January 2002
Relapse Happens

It’s no secret that relapse happens. It is a part of the recovery process for some people. If you find yourself in or heading for relapse, it’s important to keep “harm reduction” in mind. It’s hard enough to recover after “going out” again. Don’t let it endanger your health and life more than it has to. Thinking about things now may help reduce problems later. Setting some limits that will help protect you at a difficult time can be helpful too. Here are a few things to consider that may make relapse less of a devastating overall health issue.

Some keys to harm reduction during relapse:

Eat and drink water!
Remember no matter what, you need to eat, even if you don’t feel hungry. Dehydration is a very big problem too, so drink water, Gatorade or juice. This will help keep you from feeling as bad on the way down. Often when we feel sick to our stomach it is because we need more good fluids. We need to eat to absorb some of our medications correctly. We also need to keep the nutrients in our bodies up, for energy and to fight off the germs we come in contact with.

Practice safe sex!
Drug use of any kind can make us more open to sex and less likely to practice safe sex; it is a good habit to always have condoms or other barriers on hand, even if we don’t plan on needing them. If we use them we will eliminate the possibility of everything from unwanted pregnancy to STDs and bacterial infections (Which we all know can be a real pain in the ….)

Don’t share needles!
Sharing puts you in danger of reinfection with another strain of HIV that may be more resistant to drug therapy or more lethal. You could get Hepatitis B or C; both can be really dangerous for HIV positive folks. Also there are infections of all kinds that can be transmitted by needles, none of which we want. There are needle exchange programs in WA. Call 1-800-678-1595 or 206-205-7837 for where and when to exchange needles in Seattle and King county.

Continue taking your HIV meds!
Keeping a day or two worth of your meds. with you at all times helps to prevent missed doses when we don’t come home. Not missing our medications reduces the possibility of building resistance to them. This will help keep them working for us. However, recreational drugs can interact badly with our medications. Our liver has to process both medications and drugs and this slows down the work of the liver. Slowing down the process can lead to serious overdose related to the drugs. It can also increase the side effects of our meds. Some interactions like that between protease inhibitors and Ecstasy can be deadly. Be informed, check out the specific interaction for the medications you are on.

Taking the time to think about a few things now and taking the steps to keep our bodies safe will help to ensure that a slip is just that and that it doesn’t turn into something horrible that you will have to deal with later. Please remember we are always here to help, no matter what the problem might be my friends. Take care of yourselves. ?

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