Vynneve's 2022 Speedrun/wellness update

Hey, Vynneve doing their first paste-bin update, let's go.

I've been debating whether to ever talk about this publicly, but I think it's worth throwing this into the internet.

So I've been very very sporadic in my streaming/speedrunning and also kind of life in general. The reason for this is simple to state, but I want to give it the full context it deserves.

It started about 2 years ago, when I had surgery for my Crohn's disease. The surgery itself is not priority here (although I could do a massive paste-bin about that too haha) but about 2 months after my surgery, when I was back on medication to keep my Crohn's at bay (Methotrexate) I was dealing with a LOT of bad side effects from the medication. Very high amounts of pain, especially if I wanted to take the full therapeutic dose that the docs wanted me to take. My patterns for awhile was to take less of it, so i could deal with the pain. But there were signs of my Crohn's flaring back, which is extremely bad, I'm literally working with 60cm (2 feet) less large intestine.

So, as you might have guessed, I started using pain medication. The strong stuff, oxycodone. I've used this medication in the past successfully (by that I mean I was on it for ~2 months, then discontinued it without any issue)
This time however, a big part due to covid, I kept using it. And as these things go my tolerance grew, but the crazy pain from managing an autoimmune disorder didn't diminish. In the two years I went from 20mg a day, to 250mg a day. If you don't know much about opioids: that's a fuck ton.

I definitely would have slowed this down earlier, talked to my GI (Crohn's specialist) about changing our approach to something that causes less pain. But because of COVID even getting a phone call was weirdly impossible at the time, so things just grew on their own.

Until!! I finally did talk to my GI about it, and they suggested switching from oral Methotrexate pills, to subq injections (skin injection). Now. Why they didn't enforce this at the start, I have no idea. But it was a **drastic** change.

Oral pills = (9 or 10)/10 pain essentially all over my body (every muscle + headaches/migraines), nausea, anxiety, insomnia, and more honestly.

But injections = pretty tired for 1-2 days, nausea, and *moderate* pain, like (5 to 7)/10 usually. and in the world of Crohn's That's just expected one way or another during any giving day.

So. This was probably like 6 months ago, where I'm no longer requiring strong pain medication, but I have a dependency to them. And I do want to emphasize that this progression doesn't qualify for the label of addiction. Kind of semantics, but also not. I was stuck taking about 250mg of oxycodone a day for months (not increasing anymore since my overall pain is lower, hence dependency. If addiction, it would keep increasing) but anyway.

As I'm sure a lot of people know it can be very difficult to stop taking opioids, especially at high doses for a long time. My doctor wanted to reduce slowly, to avoid the common rebound issue in these matters. But this proved very ineffective. I tried for months, and then finally got sick of it. Especially since the amount I was taking tends to produce a lot of worsening of depression and apathy, hence not speedrunning, or much of anything.

However, this past 2 weeks I finally snapped for better or worse, went against the advice of my doctor, and reduced my usage of the drug from 250mg a day to 10mg, then 5mg for ~1.5 weeks. I did not expect to stay at this low amount consistently for months, but it's kind of like trying to bend a utensil back in place: you have to bend it past the point you want it to go, to end up in the correct spot.

Present day now. I am steady on 120mg/day and feeling very hopeful about moving on from this, repeating this again and getting off it entirely, or only taking it selectively if necessary.

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I'm not sure exactly what wisdom I wanted to impart from this, but I hope it gives perspective into a very common reason as to why people get caught up with pain medications. There is *always* a reason. If you are one of those people that say things like "they took the meds, they deserve any withdrawal that comes from it" you are drastically underestimating how insanely difficult withdrawal is, mentally/emotionally/physically. I would need another paste-bin to go over withdrawal itself. At this level, it is NOT just "a bad flu" it is quite literally a very unique state of constant torture.

Alright. Got a bit heavy there.

I very much hope I will start streaming regularly again, even if it's just over the summer. Coming off the meds has brought back my love for a lot of things, and drive to actually do it. I look forward to catching up with the speedrunning scenes, and hope that I can get back to doing longer runs (like TTYD stuff) that I absolutely love, but couldn't do them for a long time.

As a parting comment: if you've read this and catch my stream, don't feel weird about bringing it up or w.e. I'll answer any questions and talk about it freely. I've noticed a pretty large % of people involved with speedrunning are a bit shy about drugs and such, but personally due to my illness and just life I've had medications/drugs interconnected in my life since I was 15. In fact I made this post partly due to the fact that I'm tired of hiding this stuff from my streams and other conversations. So there it is, I'm not going to shy away from "drug talk" anymore, because like many things, it is integral to my life due to Crohn's and likely always will be.

If you read all of this, I appreciate you, and I likely already consider you a friend at some level 😄. And on the other hand, if this topic makes you want to pull away from me in general, not much I can do about that. Always happy to discuss things, but at the end of it all...you do you.