POZ Community Forums
Main Forums => Pre-HAART Long-Term Survivors => Topic started by: denb45 on December 16, 2010, 09:39:59 pm
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I'm on this, and have been for the last 2 weeks now, I take it @ night-time and was told by my ID-Doctor
to only start out @ 25MG (I have to break them in half, they come only in 50MG) she says that my APTIVUS and NORVIR will make that 50MG feel like 100MG, I feel fine, and it puts me to sleep @ night, the scary part of this is, that I don't even get up to pee, or even drink a sip of water for the next 6 to 8 hrs. seem kinda strange, as I've been used to doing this all of my life, I know it's an antidepressant, and my doctor really didn't want to put me on it, but thought it would benefit my night-time leg-cramps and PTSD :-\ anyone else out there taking Trazodone, I hear it's used as a non-addictive sleep-aide, and won't harm you like the BENZO's do
I had to STOP the BENZO's due to getting leg-cramps at night, and those things aren't good for you, so says my Doctor :)
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I had been on Trazodone for much of the last 10 years , it is the only antidepressant I ever took that didnt make me sick .
I had to stop taking it because it got to where it wasn't helping me sleep anymore , instead I found myself very sleepy and disoriented but wide awake , it was miserable . I took it for years before it affected me that way . When Trazodone worked for me it was the best .
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Hey Dennis,
Yes, I've been on Trazadone in the past. Your doctor is right, it's a non-addictive medication that helps people sleep. They use it, at least around here, quite often in drug treatment centers, to lessen the effects of withdrawal at night, so someone can sleep. It did help me sleep, and worked very well.
One thing about the continual use of benzos, is they can rob your body of potassium (so says an addictions counselor), which can lead to leg cramps. This can last for awhile even once you're off of them. One of the things you can do to help this is to eat bananas.
Good luck, I hope it continues to work for you!
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I had been on Trazodone for much of the last 10 years , it is the only antidepressant I ever took that didnt make me sick .
I had to stop taking it because it got to where it wasn't helping me sleep anymore , instead I found myself very sleepy and disoriented but wide awake , it was miserable . I took it for years before it affected me that way . When Trazodone worked for me it was the best .
So Jg.....what did you end-up taking as a replacement? and did it work for you?
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Hey Dennis,
Yes, I've been on Trazadone in the past. Your doctor is right, it's a non-addictive medication that helps people sleep. They use it, at least around here, quite often in drug treatment centers, to lessen the effects of withdrawal at night, so someone can sleep. It did help me sleep, and worked very well.
One thing about the continual use of benzos, is they can rob your body of potassium (so says an addictions counselor), which can lead to leg cramps. This can last for awhile even once you're off of them. One of the things you can do to help this is to eat bananas.
Good luck, I hope it continues to work for you!
Thanks Betty :) I think my Doctor gave this to me to get me off them horrable benzo's I've been on for the last 8 yrs. with it's NASTY side-effect too, I think I'll be ok now with them ;)
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So Jg.....what did you end-up taking as a replacement? and did it work for you?
I'm not taking anything anymore ... I have gone commando .
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Hi Dennis...
I thought I'd chip in here. My partner Kurt, uses Trazadone each night to help him sleep. He says its the only thing to deal with Sustiva dreams. I said " I thought you were'nt taking Sustiva anymore." His response was: "I'm not but I still have those damn Sustiva dreams."
SO, long story short, I tried one of his Trazadone tabs one night and it was a mistake. Very fitful sleep.
Good luck.
Joel
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I'm not taking anything anymore ... I have gone commando .
Good for you jg, I went commando for YEARS until I started getting those dam leg-cramps, and getting up just to pee, cause I couldn't go back to sleep, it's miserable to spend whole nights like this tho ???
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Joel, one of my MEDS has Sustiva in it, I forget witch one tho? so yeah, I know how Kurt feels there, you said you tired one of his Trazodone, and you had a fitful-night, I know how those are as well, I do however feel a heck of a lot better with a good night sleep tho :)
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Good for you jg, I went commando for YEARS until I started getting those dam leg-cramps, and getting up just to pee, cause I couldn't go back to sleep, it's miserable to spend whole nights like this tho ???
