The Codeine Story in Scottish Meanderings

This is a bit of backstory to the reason I'm doing the Scottish Recovery Consortium course.

Way back when I was around 14/15 or thereabouts I took a product called Feminax, containing paracetamol, codeine and caffeine, for period pain. In a house where the strongest medicine in the cabinet was aspirin, I was amazed at the size of the tablets (they were ginormous!) and so I only took one at a time. They came in a tube of around 10 tablets so that seemed to make sense.

I do remember reading the leaflet for some reason one day and being gobsmacked to see you were supposed to take 2 at once - I have no memory of taking 2 from then on but presume I must have and got some sort of good feeling or 'buzz' from them. I've got no evidence of this but I DO have evidence in diaries (good old diaries - where would we be without them?!) that by age 19 and now living away from home I was taking the odd 2 every now & then to feel better.

Since my periods had started I had the most awful premenstrual tension - not something widely known or talked about then and certainly not something I had any knowledge about - I just knew I felt like a guitar string about to snap for much of the month and had gone from being a happy, go-lucky kid to a miserable, depressed teenager who was ready to give up and at age 15, tried to do so by one night swallowing 36 aspirin. Luckily no physical damage was done and the 'lovely' doctor we had at the time told me not to do anything as stupid again and sent me on my way.

Who knows what the real cause was? Teenagers are not generally known for being ecstatic reasonable individuals at the best of times and I probably wouldn't have helped anything by having joined the dieting bandwagon which was gathering speed alarmingly in those years. I now know codeine causes sugar cravings so this became a major battle and my particular way of dieting very often took the form of bingeing and starving - a vicious cycle which gets precisely nowhere.

Anyway I have no memory of 'chemist-hopping' in Inverness so presume it was when I came to Aberdeen aged 16 that the real problem started. Dad had died suddenly from a heart attack 6 months after I'd left home so there could have been unresolved grief in there somewhere (the psychologists love to latch on to that one!) I don't know - all I know is that I just seemed to be operating generally at a much lower mood level than everyone else and all the stuff that worked for everyone else to lift spirits did bugger all for me.

And so basically I self-medicated.

Not, thankfully, to a major extent, and I'm so grateful for this when I see how hooked some folk can get on these tablets - I'm talking about levels of 60-100 tablets a day which of course causes all sorts of problems with health, finance and time. My own tally never got beyond 9 tablets a day of the lower strength codeine but sometimes that could be a double-edged sword.

I was never bad enough to get help.

I 'appeared to be coping', 'my liver was fine', I was 'in contact with friends and family', I was 'in employment', 'not in debt' and a host of other stuff which apparently constitutes 'normal' to the outside world.

Every now & then I would try to reduce and come off them myself and would succeed so far then give up unable to get to the final finishing post.

I found great support from a codeine free forum online and started a taper in October 2012, gradually reducing each month until I was free of it in October last year.

I thought I'd start to feel better but didn't.

Plodded on desperate to keep going but finding it harder and harder and not finding anyone experienced enough to talk to about it. In January I got a chest infection and coping with that on top of the misery was too hard and I relapsed, buying a packet of tablets just to get relief.

I went to an NA meeting but hated the format of it and couldn't relate to all the chaos of folks' lives (not to mention all the constant hugging) but from that, I found out about a Recovery Group called AiR (Aberdeen in Recovery) which met on a Friday afternoon. A group of really nice people wanting to promote recovery in Aberdeen and get away from the stigma surrounding addiction, the typical media hype that accompanies it, the derogatory terms and the sensationalism around it.

The group hasn't been on the go long but have done wonderful things so far putting on events and creating a hub each week for anyone to come to for coffee and a chat and to discuss issues around recovery.

In February they found out about the Scottish Recovery Consortium, a fairly new charity set up to promote recovery in Scotland. The consortium brings the Recovery College to wherever it's needed and runs it for 5 weeks, 2 days a week, then folk are more prepared with the necessary info to set up or develop recovery groups in their area.

2 girls from the Consortium came up and talked to us about it and AiR decided to run it in March. Only problem was the days chosen were Mondays and Tuesdays - 2 of my working days. I only work 3 days a week though so it was possible to change them to fit in.

To explain this to my employers was easy thank God. I used to do addiction counselling (ironically) years ago and had always wanted to get back into it if possible so I just used that as a reason for wanting to do the course. Sorted!

I was accepted for it at the end of February, my working days were changed and I started on the 4th March. And there we pick up the story ......

Last updated March 26, 2014