0:00 Hi, this is a really difficult thing to talk about actually, I wasn't really sure that I wanted to make this video, but here goes. So, last week was the 12 month anniversary, anniversary seems like a strange thing to call it, of me stopping taking tramadol. Wow. Tramadol is a drug that is a pretty strong painkiller, it's an opioid painkiller and it was given to me because I have a lot of pain related to my cerebral palsy. I think most people who watch me on YouTube know that I have CP. You might not know that it can be a really painful condition and that's the reason I had Tramadol for many years. I took Tramadol for about five years and then obviously it's been about a year without it. I'll get into the reasons as to why I had it. and why I wanted to stop it. I guess I should say from the author that this is not
0:47 medical advice, I'm not suggesting that A you should give up your pain medication and that I wouldn't even suggest that how I went about it would be a good idea so this is really just me talking about my experience. It would be difficult to exaggerate how unpleasant that experience was quite frankly. We're going back six years now and I had a lot of pain and discomfort just from CP being the way it was and actually weirdly enough it wasn't directly I had a little accident I like fell and I really hurt my back and coupled with everything else I was going through I was just in a lot of pain and the doctors gave me some painkillers some tramadol in the short term the change in my quality of life was pretty dramatic because it wasn't long before once I got over the initial kind of sickness of dealing with this new and strange drug it was like a new
1:37 lease of life for me because I was like oh you're not supposed to be in that much pain and for about a year or so it seemed like wow this is the future why have I not had any kind of pain management in place before I didn't know you were supposed to not be in like loads of pain everything was super super hard and then it suddenly wasn't quite so hard because I had this amazing thing called tramadol certainly for a few years it seemed okay the trouble is that sense of it like solving pain really just didn't like last that long it just started to feel like a bit of a roller coaster there I'd wake up in the morning and I'd feel really ill and shaky and like the beginnings of withdrawal so I'd take it and that would take the edge off there and then about four hours later I'm gonna hit that sort of cycle of like starting to feel withdrawal there wasn't anywhere to go with it except to kind
2:26 of ride this roller coaster of withdrawal and it was happening like several times a day it wasn't like just like once or twice and it was horrible actually it was really starting to get me down because like my productivity and my attention span and everything was sort of dictated to by where in the day I landed with this cycle of like the tramadol so I was like I don't feel like I'm getting any benefit from this anymore I just felt like the reason I was taking it was to avoid this withdrawal so that's when I started to think this has got to go this is not a long-term solution it was a bit of a long journey I started tapering down and I got it down a bit like I would take two tablets every four hours I took one out and then you know so that was seven tablets and that day would be a bit rough and the
3:11 next day would be a bit rough and then by about the third day I could cope with seven and then next week I'd take another one out one GP recommended I swapped a slow release tramadol which was a bit easier and I sort of settled with that for about another year slow release tramadol doesn't have the kind of peaks and troughs so much because as the name suggests it's a slow release drug it wasn't like a four hour cycle and then your body goes ah where's the tramadol it's supposed to last a lot longer I didn't find it lasted anywhere near as long as I had been told it would like one tablet's supposed to be sort of 12 hour cycles and it was like after about six or seven hours I was feeling withdrawal again but it did give me a bit more time to manage my life and deal with the cycles, bear in mind I was flying around the world and doing all this stuff with the gloves and things and then
3:57 I'd have to factor in oh god I hope I'm not doing a thing at four o'clock because that's just before my afternoon dose of tramadol so I'm going to be really really clinging on for dear life and feeling really ill and tired and achy and all the things that start happening to your body when it starts to go where's the opioids that you're supposed to be giving me Dark times, man. That sounds really rough when I say it like that. But that was literally the loop that I was in. So I stuck around with the slow release thing for a little bit. Like, probably about a year. But it was still the same problem. I was just sort of spreading it out. I'm just taking this because I can't stop taking it. Because everything... By all accounts, it was just like... Stopping taking it would be a horrific ordeal. But... I don't know what it was. The pandemic...
4:46 boredom probably, I just thought, well for one thing, during the pandemic I thought okay well I'm not that busy because you know touring stopped and everything, I thought if there's one shot in life where I could stop taking this and see what happens on the other side, it's now right? Because I wasn't working that much that it would really affect me, but it seemed pretty clear that the pandemic was like this is the window of opportunity whereby I could stop if I was ever going to stop, so I did, so I stopped. And that shit does not fuck around. When you stop taking opioids, you may have heard the term cold turkey. At the time when I stopped, I didn't even realise how bad things were going to get. I mean, things just were... They ended up... This time last year, I still had no idea what I'd let myself in for. So the first few
5:34 days were pretty typical, kind of like... If you've seen Trainspot in, that scene where... Renton's in withdrawal. It was like that for a couple of weeks. Just constant agony, just sweating, unable to sleep, but never really awake. I mean, yeah, it was really, really, really horrible. Like, just puking up and just, oh, you don't want to know all these details, do you? Fucking hell. What's really rough about opioid withdrawal, in my experience, is... Those first two weeks where you feel like your body is just falling apart, that's the easy bit.
