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What Can Go Wrong with Needles
Hydromorphone
Citation:   Taylor. "What Can Go Wrong with Needles: An Experience with Hydromorphone (exp83268)". Erowid.org. Oct 3, 2011. erowid.org/exp/83268

 
DOSE:
4 mg IV Hydromorphone
BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb
I had never used needles before. I am an opiate addict, and I would say I have about a tolerance of twice what the normal person would. I have only done dilaudid once, I snorted an 8mg one and it did little to NOTHING, just took my withdrawl symptoms away. It broke up into SO much powder, it just clogged my nose up if anything for the $20 bucks I spent on the pill. Everyone told me that snorting or eating it was a waste and the only good way to get anything out of it was to bang it, or inject it. And boy were they right.

A few weeks ago I was sick, nothing was around, except k8’s, or 8mg dilaudids. This time I said fuck it I’m putting it in my arm to see what all the fuss is. Because I was so naïve to needles I made several stupid and dangerous mistakes in this process, so please learn from mine if you can. I was so super nervous, and scared I was going to have some freak accident and flop on the ground dead once the drug hit my veins, so was going to ask my good friend Bob who had TONS of experiences with syringes to do it for me. Unfortunately Bob was at work and told me he would help me once he got off, but of course I was impatient and had to do it now now now, so I asked my other friend Joe, who was more of an acquaintance and had far less needle use experience, to help me do it. Bad idea.

He said I should do it in my foot so that I wouldn’t have marks on my arm, so I said sure sounds good. PEOPLE—Don’t EVER put a needle in your fucking foot. If it is your first time, it will hurt 100000x worse than on your arm and it will ruin your opinion of syringes forever. I let this dude Joe stick the needle in my foot for about a second, and I have a good pain tolerance, but it hurt so bad I wanted to SCREAM. I jerked my foot up and off the table and said fuck this if this is what it feels like count me out. No high is worth that. Joe got all flustered saying it was my fault for moving. I said put it in my arm then. This is where Joe demonstrated that he clearly had no clue about what the fuck he was doing and didn’t care at all if it hurt me or my body.

I didn’t use a belt, or a tie-off of any kind. Joe just took my arm and stuck the needle in and starts swishing it around side to side. Well, understandably after about 5 solid minutes of this and Joe not hitting a SINGLE VEIN, my arm starts swelling up like a fucking golf ball, and turning dark purple. Even my veins on my wrist, almost a foot away start swelling. He kept saying, “Almost got it, almost got it….” But he never fucking had it. I was so pissed I started crying, I was still sick and my arm was SO fucked up.

I told him to get the hell off of me, give me the rig and I would do it myself later. It hurt like hell to even extend or bend my arm. I couldn’t believe I had just let an almost complete stranger stick me with a big ass needle who didn’t know what he was doing. I considered going to the ER, but decided to go ask Bob what he thought first. I got in my car, put the rig in my purse, and drove to Bob’s gas station where he worked, walked in crying showing him my arm and explaining what happened. He couldn’t believe how bad that kid messed my arm up, but he said he had seen it and been through it before and it would go away it would just take time, unless I saw infection start then go the hospital. I could tell he felt so bad for me, he told me to give the rig to him, come into the back, and he would do it for me there.

I was feeling a little better knowing that I would at least get high out of this. Coincidentally enough Bob’s girlfriend was also in the back, about to shoot up too. She had just started a few months ago. She made me feel better because she is itty bitty, like 5 foot and 80 lbs so I thought if she can do it I can. Before I sat down, Bob told me to start throwing the arm I would use back and forth in the air like a baseball pitcher does, to get the blood flowing to my hand. After a few minutes of that, I sat down in the chair, Bob gave me his belt, tied it around my arm, and told me to make a fist. I still couldn’t see any of my little girl veins but he only had to feel for a second before he grabbed the needle and stuck it in and it registered (hit a vein).

The whole process to him maybe 5 seconds. He knew what he was fucking doing, unlike that asshole Joe. I was so excited and nervous at this point, until he tried to push it in me. It didn’t push, it was like, jammed or something. Bob had no clue what the hell was wrong. He took it out of me, and realized what it was. My small amounts of blood and plasma that had collected in the edge of the needle point from Joe had coagulated and clotted up in the time it took me to drive to Bob’s work. There was no getting that precious liquid out of that needle, it was useless. Bob said he had a clean, unused one in his car, and was going to try to break my bad rig open and pour it into the new good one. He got his knife out and tried cutting it open, but it broke instead, and spots of my blood and the fluid flew everywhere, on Bob and his girlfriend. They just wiped it off and acted like it was no big deal. I was thinking what the hell? You don’t know if I have HIV or Hep or something and you just nonchalantly got my blood spilled on you and wiped it off? Dirty…that’s all I could think.

