My issues with painkillers started about 5 years ago. A condition known as 'testicular varicosele' found its way into my life. I was in college at the time, and without insurance. As a recovering alcoholic, I know that I am susceptible to addiction, and did my best to stay away from opiates. However, two unsuccessful surgeries later, and then a third to remove a malignant tumor from my kidney (and most of my kidney with it) and I finally broke. I couldn't take it anymore. I had been living my life like someone was hammering on my testicles for 2 years at this point. I found a doctor that took mercy on me, and I have been on a slowly rising dose of narcotics ever since.
I'm stuck. I have to take the pills or I get sick. Painkillers have helped give me some quality of life back, while simultaneously sacrificing other parts of my life. It is a terrible burden. My wife doesn't realize the extent of the grip these things have on me. I don't know how to even begin working away from opiates at this point. I have been very diligent in trying to keep my tolerance down, but my dose slowly rises over the years, and now I take between 200 and 300 milligrams of opiates every day. I am back at work after the kidney surgery, but how long can I do this? How long can I just take this dangerous medicine til it catches up with me? But what else to do? How many times do I let them cut me?
I am not homeless. I am college educated and employed. I have a family. I'm not out robbing people to get my fix. So I'm not your stereotypical junkie living in a van under the bridge. But could that be my future? Who knows? I've never tried heroin, but had I not found a sympathetic doctor, who knows? I suspect my story is not unique.
That, at least in my personal experience as a legitimate chronic pain patient, opioid dependence is significantly different from addiction in that I have never, in 20+ years, needed to increase my dosage, once we'd reached a therapeutic dosage. The current focus on addiction and abuse has been hugely harmful to the legitimate chronic pain patient. Due to the over swing of the control pendulum, we have been deprived of our medications, lost our doctors and been treated like criminals.
This has caused not only physical harm but psychological as well. Just look at the surge in suicides by despondent pain patients. I suggest that a portion of the rise in heroin usage comes from desperate pain patients who cannot acquire their legal prescriptions and that many of the overdoses are pain patients either unfamiliar with heroin or deliberately OD'ing. I can't prove these statements but they are my experience and the experience of many pain patients nationwide.
Not every pain patient is an addict or addicted to their pain medication. Addiction is a "CRAVING" for a substance. Pain patients DO NOT "crave" their medicines. They take it because they have to. They're in constant pain. They are dependent on it for pain relief, nothing else. Just like any other medicine to treat blood pressure, insulin, cholesterol.
The current anti-opioid climate has had a negative impact on me as a legitimate, responsible pain patient, in that it has made it difficult to find any doctor who will prescribe the medications, made it difficult to find any pharmacy to fill it if I DO get a prescription, and made it difficult to even have it covered as my insurance will no longer cover my pain medications. I have been tried, and sentenced, and am now being punished for the misuse and abuse of others (and lumped in with heroin users to boot) and have committed no crime. I bear the stigma and discrimination as a 'drug seeker' and 'drug offender.' Even though all I want is pain relief.
There are many legitimate users of pain medication who suffer from chronic diseases. Patients are not addicts. I suffer from Fibromyalgia and MS and just making through the day is a challenge. I still work full-time but I am on intermittent FMLA since flare ups can happen at any time. I suffered for over 10 years in debilitating pain because doctors thought I was too young to be in such pain. You can not let the possibility of someone being an addict hold you back from treating those who actually need it. There is no reason any person should have to suffer in pain. I have seen the horrors of addiction with friends and my ex-husband, and it is awful, but we as a society must recognize there are millions of us who have true invisible illnesses.
