I should be a farmer... I'm up early enough most days to be one (4:30am this morning)... heehee. I will have been off heroin for 1 week at 4:30pm today.

I've managed to grab an hr or so on the couch at some point during these days so maybe ill have a snooze later. im tired and yawning and want to go to sleep but the body wont let me.

I cant decide if I felt so bad last night because i had no valium or because id taken the codeine the night before.

A bit of both i think. I put opiate substances into me but also the valium has been blocking the emotion that the heroin has for the last two years so I have at least that long worth of blocked emotion to deal with. Watching Jeremy Kyle or Trisha (or even somethin sad on the news) can send me into floods.

But then so can nothing at all... it just comes and goes. But i dont feel 'too bad' and have made myself a cup of tea (as well as a couple of icepoles) and i can at least think enough to function and write this blog (though my 'tailbone' hurts like hell).

Little bit of chemistry here (and if i get my facts wrong feel free to correct) about Heroin and its effects.

Heroin is an opioid - a very powerful painkiller. The body and the brain are packed with opioid receptors, meant for endorphines, the body's own natural pain-killing substances produced in emergency moments of shock or injury.

They do more than that though... Your brain produces chemicals such as, in this case, endorphins, that make you feel good. When you do a good task, or something you enjoy, your brain releases these chemicals and you 'feel good'. Heroin is full of them. So, because your getting it artificially your brain says to itself "well i can do other things now" and stops making them. So thats reason #1 why you feel like such shit for days/weeks going turkey. No endorphins = no feel good factor can possibly exist without that bag of powder.

The other main thing is that there are things in heroin that block pain receptors (morphine anyone?) in your brain... all pain. Physical and emotional it doesnt matter they just dissapear... theyre 'blocked'. The pain cant get through. Bye bye, cheerio.

Except your body didnt block them and as its designed to 'repair' itself it sets about building new receptors... these new receptors are built up slowly and are one major reason that the time between 'fixes' becomes shorter and shorter with larger doses needed as time goes on.

The thing is, those new transmitters you just grew don't go away or stop their messages (at least until you dont take lady H anymore). They stay there. It's permanent. And that's what a chemical dependency is; you now no longer are able to function the way you were before normally. Something that before your body could supply naturally now has to be supplied by the heroin. And so you are dependent on it,

"Not for something that the substance gives you, but for something the absence of the substance has been taken away."

Taking Heroin
***************

Smoking it, usually on tinfoil and inhaling the fumes (chasing the dragon) will have an immediate effect and a 'high' in abouts 10-15 minutes.

IV provides the greatest intensity and onset of about 5-10 seconds. It also lasts longer.

So what then? What has it *done*?

After the initial rush you go into what we in Glasgow call a 'gouch'. You can appear to be asleep yet are totally aware of everything/one and things said. You are distanced from the world as though wrapped in wool and the pain stops, the comforting 'glow' appears and nothing, *nothing* matters. There is no pain anymore so your mind drifts comfortably from one drug induced memory to the next and its wonderful.

btw, woe betide the person that rises you from a well earned gouch... usually you can slip back into it but not always.

Well one assumes that once again the body will repair itself of these transmitters and blocked emotions and starvation I have abused it with by the stopping of the taking of the drug and one day I'll get back to normal.

I knew at the back of my mind as I felt my addiction grow (and was unable to stop) that one day I would have to pay that back (with interest) but boy oh boy is getting there a terrible journey. The reasons for allowing that to happen ill write in a blog when im ready... maybe today maybe next week... emotions still running high.