Hi Mel,
Thanks so much. I hope you are feeling better now?
Looks like my urgent issue is going to progress into next week, so I might have to hold off on cold turkey until the first week in March. I should not have anything on then. Many thanks for your encouragement with it. It is definitely the way to go. I took five fizzies yesterday, which I haven't done for a long time, because terrible insomnia started to trigger a migraine. I'm going for 3.5 today. The more I can taper before I start cold turkey, the easier it will be on my body, I reckon.
I think you are right, above, that if your brain *knows* unequivocally that it can't have codeine, it tends to calm down. Accepting the pain does help on some level. I have found that during a bad migraine, when I can't take anything because I throw it right back up. Once you accept that that is it - you're here for the duration of the pain - it somehow calms down the mind. For me, anyway.
Many thanks for recommending Dr Gabor Maté's work. I came across him on YouTube a couple of years ago but have not explored his thinking yet. I like his vibe, though, and I like his son, Aaron Maté, as a political commentator. I'll definitely check out his book. I had a lot of loss in my childhood and teens and I think it did a number on my thinking processes, along with too much caffeine (and painkillers for migraine). Health really is holistic, isn't it? The mind and body are a continuum and that which affects one, affects the other (if it can be called an 'other' at all!).
As regards migraine, I think the pain does lessen over time. Each 'wave' is a bit less bad than the previous one. One thing I find hard, though, is that a week or so after quitting cold turkey (usually forced by a bad migraine) I get awful stomach cramps and diarrhoea. I can't eat or drink anything without inducing a bad cramp that can only be relieved by a long visit to the bathroom :-( Have you had stomach issues after quitting? I think it's codeine detox, as codeine is constipating, but it's quite miserable. At least with Covid-19 lockdown (at the highest level where I live) it's easier to deal with because we are all at home! I had it last time at a friend's wedding, which was rather miserable.
I totally agree about paracetamol. It still astonishes me that it is available over the counter in Tesco when the line between a 'therapeutic' dose and a fatal dose is so thin. It's possible to overdose by taking too much at once but it is also possible to overdose unintentionally by taking too much in a staggered way over a longer period of time. A friend of a friend died this way. He just took a bit too much a bit too frequently over time and his liver gave out. Anything containing it should have screaming warnings on the packet.
I have mentioned the paracetamol issue to a few fellow sufferers here. I always feel frightened for people who are taking 24 Solpadeine a day, or even 16, etc. Or even 10 or 12, which I have also done on very rare occasions. I have no idea how anyone's body can cope with that. The dreadful thing is that while caffeine and codeine draw one in and make it hard to quit with their painfully addictive qualities, the paracetamol is lethal at high doses, especially once one goes over the maximum recommended dose of eight tablets a day for no longer than three days.
The great thing, though, is that once through cold turkey in all its manifestations (headache, migraine, cramps, the trots, backache, etc.) the pain of all these things starts to diminish, as long as we can tolerate them while they last, which is where I tend to trip up.
Just reading your post below, I'm so glad you are still off the fizzies. It's great you're experiencing improvements in sleep and heart rate. Both so important. I didn't know paracetamol was also linked to heart attacks. Thanks for detailing the damage each drug does. It is so, so important that we all know this information. I have no idea if it's connected but my uncle has Parkinson's (he's in his seventies now) and my aunt said he took Solpadeine for headache, etc. for years and years. I don't know if he was dependent on them, or if it was more a case of frequent but not addicted, but I wonder if his chronic use of Solpadeine contributed to his illness… I probably shouldn't speculate about that but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't help, given the way they make the brain feel.
One other thing I came across recently… Apparently a diet very rich in different plant fibres (30+ different plants per week) helps the microbiome produce short-chain fatty acids that repair the gut lining and the blood/brain barrier. If I remember rightly, the information came from Dr Will Bulsiewicz (https://theplantfedgut.com/).
I have an idea that the effervescent element in Solpadeine can damage the gut lining, leading to leaky gut and food particles entering the bloodstream, where they cause chronic inflammation and pain, but I need to look into it in more depth.
Better head off now but I hope you are having a good weekend and are feeling OK.
Take care,
Storm