hydrocodone. Prior to my back surgery I thought that I would have pain medication for about a couple of months during the acute pain and that one day I would just stop taking them. Well it doesn’t work that way! Those narcotics are not that simple to get rid of and as much as I don’t have an addictive type of personality, our body and mind get used to being medicated. At first the meds gave me headaches and made me nauseous but then when I tried to lower the dose, I would also get headaches. I use to say that I’d rather hurt than be nauseous but sometimes the pain was too much and I preferred laying there sick to my stomach just to get some relief from the back pain. So I had to do it very slowly with the help of my doctor. In the end, the process is very simple: stay on schedule (for example one pill every 4 hours) and keep cutting the pills down (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16) until one day you’re taking 1/16 every 8 hours, then twice a day, then once a day, and finally you completely forget to take it because you don’t need it anymore!