I thought my chance was gone, and that I wouldn’t get to experience it period once my rig(needle) broke. Finally, Bob saw how disappointed I was, and broke one of his k8’s in half, heated it up in water and told me I could have it. YESSSSSS. Sooo we FINALLY have a good rig, 4mg of dilaudid, and a person who knows what they are doing. CAN ANYTHING ELSE GO WRONG?! Knock on wood. We do the process again, and Bob finds a vein on me just as fast. I watch as he pushes the fluid in my vein and takes the belt off my arm.

After he pulled the needle out of my arm there was about a 5 second period where I didn’t feel anything, and I was wondering if it would work at all. I had just enough time to get out, “When will it start worki—” when BAM! I only wish my keyboard had a symbol big and loud enough to describe what I felt, because with only words it’s hard to. Unless you have experienced a needle rush of any kind, there is absolutely no way I can accurately portray to you how it felt, but I can try.

Bob said it had a bigger rush than heroin to him. “Rush” is the closest people have come to naming it. I can’t relate it to any other drug feeling, it wasn’t even an opiate feeling it was just…so intense it felt like someone slammed a baseball bat into the back of my neck, that’s where it started, my neck, and the hit vibed through my head, limbs, and whole body. That’s as close as I can come to describing the severity of the feeling. I was lucky I wasn’t standing up when I did it, because if I had been, I would have COLLAPSED onto the floor, smashing into whatever was in the way. But I did half that good, since I was sitting down, my body fell forward and my face smashed full force onto the table. I couldn’t even pick myself up. I could hear Bob and his girlfriend yelling something about, “Clean up your arm chick! You’re hella bleeding!” and I managed to roll my eyeballs over, which was difficult, to look at my arm where he had pulled the needle out and saw blood just streaming out all the way down my arm, rolling down my fingers and onto the floor. It looked like a horrible site I tell you.

I tried to speak, I tried to tell them I couldn’t even move to clean the blood, but the only sound my mouth managed to get out was, “ugghhooohh”. It was like I went fucking retarded and paralyzed. It wasn’t a euphoric feeling, but it wasn’t a bad one, it was just…the most intense fucked up I’ve ever experienced out of all the drugs I have EVER done, and I’ve done just about all of them. If you’ve ever done too much GHB, that feeling of not being able to move even if your life depended on it kinda is like it. I’ll be honest it scared the shit out of me, how out of control I was. I swear if someone had walked in and held a gun to my head and said “You either raise your right arm up or I will rape you and then shoot you” I would have been raped and died. I could not have raised my arm. That scares to me to think of how many people shoot up and make themselves that vulnerable.

I felt Bob’s girlfriends hands pull my hair out from between my face and the desk it slammed into, then she grabbed a paper towel and started wiping off my arm, which had stopped bleeding, she said, “I don’t know why your arm bled SO much that was crazy, but don’t worry this part only lasts a little bit”. At that point I couldn’t even process time, but she was right. No sooner had it started, it left. I would say that part of the experience lasted maybe 3-5 minutes. Which is actually a LONG time to be THAT fucked up and vulnerable. Anyone will tell you anything bad can happen, in 3-5 minutes. After that it just vanished, and I was left feeling a slight opiate high, but really not that much. Maybe like a few lortabs. It was insane how fast I went from totally gone to there and feeling fine and not even that high anymore. I was able to get up and drive home just fine, and felt that slight opiate buzz for a few hours then it drifted away. [Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

Overall I don’t know how I would rate my first needle experience with dilaudid or hydromorphone, I guess I would say it was way too much bullshit for what it was. If I had done just a few more milligrams than what I did I think it would have been TOO MUCH, and I don’t know what would have happened to me. I haven’t done it since and don’t plan to. I had to wear long sleeves for a week before my arm wasn’t black and blue and swollen everywhere. It was pretty embarrassing. But way worse could have happened. I guess I will close with saying if someone decides to try this for the first time, please god have someone who knows what they are doing and has a LOT of experience do it for you and do it right. And be in an environment where people you know and trust will take care of you if anything goes wrong.

Exp Year: 2010ExpID: 83268
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Oct 3, 2011Views: 54,590
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Hydromorphone (300) : First Times (2), Difficult Experiences (5), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Post Trip Problems (8), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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