Codeine

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I have been prescribed codeine for a painful condition and took two tablets at about 4 am (the pain had woken me up). They were working within about an hour and I fell back to sleep and slept til 11am. Now I am incredibly sleepy again and am going to have to take a nap. Is this normal? How do people function on codeine??

Yes codine can make you sleepy i take 1 instead of 2 during the day if i need to "function". If they areworkng just take the nap you probably need to rest if you are not well .

You get used to it.
Tolerance soon builds up as I found out.

Yes it's normal for some people. I'm fine on codeine, my friend can't take them because she is drowsy constantly.

It varies. I can't covert cocodamol so I have dihydrocodiene and can tolerate 4 x 60mg a day (red hair issues!)
My colleague takes 8mg and falls asleep

It is an opiate. Everyone's tolerance is different.
It causes horrendous constipation so better get the prunes and movicol.

I only take them if I am able to go for a nap, or just before bed. It's rare that I need something that strong, but paracetamol don't seem to work. I'm becoming a fan of aspirin, which doesn't seem to be a go to anymore

I take it sometimes for pain issues and it can make me sleepy if I haven’t had it for a while. If I need to take it more than 2 days in a row or at higher doses I also take a laxative before bed to stop constipation as well.

Knocks me out if I take 2. Took them for 5 days recently and today my body has had its revenge after the resulting constipation

If I haven't taken any in quite a while that’s wha pt the first ones make me feel like. I love it, best sleep I ever get! I barely sleep any other time. The second dose has a lesser effect and after that I find they don't make me sleepy at all.

I've an Orange juice rule, half a litre for every two codeine.

If you're in a lot of pain, it only makes that more tolerable, so you aren't impaired by it. In addition, as you take them over time, you get used to it (and the odds are that you need to increase the dose/add something else in).

It's worthwhile bearing mind that you will likely need to tail it off gradually rather than stop immediately if you have to take it for longer than a couple of days - the best way I found was to allocate a few days of the supply to tailing off and beforehand, to see how long I could stretch it between doses and taking just one where I thought the pain was bad but not that bad.

These days I'm surprised at just how effective paracetamol can be. I took codeine longterm and tailed it off as soon as I was feeling a bit better and it deals with almost everything.