Substances to avoid

[SNB1014]

God willing, any day or week now I will be granted the gift of TPAPN...I say gift because at the core of the program ( specifically: Eval, treatment, meetings, sponsor, objective and random drug testing) are supportive of a strong recovery program and after successfully completing TPAPN my license will remain intact and unblemished. If the BON chooses to show me justice and NOT mercy, I will be professionally screwed, so yes, I am actually slightly excited about TPAPN, lol

I have spent all of my life never giving any thought to cooking or eating delicious food with white wine or vanilla extract and hydrating myself with 8-10 glasses of water a day. I use hand sanitizer (almost) enough to please any infection control nurse. When I have a cold/flu from hell or allergies, I take NyQuil or Benadryl. I use the hair products that I love, including mouse and hairspray.

......you guys get the point, right?

I feel more anxious over being paranoid about secret ingredients/interactions/false positives than I do staying clean and sober. I have taken pre-employment, routine and for cause drug/etoh tests (urine and blood) and never once had a false positive. Apparently they use some ultra sensitive Ets/etg test that has been documented to be "overly sensitive and nonspecific". What the heck?? That is the science they are using?

I understand that they list these things (and many more) because they don't want someone who did indeed drink and blame it on excessive hairspray and hand sanitizer, so they make broad recommendations.

Have you guys in recovery monitoring been forced to change or second guess what was previously never given a second thought? I am anxious, frustrated and confused. Any insight would be super appreciated , thanks!!!

[SpankedInPittsburgh, DNP, RN]

Yeah. Advil, Bagels, who knows what??? I'm afraid of all this stuff. I do wonder how many "false positives" are false though. We have a new member in our group who did the whole false positive protest & then she finally fessed up. I doesn't really matter so much if its a false positive it seems like they treat it the same as if you actually used. This is a paranoid, sick existence

[Recovering_RN]

Paranoid is definitely the case with me! I have read that the alcohol in hand sanitizer gets absorbed more by breathing the fumes rather than through the skin. Now I don't actually know if that's true, but having read that, a friend of mine offered me a taste of some home made moonshine she'd made, and of course I declined. But when she handed me the jar, I took a "whiff" because I've never tasted, or smelled, moonshine whiskey before. To be honest I didn't know people actually still made it! Later that day I panicked, wondering if that little smell of her jar of moonshine would cause me to test positive for alcohol! Sounds silly, but if it's the fumes from hand sanitizer then does that mean the fumes from super strong backyard moonshine might cause a positive result too??? I was so scared for days! I actually did get tested soon after that and of course I was negative. But jeez, I'm afraid to even smell alcohol! Crazy what this system has led us to.

[SpankedInPittsburgh, DNP, RN]

It seems to me that if you are going to relapse you should at least be aware of it. Perhaps one of the problems is the levels they test at. For example if I use a hand sanitizer I guess I absorbed a small amount of alcohol in my system. However if I'm an alcoholic and I relapse I don't think you would find a small amount there. I know time is a function of this but I don't think out of control alcoholics or addicts could pass months of random pee tests. In my state only about 9% of the nurses don't make it through the program. They are the ones that truly need help. Most of the rest of us just have to put up with nonsense for years for something we don't need