Three years ago my WED/RLS that had been an occasional annoyance suddenly made my life very difficult. Plane rides were torture. I was only sleeping a couple of hours a night. Sitting on a couch to read or watch a movie at night became a distant memory.

I went to a neurologist who did all kinds of testing. My neurologist said the WED/RLS looked primary and prescribed a dopamine agonist drug. I began reading so much online about sufferers who had augmented on the dopamine agonist drugs. Other sufferers wrote about very troublesome side-effects. I had a bad reaction a few years earlier when I took statins, and was very reluctant to take another powerful drug.

So I researched online and found a drug called kratom. It’s the leaf of a tropical plant in southeast Asia. Wikipedia describes it like this: “Kratom behaves as a μ-opioid receptor agonist like morphine and is used in the management of chronic pain, as well as recreationally.”

So I researched.

I found that not only was it not FDA approved, the FDA had labeled it a drug of concern. But it was legal, and everything I found online indicated it was safe. Apparently, it does not depress breathing, like a regular opioid does. It is also hard to overdose on it, as you have to take so much that you become nauseous first and throw-up. There were a couple of cases of teenagers who had mixed it with other drugs, and one died. But, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any cases of anyone who had died just from kratom. This, of course, distinguishes it from prescription opiods.

So I decided to try it. I didn’t look at it as a good option, but it seemed a less-bad option than the dopamine agonist drugs, which I really did not want to take. At this point, WED/RLS had severely impacted my quality of life. I found kratom widely available on the internet, even on Amazon.com, and began ordering the powdered leaf.

It’s been over a year now. I take kratom daily and it has given me my life back. The strand I use—and that which at least one other WED/RLS sufferer I know uses—is the red leaf Borneo strain. I make up a dose by letting a gram of kratom sit in a cup of orange juice for twenty minutes, so it dissolves. Then I drink it. Usually, over 24 hours, I’ll take four or five doses. I also have a capsule-filling device I got on Amazon, and will make up capsules to keep in my purse or take with my when I travel.

In addition to the kratom, I take a good variety of vitamins and minerals. The only other thing I take that might be helping as well is L-theanine.

Last month I flew comfortably from Newark to Honolulu—a thirteen hour flight. I had one little period of mild discomfort when I woke up from a nap, but fixed that by simply walking to the restroom. I took a bit more kratom than usual for this trip—maybe as much as ten grams, from the time I left the house until we landed. I usually get six, and sometimes seven, hours of sleep every night. I usually wake up twice—since kratom hasn’t produced time-released leaves yet—and take another dose, and then perhaps walk around for five or ten minutes and then go back to sleep.

For a while, I took the maeng da strain. It made me constipated. After I switched to the red leaf Borneo, and started taking some extra magnesium, the constipation cleared up. The only side effect I notice now is that I get a headache if I don’t drink enough water. I’ve discovered you need to drink a good deal of water while taking kratom.

Kratom doesn’t make me sleepy or nauseous. It manages both the hyper-alert feeling as well as the creepy/crawly feeling of WED/RLS. I don’t feel high at all; in fact, I just feel normal, probably because I don’t take enough to feel high. With the low dose I take, I can drive and do everything that I normally do.

So far, I haven’t seemed to develop any tolerance for the drug and am taking about the same dose I started with over a year ago. But, as we all know, the disease is a moving target, and I expect as it worsens I’ll have to start taking a bit more. So far, all is really good.

I hope my story can help others.