[Poncho]

Jefferson,

Your post just happened to catch my eye. I was once jacked up to 75mg a day right before ADR surgery and I weigh about 130lbs - so that was quite a hefty dose to come down from.

Okay, drawing from personal experience weaning from the first 80% was pretty much a "cake walk" - but the last 20% started to get a bit rough.

I was also on clonidine (pills) this will help out with the hot/cold flashes and sweats. I never took ativan - but this is how I weaned off the last 10mg.

I took a 10 mg tablet (or you can take 2 5 mg tablets) and crushed them. Then, I mixed the 10 mg of the crushed methadone with 10 milliliters of tap water. Mixed mixed it up well in a bottle that had an eyedropper that also measured in milliliters.
Doing this made the concentration of methadone and water a 1:0 ratio ---- Meaning that one milliliter = 1 mg methadone. (when shook up well)

You can also do this with just a 5mg tablet to 5 milliliters of water. You will get the same concentration.

Okay, once that is done - I could dose throughout the day in smaller increments - say 2mg (or 2 milliliters) every 6 hours or so.

However, once I got down to 3mg a day - I decided to just go off of the Methadone totally.
When I did this, the hardest days were days 3-7. Restlessness, upper back pain, chills, general body aches & etc. No nausea or vomiting, but quite a bit of diarrhea. This is common. The symptoms eased up after day 7 a little each day. After day 14, I could notice a marked difference in the way I was feeling - getting more sleep each night & etc. However, I honestly didn't feel totally "normal" for like 2 months after stopping cold turkey.

I was also offered to stay on methadone at 5mg for the rest of my life - but I refused. I didn't feel the need to take it any longer than I needed to.

Hope this information helps you. It will be rocky at first, but does get better.

Sincerely,
Poncho