Saturday, April 18, 2020

The Dummy and The Drug Test

Hello Again !

I know that I promised to update more and I haven't because life has really gotten in the way.  Life and Covid-19.  My husband has been working on an ambulance during this and we are all scared that we will get it.  As of right now, however, we are all healthy and getting along pretty well with each other.

During all of this virus stuff, the reality of being dependent on methadone has been tough.  I wrote an article describing the fear that we are all going through and how the federal government is handling it.  What I want to talk about here though isn't about that fear, it's about the fear of failing a drug test.  It is a stable methadone patient's absolute worst case scenario. 

A couple of weeks ago I was having some heartburn so I took a single dose of Zantac.  The next day I went to the clinic to pick up my medicine for the upcoming month and took a drug test.  I take one every month, just like all methadone patients.  I wasn't really concerned with the results as I've been clean for four years.  It's just something that I have to do and it is slightly degrading (to be completely honest)  but it's better than most things that I had to do for drugs back in the day.  I pee in the cup, drop it off at the window, pick up my bottles of methadone and I'm on my way home. 

My family and I live about an hour away from my clinic so we have lots of time to talk and think and it's kind of like our weird little family outing.  Make the best out of a bad situation am I right?  As I'm sitting in the car I realize something devastating:  THE ACTIVE INGREDIENT IN ZANTAC CAN CAUSE A FALSE POSITIVE FOR AMPHETIMINES.  I belong to a few online communities and I have read countless horror stories about people losing all of their privileges due to false positives from this medication.  I went straight into worst case scenario mode and assumed that it would come back as a dirty drug test and that I would lose ALL of my take home bottle privileges.  I was panicking and had visions of having to drive an hour every day with my poor children all because mom had to take a Zantac.  In my mind it was ALL methadone's fault.  If I wasn't on it in the first place then I could take whatever damn heartburn medication that I wanted....hell, I could even eat poppy seed bagels again!  What kind of life was this?!

To wrap up the story before it gets too long, I called my counselor the following Monday and vented about my fears and worries about my stupidity.  She told me to take a deep breath and to let it out slowly....I think I had rambled on for fifteen minutes at this point.  She told me that if it did come back positive then the laboratory would send down another another bit of the urine that I submitted for a more detailed test.  It's called a GCMS, or Gas Chromatrography Mass Spectometry analysis.  

I felt so much better.  It also opened up my mind to what other people must go through when they fail a drug test, knowing that they didn't do anything wrong.  Some people have more on the line than a few weeks of medicine , like their children or freedom.  Of course you do have the people that lie and say that they produced a false positive when they know damn well that they were shooting up in a gas station bathroom the day before.  (Like me, circa.2015)  I'm just trying to make a point that A LOT relies on the results of these tests being accurate and I am sure that a lot of people have been on the receiving end of it not being so.  

Anyways,  I got a call two days later to let me know....

THE TEST WAS NEGATIVE.  

I felt like an idiot....the kind of idiot that sees their boyfriend out with another girl so you confront him and make a big scene only to find out that it's his sister.  That kind.  Moral of the story:  Be mindful in regards to over the counter medication if you are on methadone (or suboxone)....and don't eat poppy seed bagels.  


1 comment:

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