[pepi112]

Hello everyone! I am new here and just started reading some threads but I find myself having a question. First a little background info on me.

I'm 22 years old and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at 18 and was given darvocet for a year, increasing in dose as time went by, and then my doctor left private practice and my new doctor refused to give me pain meds because I'm young and she was afraid of me abusing them/selling them *yep that is what she said* and so I went into some withdraw until I found another doctor. This doctor prescribed me lortabs instead of darvocet. He said it was just the next step up in pain meds because the darvocet wasn't helping me with my pain anymore. I was on lortabs for a year and a half, increasing as time went by, and at one point my arthritis flared up really bad and I was taking up to 6 pills a day.

Thankfully my R.A. went into remission and has stayed that way, up until now, so December 2007 I asked to be taken off of pain killers all together because they were controlling my life. My new pain doctor, who is still my doctor now, started me on Subutex. I felt like this man saved my life. Subutex has been amazing. I was started on 8mgs and was on that for a year.

December 2008 I found out I was pregnant! Yay! Well my doctor said that Subutex was safe to take during pregnancy but he wanted me to switch to methadone because it has been around longer and more studies have been done with methadone and pregnancy. He wanted me to take 30 mgs a day, I did that for one day and it knocked me out so I decided to only take 20 mgs, 10 in the morning and 10 at night, and stayed that way throughout my pregnancy. I researched everything I could about methadone and pregnancy and my son was born on the 9th of September and was showing NO signs of withdrawal, scoring 0's on the NAS scale, and then someone out of nowhere scored him a 10 and they put him on morphine and he is still in the hospital, should be home some time this week though!

Anyways, now that I am not pregnant anymore I want to go back to Subutex. I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow morning. I ran out of my methadone yesterday morning and that leads me to believe someone is taking my methadone because I have been taking LESS than my prescribed dose yet I ran out early! My mother, who is on Suboxone to get off of pain killers as well, has offered to give me some of her suboxone today because I'm withdrawing pretty bad here and all I want to do is go see my son but I can't feeling like this.

My questions are: should I switch back to Subutex or stay on methadone? Which is easier to taper off of? And is this safe to take my mom's Suboxone?