6:21 That is easy compared to what comes next. I was talking to my doctors about this, and although they thought it was kind of a bad idea that I'd quit as fast as I had, they were like, okay, well, if you can get through the first couple of weeks, you'll be okay. By about day 10, you should see it out of your system. And sure enough, things started to get slightly better. And after a couple of weeks, I was like, oh, maybe that's it. Maybe it's over. Like, the worst of the kind of sweating and the kind of train spotting episode was over. And that's when the real shit begins. That's when the really, really hardcore stuff starts happening. Because then, for me, it was anxiety. Constant, like, gripped with constant fear about absolutely nothing. Always angry or terrified.
7:08 all the time like I felt like my brain was just coming apart and I felt like my personality had sort of dissolved basically I just didn't know who I was or what I was doing if you don't know I've got like a family I've got three small children it's like what the fuck they must have thought was going on as I was like slowly just like losing my mind in bed for just what feels like forever and So once that long tail anxiety stuff kicked in, that was when it got really really serious. Like, I would just be sitting down watching TV and then just have like a full on panic attack, like heart rate, like 1AE, like barely able to breathe. In the UK we have this thing called 111 which is like a non-emergency advice line for health stuff and I would call
7:57 them and tell them what was going on and they were just like, yep, send in an ambulance. And I ended up in A&E probably Over like last Christmas, I probably was in A&E every week from sort of now-ish. Well, not quite now. Like end of November to sort of, I don't know, January. Spent my birthday hooked up to an ECG. That was a low moment. Fucking hell. The other problem was that it got so bad that like my GPs kind of just took up massive u-turn and we're just like i was getting second opinions from different doctors and it was just like just start taking it again you might as well get back on the tramadol you'd be you'd feel a lot better i was like that doesn't feel like great advice after
8:47 everything i've been through like mostly i was just really really stubborn like i'd hacked all this pain like physical pain like i just nothing that cp has ever thrown at me was close to as painful as like what this was like. Just every muscle in my body just hurt constantly. And I'd been through that for like a few weeks when the real wild kind of anxiety attack started and I was just like, no, I've got this far. I've got to see it through. So then I started having these really weird episodes where I would literally be like just sort of randomly spasming and just moving around really involuntarily, it felt like Parkinson's or something like that, just constantly
9:36 shaking and I would stop breathing and mostly my chest would keep moving and compressing in this really weird way. I would shout random sounds and stuff and I had no control over my body or my voice or even really my thoughts. It was just like, ooooh. Everything was just like coming apart. I remember just sitting in A&E, just lying on a bed, just like shouting random noises and I had no control of it I knew it wasn't me saying it it was just like I wasn't saying any words it was just like really just random noises and I was just like I thought I've completely broken my brain I pushed to see a neurologist and in April the first conveniently enough that I got a diagnosis of functional neurological disorder which manifests in all sorts of ways but
10:24 it's some kind of like non-permanent kind of frazzling of the pathways between your brain and your body. So your body will do weird stuff. The specialist that I saw was like, I'm just going to go ahead and blame the tramadol for this because tramadol is just an awful drug and it does really, really weird things to your brain. So I'm just going to go ahead and assume that this is what's happened. And she seemed confident that it would get better. Certainly I felt better, better, quite quickly with that diagnosis because it was like, okay there's a there's an explanation so at least in my memory it feels like i almost immediately started to feel better better with the diagnosis of the functional neurological disorder because there was an explanation for
11:11 all the weird stuff that was happening to my body that wasn't tramadol induced parkinson's disease which is a thing that has at least documented as being one of the things that can happen one of the perils of going through something like this is the temptation to sort of web md your life away and i spent so much time on websites reading all sorts of studies about tramadol withdrawal and what happened to people. That feels like a big mistake actually. Getting on with it in retrospect would have just been easier rather than reading all these horror stories but it is what it is. I learnt a lot. So naive of me to think that when I stopped that I could go through a couple of weeks of hell and then start a new life feeling healthier and fitter and happier and more productive. Now I'm not slamming like pain medication altogether but I would say that Tramadol
11:59 deserves a bit more scrutiny, to put it politely, because it's a really, I've since learned, really problematic and really strange drug. I mean, my consultant who diagnosed me with FND was just like, she was just like, yeah, it is evil. It's quite effective as a short-term pain solution, but I've been, obviously, spent a lot of time on Reddit and stuff and reading other people's accounts, and it gets really complicated because, you know, there are people out there who have, you They've been prescribed tramadol for something that is, not to say trivial, but not quite the same thing as a lifelong condition like cerebral palsy. Maybe they've broken their wrist or something, and they've been given tramadol for the pain. And then they get stuck with it, and then they're just taking it way after the injury is healed, because they're just... scared to stop. One
12:47 of the things that makes coming off it so sinister is that tramadol acts as an SSRI, like as a type of antidepressant, sort of like Prozac. My understanding is nobody really knows why it has this effect, but it does have this effect. And certainly it had a good effect on my mood when I first started taking it. So it seems to work unintentionally as an antidepressant. The problem then is you're basically dealing with two types of withdrawal because you're coming off a strong antidepressant, something comparable to Prozac, and a fairly strong opioid painkiller. The withdrawal is coming at you from so many directions, it is really just like all bets are off in terms of what is happening to your brain when you stop. So, it's been a year.