I have the restless leg and neuropathy thing that makes bed time difficult . I cant take lyrica or most antidepressants so Im stuck just kinda toughing it out . I am not working a day job so I sleep when I can .
I do take pain killers every now and then for relief but I cant do that everynight or they wouldnt work after a time .
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I have the restless leg and neuropathy thing that makes bed time difficult . I cant take lyrica or most antidepressants so Im stuck just kinda toughing it out . I am not working a day job so I sleep when I can .
I do take pain killers every now and then for relief but I cant do that everynight or they wouldnt work after a time .
Last time I was on antidepressants was back in 2002, 8 yrs later, here I go again ??? don't really care for them tho, but, I'll take them as long I need to, maybe a few yrs. until I have another meltdown from them
but, that's a whole other story, for another time, and a very embarrassing one @ that ???
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Dennis,
I've been using Trazadone for over 10 years and to me, it is a miracle drug. Because of the antidepressants I take, I find myself wired by the end of the day, but no matter how frazzled I may become, two pills, an hour before bed, does the trick. I can get almost 7 hours of deep sound sleep every night and what a difference that makes. I also like that the half-life of Trazadone is around 4 hours, so after a full nights sleep, most of the drug has left your system and I awake feeling well rested and alert.
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Thanks Joe, I'm only @ the 25MG level and I have to break them in half for now ;)
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This is one that I take also, have for quite awhile now...I take 100 mg at bedtime, and it helps me sleep through the night (most of the time).
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Hi Dennis:
Just wanted to put in my 10 cents worth. I think the doctor made a wise choice putting you on Trazadone.
If it doesn't work for you, Ambien CR might be worth a try. Unfortunately for me, I guess I am an official benzo addict as my doctors have had me on clonazepam for 10 years now. I am now at 3 mg a day. My HIV/primary care doctor feels the benefits outweigh the risks as I have been through a tremendous amount of stress the past years. My shrink completely disagrees, but he doesn't get HIV. My doctor's take is to attempt to keep my stress/anxiety at a minimum so I can have quality of life. He and I are both aware I am now dependent on them, but he knows how to withdraw me from them when we decide. Guess it can take up to a year to wean off them. In a sense, even though clonazepam has worked for me, I wish I had never started taking benzos. They do have a bad rap. We do what we have to do to get comfort at this point I guess.
Take care,
Jeff
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Jeff, I know what you mean, I was on Benzo since 2002, I feel a heck of a lot better without them, my PM
leg-cramps are gone, and my head is a little clearer than it use to be, but yesterday, I just left the GI-doctor
and they want to do another Colonoscopy, this time, they are looking for any BUGS that they think my have
attached themselves to my bowels, Hench the 15 yrs of Chronic Diarrhea, GI thinks it's NOT the AVR's , this might have been a fact about 12 yrs ago, but, they don't think it's that anymore.....so it's now official, not only do I have Long Term HIV/AIDS, but I also have Kidney Disease and Digestive Disease, along with aging, when it rains, it really pours doesn't it ??? when I was young, my Father use to tell me this "Son when you get old, all of your parts will wear-out, just like an old Car" but you cannot replace yourself, like when you would buy a new Car" this is your body, and it just doesn't work that way ;)
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Guess it can take up to a year to wean off them.
I cold-turky'd off of them, and was done with the bad physical withdrawals in 4 days (the bad withdrawals, the social and less physical type withdrawals took awhile). I'm not saying I recommend this, I'm just saying it doesn't have to take a year.
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Merry Christmas All,
I finally broked down and asked my PCP to prescribe me something to help me sleep at night. :'( He gave me TRAZODONE. It's a 50MG tablet. The first night I did not feel anything differant except for my legs were cramping. ??? But last night I slept really good. I did not get up even to wish my partner a Merry Xmas and to have a good day on his way to work at 3AM. :-* But I still had cramps in my legs when I got up. :-\ I hope that will go away after a while.
Aloha from the land of HAWAII ;)
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I'll give you my klonopin when you take it from my cold, dead hands
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I'll give you my klonopin when you take it from my cold, dead hands
Oh My , that stuff is EVIL (klonopin) I took that for about a week, and didn't wake up for almost a day, I was dehydrated and had to go to the ER and get some IV's for a few hrs. then, the ER doctor told me to STOP taken the klonopin .....this was back in 2003 ???
