I am also at a loss how far to connect the disuse of opium with the lancinating pains which have troubled me since the time to which I refer. These pains began long before I had recourse to opium, they did not cease their frequent attacks while opium was used, nor have they failed to make their potency felt since opium was abandoned. While it is not improbable that the neuralgic difficulties of my childhood might have remained to the present time, even if I had never made use of opium, I think that the experience of all who have undergone the trial shows that similar pains are invariably attendant upon the disuse of opium. How long their presence might be protracted with persons not antecedently troubled in this way, is a question I can not answer. I infer from what little has been recorded, and from what I have learned in other ways, that the reforming opium-eater must make up his mind to a protracted encounter with this great enemy to his peace. That the struggle of others with this difficulty will be prolonged as mine has been I do not believe, unless they have been subjected for a lifetime to pains connected with disorder in the nervous system.
The unnatural sensitiveness to cold to which I have alluded is rather a discomfort than any thing else. It merely makes a higher temperature necessary for enjoyment, but in no other respect can it be regarded as deserving special mention. With the thermometer standing at 80° to 85° the sensation of agreeable warmth is perfect; with the mercury at 70° or even higher, there is a good deal of the feeling that the bones are inadequately protected by the flesh, that the clothing is too limited in quantity, and in winter that the coal-dealer is hardly doing you justice.
The cold perspiration down the spine, which was so marked a sensation during the worst of the trial, has not yet wholly left the system, but is greatly limited in the extent of surface it affects and in the frequency of its return.
The tendency to impatience and irritability of temper to which I have adverted is by far the most humiliating of the effects resulting from the abandonment of opium. Men differ very widely both in their liability to these excesses of temper as well as in their power to control them; but under the aggravations which necessarily attend an entire change of habit, this natural tendency, whether it be small or great, to hastiness of mind is greatly increased. So long as the disturbing causes remain, whether these be the state of the liver or the stomach, or a want of sufficient sleep, or the excited condition of the nervous system, the patient will find himself called upon for the exercise of all his self-control to keep in check his exaggerated sensibility to the daily annoyances of life.