More than once in the very recent past, I've encountered people - one of which claiming to be a doctor, himself - who accused me of "conning my doctor into being my drug dealer" because I am prescribed an opiate medication. I know for a fact I'm not the only person who's had to deal with idiocy like this, and for my fellow Chronic Illness Warriors out there, I feel your pain; figuratively and literally.
For the rest of you, let me drop a bit of a truth bomb on you first and foremost about my conditions and the medications I'm on, and then I'll delve into some truth about the "opioid epidemic."
Those of you who regularly follow my blog will be reading information you're already, at least in part, aware of. Bear with me.
I first became chronically ill when I received a whiplash injury at ten years old. Spinal cord injuries are not uncommon in triggering the onset of dormant fibromyalgia. I had always been very active as a child, but as the pain levels in my body increased, my activity level decreased. Doctors then had no idea what to make of it. Fibromyalgia was still seen as a trash bin diagnosis, and it wasn't yet as common knowledge then as it is now that children can suffer from it as well as adults. It began the stage of my life I call the merry go round of doctors. I had more and more tests done, everything from xrays, mris and ct scans to full blood panels. One doctor would say I had arthritis and another would say I didn't. The only consistent finding, it seemed, was my elevated ANA. For the uninformed, the ANA test tracks inflammatory - and typically autoimmune - processes in the body. Thus began another round of tests for Lupus and other autoimmune conditions.
Years down the road, I am now approaching my 31st birthday, and my diagnoses are as follows, assuming I leave nothing out (it's a lot to keep track of): Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Autoimmune Thyroiditis (Hashimoto's, hypothyroid), Hypermobole-type Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Type 1 Chiari Malformation, Tenovitis, Synovitis, Tenosynovitis(yes, those are actually three separate things), total loss of lordosis (normal curve) in the cervical spine, Degenerative Disc Disease in the thoracic spine, arthritis in my neck, knees, and likely back, hips and shoulders, scoliosis, chronic migraines, chronic severe muscle spasms, irritable bowel syndrome, highly suspected to have Sjogren's Syndrome, depression, and anxiety.
To be honest I'm not completely sure I didn't miss something up there, but I did my best. As it stands, I'm taking topamax for both my chronic migraines and my cervical arthritis, I'm on 2800mg of gabapentin currently not only for nerve pain but to combat my insomnia and anxiety, I'm on lexapro for my depression, two different muscle relaxers that I alternate every four hours to keep the spasms under control, my thyroid medication, continual birth control due to the insane amount of pain my cramps cause along with the hypotension and anemia that goes along with my monthly, and 5/325 hydrocodone three times a day. Which, especially given I've been taking opiates off and on since I was around 16, is a low dose. I can't take NSAIDs like ibuprofen or aspirin as they give me lower GI bleeds, and oral steroids cause the same. There is little that can be done for actual pain medications that aren't opiates, and frankly, my GP and now pain management physician would not prescribe them if they were unnecessary to mitigate the overwhelming amounts of pain I experience.
I have been receiving local steroid injections when possible, but you can only get so many of those in a year. Being on an opiate medication does not make me a junkie, it does not make me a drug seeker, and it does not make my doctor a drug dealer. It means I am in pain and I need pain relief.
The "opiate epidemic" is, frankly, poorly titled. The better term is a heroin epidemic. The overwhelming majority of reported figures are of individuals using illegal street drugs, or abusing medications that were not even prescribed to them in the first place. Actual pain patients do not abuse their medications; if anything we tend to take fewer than what is prescribed out of hypervigilance in not running out on a bad day or if our prescription gets cut off. Very few people who are prescribed opiates become addicted to them; addiction is a genetic anomaly in the brain. In a room of roughly 100 people, about 4 have the potential to become addicted, if I'm remembering my figures correctly here.
People are trying to punish responsible patients who are ill - and the doctors trying to help them - for the actions of people abusing street drugs. It isn't right, and it is in no way fair.
We pain patients are in no way drug addicts. We are however drug dependent. There is a difference. Addiction is in the brain. It runs your life. Dependency however is when that drug makes you able to live your life. No one calls a diabetic insulin addicted; they call them insulin dependent. So too with pain patients. We depend on medications to make our lives livable, to some degree. Without Pain medication many of us cannot carry out our day to day activities - Even simple things like showering or cooking a meal is too much because the pain we are in is debilitating.
This isn't about pain patients being junkies looking for a fix. This is about pain patients asking for the right to live our lives as closely to normal as we can.
Are you really going to sit there and tell us, "No?"
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