Ten days ago, on September 1st, 2019, I started writing the first draft of my upcoming book. On the last two days of August, I came up with the rough draft and a final draft of the outline.
The book is going to have three parts and thirteen chapters.
I came up with the title RECOVERED! Quit Opioids, Get Healthy, Reclaim Your Freedom.
The main title will remain the same, and unless I come up with something better, the subtitle will also remain the same.
In this blog post, you’re going to get a “behind the scenes” look at this new book.
I’ll share with you my current names of the parts and chapters, along with an overview of chapter one and a passage from the chapter.
Here is the outline of RECOVERED!:
- Table of contents
- Foreward
- Introduction
- PART 1 – The Struggle
- Chapter 1: Innocence & Suffering
- Chapter 2: The Battle of Your Life
- PART 2 – The Solution
- Chapter 3: The 5 Phases of Overcoming Opioid Dependence
- Chapter 4: Mindset Mindset Mindset
- Chapter 5: Traditional Opioid Detox Methods
- Chapter 6: Alternative Opioid Detox Methods
- Chapter 7: Detoxing From Opioids at Home
- Chapter 8: PAWS & Biochemical Optimization
- PART 3 – Staying the Course
- Chapter 9: Pro-Recovery Habits
- Chapter 10: Empowering Identity (Character, Beliefs, & Values)
- Chapter 11: Constant-and-Never-Ending Improvement
- Chapter 12: Service to the Many Leads to Greatness
- Chapter 13: Are You Ready?
- RESOURCES
Chapter One Overview
Chapter 1 is all about identifying the struggle of opioid dependence. You’ll read about real-life stories of people that began using opioids either recreationally or medicinally for pain, and how opioids improved their lives for a while, and then eventually how opioids become more troublesome than helpful.
Here is a passage to illustrate this:
“Due to a disease of the peripheral nervous system, Richie had been experiencing increasing pain and weakness in his legs for five years. His doctor prescribed him oxycodone and increased the dose a number of times.
Richie sure wasn’t complaining, because that meant more painkilling action and he liked the buzz.
After a few years his daily dose went up to 60 mg per day, but he began to notice a gradually diminishing effect.
His pain increased in both severity and frequency, and by the end of most days, he would have teary eyes, anxiety attacks, fatigue, and other symptoms associated with the first few hours of opioid withdrawal.
Richie continued to take the pills every day to get through work and would spend his evenings in mild withdrawal and would have to take Xanax to be able to sleep.
As soon as he woke up, the withdrawal was beginning to get so bad that he needed to take oxycodone right away just to be able to get out of bed and calm down his anxiety.
Richie’s opiate treatment for chronic pain started off so innocently. He had legitimate nerve pain and the oxycodone worked like a charm for years.
Everything seemed to be going quite well.
He was getting lots of positive benefits like pain relief, energy to work, and a euphoric buzz too.
But eventually, his tolerance started to go up faster and faster.
Tolerance is when a person’s body requires more of the drug to achieve the same desired effect.
Additionally, Richie also developed physiological dependence on oxycodone, meaning if he didn’t take enough oxycodone daily, he would experience symptoms of opioid withdrawal.
When Richie’s medicine no longer worked well for his nerve pain and every night he would go into mild opioid withdrawal, this was hard to deal with both physically and psychologically.
The positive benefits of daily oxycodone had mostly vanished and the negative consequences had appeared and outweighed the balance beam.
The end result of Richie’s daily opiate use was a life that had a strong element of suffering in it.”
Stay Tuned For More Updates…
As I continue to make progress writing my book, I’ll publish more blog posts on it, thus giving you a consistent sneak peek at how it’s coming along.
I’ve been studying and teaching opioid addiction recovery for almost eight years now, and this book is going to have so much great information in it.
Think of RECOVERED! as a self-help book on quitting opioids.
I’m really excited about it.
And I know that once it’s published on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible, it’s going to help a lot of people.
That’s all for now…
Stay tuned for more updates, and take good care of yourself.
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