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Oh My , that stuff is EVIL (klonopin) I took that for about a week, and didn't wake up for almost a day, I was dehydrated and had to go to the ER and get some IV's for a few hrs. then, the ER doctor told me to STOP taken the klonopin .....this was back in 2003 ???
Please. I can pop 20 of them and still prance around the city shopping, though I did get on the wrong bus last week and have to scream "Open the doors" loudly and hop in a taxi.
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Dennis I've been on Trazadone for 6 years now .
I can't sleep a wink with out it !
I sleep 8 hours and wake up feeling GOOD !
Carl
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Please. I can pop 20 of them and still prance around the city shopping, though I did get on the wrong bus last week and have to scream "Open the doors" loudly and hop in a taxi.
Miss P hunnie, we all know that Your inhuman, a burning bush, a space-alien, not of this world :D
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It's fascinating that people insist that trazodone isn't addictive yet they can't sleep a wink without it. What's the difference? It's like some strange Catholic guilt thing.
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It's fascinating that people insist that trazodone isn't addictive yet they can't sleep a wink without it. What's the difference? It's like some strange Catholic guilt thing.
Well isn't Trazodone an antidepressant? not sure if they are addictive, I know that you need to get up the blood-levels with antidepressants, I hated Prozac, Efexsor, and Zoloft, they didn't work for me, I just wanted to jump-off the I-40/I-25 freeway Interstate and kill myself, and if I was successful I would have been hit by a Semi- Big-Rig-Truck, and that would have been that, at least that is the way those drugs made me feel ???
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Antidepressants aren't addictive, per se. The body (and brain) gets used to them, though, so when they're stopped, the body reacts in a not-so-nice way. But, they're not addictive like benzo's are. In a lot of treatment centers, the doctors will use Trazadone to help people sleep, because people won't have a violent reaction coming off Trazadone when leaving the treatment center. And a lot of doctors use Trazadone for recovering addicts, because people don't develop a tolerance to it (one of the things involved in diagnosing addiction to something), so they don't have to keep using more and more of it for the desired effect, and people usually don't get themselves into trouble using Trazadone, like they would, say for narcotics (trying to obtain pain pills illegally, or having multiple doctors prescribing them because someone needs to use more and more to get the high), or benzos, or amphetamines that are used for ADD. I'm not saying that everyone who uses pain meds, or benzos, or things like Adderal get so hooked on them they start abusing them, but of course it does happen. Most of those drugs can be obtained on the street, for a price, and yes, people pay that price to maintain their addiction.
Again, I'm not saying everyone does this. But you won't find Trazadone for sale on the street like you would, say, Vicodin or Xanax. Nothing against anyone, but I know when I was abusing prescription meds, Klonopin was pretty light-weight to me and didn't really do anything. I used a combination of Xanax and Valium (along with several other things), and always ran out of them, which threw me into horrible withdrawals, and I would end up in the emergency room because of it.
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I cold-turky'd off of them, and was done with the bad physical withdrawals in 4 days (the bad withdrawals, the social and less physical type withdrawals took awhile). I'm not saying I recommend this, I'm just saying it doesn't have to take a year.
Hey BT65:
Thanks for the info. I trust my primary/HIV doc who prescribes them, and I'm willing to take the shortest route if possible. Clonazepam or Klonopin I guess both the same, have really helped me, but I hate being addicted to anything. I take three a day 1mg, and I notice if I haven't taken the afternoon dose, my body gets jittery, I get anxious, and sometimes sweaty. I have some days gotten by with taking only 2 mg and haven't had these symptoms so who knows.
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Hey BT65:
I take three a day 1mg, and I notice if I haven't taken the afternoon dose, my body gets jittery, I get anxious, and sometimes sweaty.
Withdrawals from benzo's can be pretty awful. It's not really recommended to just cold turkey off them. The usual protocol is to keep a taper going, until they can be stopped. Not sure how long that takes. If you're taking them as prescribed, I wouldn't worry about being strung out. Like I said, when I was taking all those pills, I ran out of them all the time, as taking them just as prescribed wasn't giving me the high I wanted. Then when I ran out, I had horrible withdrawals, and would end up in the emergency room, in pretty bad shape. If you're not doing that, then I wouldn't be too concerned.