13:32 What's it like without it? So the question people want to ask, I guess, is... Was it worth it? Lying in hospital beds in the height of a pandemic thinking I was going to die of a heart attack brought on by drug withdrawal. Was it worth a year of my life in terms of the effect it's had on my family? Was it worth being so distant from everyone? Was it worth all the hold-ups and all the things I've not been able to do with my career because of just feeling too ill? Was it worth it? Yeah, yeah. It was totally worth it. It was full on. That is like a wild episode of my life. The anxiety is still there. The weirdest thing about the anxiety for me was that it just didn't feel attached to anything. I was just having
14:20 like these most extreme anxiety attacks and like feeling like I could just pass out and just gripped with fear and there was no conceivable trigger. I'd just be watching TV or just you know. reading a book or something. So you'd start to just lose in all sense of like who you are in that process. Again, just to reiterate, I do think it was worth it. It's not saying much, but I'm at the peak of my health right now. I feel fitter and stronger than I've ever felt in my life. And it's not like it was 12 months of just hell. After about six or seven months, it started to feel manageable. And certainly in the last, I would say in the last couple of months, Since
15:05 the autumn of this year, by about month 9 or 10, I started to think, yeah, I've done this actually, I've won this, I've beaten it. I wouldn't recommend anyone do it the way I did it. At one point I did seriously consider rehab, going into a clinic and that kind of process, because I just thought that might be safer to do it under observation. The problem is there's no support. for somebody like myself where you've been prescribed tramadol for a legitimate reason if I'd been stealing tramadol and taking it for recreational purposes and developed a drug problem that way then there's more of a support network if it's more obviously like drug abuse then that is supported but I couldn't get any help on the NHS with this at all there was just none available because the argument was well you've got a
15:53 good reason to have it you're not abusing the drug you're just you're trying to stop it but Why are you trying to stop it if you need it? I perceived a better quality of life on the other side. And I was right. I believe I've arrived at a much better quality of life than I had. And yes, Tramadol gave me a bit of a certain quality of life early on. And for a while, it was great. And it really helped me. But that didn't last long. And I just knew that it had to come to an end. It would be difficult to over-exaggerate this one. It is properly like gates of hell stuff. It's the most frightening and painful ordeal I've ever experienced in my life by a long way. Does that sell it? I
16:43 feel like I'm still underselling it. It was horrific. It was... Fuck me. It was... Oh, fuck. Oh, God. It was... Fucking, it was, oh my god. I don't use the word like, it was insane. And I don't just mean that flippantly like, oh, it was insane, man. I mean, I felt like I was literally going insane. Lost my mind, didn't know who I was anymore. It was fucking full on, man. Full on. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, so this is not advice. This is just my experience. I think it's fair to say that I was over-prescribed Tramadol. I was given a really high dose without any real advice on what that meant. and the long-term addiction that I was being set up for, it was just like, hey, take these, you'll feel better. Certainly
17:29 there's a lot of anecdotal evidence on the internet to suggest that that is quite commonplace, and people are offered Tramadol without any real advice on what it is and what it can do to you, and it's often given for quite trivial reasons. So yeah, it seems to be something that is being over-prescribed, and it's, yeah, obviously hugely problematic, to put it lightly. But yeah, if there's anything to sort of scrape from this rambling video is that it is possible to stop and I'm sure people could do it in a more effective way than I did one day at a time but I think it's yeah I feel better I've got it off my chest it was not easy but there you go live to tell the tale thank you
