The world isn't big enough to hold me

The physician who was hired to make the decision on my LTD benefit appeal denied me based on “facts” like this one. The twitter account he referred to as evidence that I’m lying about my illness is hardly active. Also, the majority of the posts are:

• Photos of pets • Photos from Timehop (aka from years ago) • Photos of things around my house

The few photos that “appear to be a young woman who is engaged in life activities” and “awake, smiling and alert” are FAKE. People always use social media to show the BEST moments from their lives, even if they aren’t the whole truth. I’ve had some great experiences in New York, so of course I am going to brag about them! What I don’t share on social media are the consequences of being happy for a day. I don’t share the three days I have to sleep to recover from one stand-up comedy set. I don’t share the intense pain my body is in after walking around in Central Park for a day. 

“In their discussion of the review, the authors said, ‘The most impressive finding of the present review is the deficiency of good-quality studies. This seems to stand in contrast to the widespread concern of doctors and authorities relating to the prescription of opioids for pain management.’ In other words (my interpretation), the current push to prescribe fewer opioids for chronic pain patients is not based on quality research showing a significant danger of addiction, but rather an assumption by authorities that because opioid addiction has increased, it must be due to misuse by chronic pain patients. If anyone ever did a really thorough and high-quality study on the subject, I suspect they would find that most of the people who are addicted to opioids got into that situation because they obtained the drugs illegally, lied about having chronic pain in order to get opioids, or had a problem with addiction prior to being prescribed an opioid for pain.”

I’m HUGELY disappointed at the sweeping over-generalizations that all 3 Democratic candidates made last night when discussing how to end the heroin epidemic. All 3 said that opioid pain medications need to be reigned in hugely in order to fix the heroin epidemic. While it’s true that people can jump from opioid painkillers to heroin, and that heroin and non-medical usage of prescription opioids and other medicines for pain (benzodiazepines, etc.) are epidemics across the country, only 4.5% of people prescribed opioids for chronic pain become addicted to them. What about the other 95.5% of us?

100 million Americans experience chronic pain. 25 million Americans, including me, describe it as “debilitating”. It’s the number one cause of disability in the US. Without my daily doses of Tramadol, as well as my 3 other daily pain-related medications, I’d be at 9/10 pain levels daily instead of some (or most) of the time. Without my bottle of Percocet that I only reach for on 10/10 pain level days, I’d have to go to the emergency room for pain management, where the lights and sounds give me cluster headaches, waits are hours long, costs are high (even with the best of insurance plans), and nurses are quick to assume that I’m drug seeking if the first thing they try to give me doesn’t work.

I understand that there are drug-seekers. I don’t deny that it’s a real and devastating problem. We lose 44 people each day to prescription opioid overdoses, as well as 22 people to heroin overdoses, in the US. Medical professionals have to be on the lookout for people with addictive personalities and questionable symptom descriptions, and they have to make snap judgments in places like the emergency room, where they likely know very little about the patient. But the last time I went to the emergency room, I was given “enough Fentanyl to make me completely out of touch with reality”, and it didn’t even touch the pain. When I told my nurse that, instead of empathizing and wondering what it must be like to feel 9/10 pain, even on a drug that powerful, she said, “Are you *really* sure?”

Let’s not demonize the people who need these kinds of drugs in order to get out of bed because otherwise the pain would literally stop us in our tracks. Let’s put money into research on how to EFFECTIVELY treat chronic pain without opioids before we make it increasingly difficult or even impossible for people who need them to get them. (And no, I don’t want to hear about the unicorn horn that cured your mom’s 3rd cousin’s dentist’s wife’s friend’s incurable disorder). 

You can look here [1, 2] for more statistics about the devastating effects and statistics of chronic pain in the United States. The Washington Post article [2] also makes the false correlation = causation argument that the candidates did last night, but it has good information.

They’re pretty accurate