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Withdrawals from benzo's can be pretty awful.
I never experienced that with the Benzo's, as I was only on them for 8 yrs. (off & on) with such a small-dose 0.5mg and that was only to be taken as PRN, so when I stopped them altogether, I didn't notice any withdrawals, that sounds awful that you had to go thur that, and I blame your Doctor for that ???
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sounds awful that you had to go thur that, and I blame your Doctor for that ???
Well, thanks Dennis, but... When I started seeing the psychiatrist, I was in a 12-step recovery program for drug and alcohol problems, so when he wrote out the very first prescription for Xanax, I knew what it was, and how it would effect me. And I chose to take it anyway. So, that's on me.
He was also prescribing ground up horse thyroid, which put me in a pretty bad state for a long time, plus extremely large doses of estrogen and progesterone, and that had me in a bad state also. For those things, yes, I blame the doctor. And I was too fucked up on the other meds (benzos, narcotics, amphetamines) that I wouldn't even have been able to put two and two together on the thyroid and hormone thing. And yeah, that was his failure to provide good medical care. He really had no business prescribing them anyway, being that his specialty (which he sucked at) was psychiatry.
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Bahhh Doctors, some of them are Great, but, some of them are real ASS-HOLES, I've had a few of them in my time :(
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I was prescribed Trazadone and it made me feel like I was drunk if I awoke during the night. I was also told that a side effect could be an erection...Which did happen as well. I have not taken them lately since I would need assistance walking to the restroom in the middle of the night. (In ABQ as well) ;D
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I was prescribed Trazadone and it made me feel like I was drunk if I awoke during the night. I was also told that a side effect could be an erection...Which did happen as well. I have not taken them lately since I would need assistance walking to the restroom in the middle of the night. (In ABQ as well) ;D
OK you'll probably get spanked HARD for posting in here, should go back and read why that is.....
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Hi Sandoller, welcome to the forums.
I have no way of knowing whether or not you're a long term survivor (being defined for the purposes of this sub-forum as someone who was diagnosed before 1996). If you were more recently diagnosed, you should not be posting in the LTS forum.
Please read the LTS Welcome Thread (http://forums.poz.com/index.php?topic=11166.0).
If you are an LTS, by all means, continue posting here. If you are not an LTS, please don't post here again. Thanks.
Ann
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I'm on this, and have been for the last 2 weeks now, I take it @ night-time and was told by my ID-Doctor
to only start out @ 25MG (I have to break them in half, they come only in 50MG) she says that my APTIVUS and NORVIR will make that 50MG feel like 100MG, I feel fine, and it puts me to sleep @ night, the scary part of this is, that I don't even get up to pee, or even drink a sip of water for the next 6 to 8 hrs. seem kinda strange, as I've been used to doing this all of my life, I know it's an antidepressant, and my doctor really didn't want to put me on it, but thought it would benefit my night-time leg-cramps and PTSD :-\ anyone else out there taking Trazodone, I hear it's used as a non-addictive sleep-aide, and won't harm you like the BENZO's do
I had to STOP the BENZO's due to getting leg-cramps at night, and those things aren't good for you, so says my Doctor :)
Hey there. I use to take tons of benzos for sleep and anxiety. A yr ago I went on methadone to get rid of a 15 yr addiction to opiates. I had to get off as many benzos as I could due to the fact of an overdose. I was put on trazodone. I take 150 mgs at bed and I sleep better than I did with any benzos. I hope it works for you as well.
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BJS,
I know you mean well, but as someone who was not diagnosed before 1996, you should not be posting in the LTS forum.
Please read this forum's Welcome Thread (http://forums.poz.com/index.php?topic=11166.0), which is stickied to the top of the LTS main index page.
Please also read some of the other sub-forum's welcome threads (not all sub-forums have them). If a forum has a welcome thread, it will be stickied to the top of that forum's main index page, just like in this forum.
Please do not post in the LTS forum again. Thank you very much for your cooperation, it is much appreciated. :)
Ann