The main bulk of my suffering is directly related to the manufactured "opiate crisis" that has caused untold pain and suffering for so many millions of people for so many, many years. In this essay, I intend to place my experiences in their proper context, as one of a sharply growing series of victims of medical malpractice stemming from the fundamental shift in our society from seeing pain patients as people to be treated, to deriding them as addicts to be suspicious of.
Though it says volumes about our society that we see addicts as fundamentally 'bad' people who deserve homelessness and death instead of as human beings, often times human beings who are suffering greatly and turn to the only thing that makes life even mildly bearable. But that's neither here nor there. (For more information about addiction, see https://tinyurl.com/rat-park )
Our story begins in 1996, when Purdue Pharma (Stamford, CT, USA) released OxyContin, a sustained release oxycodone preparation that is also sold here in the UK. In the US, where such things are legal, it was aggressively marketed and promoted as less dangerous and less addictive than other opiate preparations. (Source & more information about OxyContin's marketing: https://tinyurl.com/oxymarket )
Anyone who thinks a $200 million a year marketing campaign would not spill over to the UK is more than merely obtuse, but likely willfully ignorant. The entire 'opiate epidemic' is an American import, and it started there: with an unscrupulous American company that would stop at nothing to make money.
Lulled into a false sense of security by Purdue's claims of minimal risk of addiction, doctors began prescribing OxyContin much more liberally and for much more than they originally would have. This increased availability set many people up for addiction and overdose deaths.
To most people, that is the bulk of what the 'opiate crisis' is. But there is a secondary crisis unfolding quietly behind closed doors. In the USA, there are "Don't Punish Pain" rallies that at least try to draw attention to the situation ( https://dontpunishpainrally.com ), but here in the UK we are entirely forgotten and buried under the British 'stiff upper lip' mentality. It is completely hushed up, no one talks about the fact that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. (For example: https://tinyurl.com/opiate-pendulum )
The government and/or the NHS have enforced involuntarily tapering of chronic pain patients' medication. Medication we need in order to not spend our lives screaming in agony. The pain management clinic has already warned me that it is, direct quote, "when, not if" I will find my own medication terminated, ready or not.
But there will be no 'ready'. Chronic pain does not get better with time. Chronic pain does not go into remission. If you know someone with chronic pain who appears to be 'getting better', I can promise you it is merely that the sufferer has learned to better conceal it. It's a saying in the chronic pain community, "We don't fake being ill. We fake being well."
We have learned that the average person only has about two weeks of compassion in them, after that you're treated as a freak for not getting better already, or outright accused of malingering. After all, with all of modern science, can't you just go to the doctor and get a pill and be done with it? Our concept of illness is either 'you go to the hospital, get treated, and come out okay' or 'you go to the hospital, waste away, and die'. Chronic pain patients, who never get better, but aren't actively dying, don't fit in to our society's 'concept' of illness.
People who offer to help us out for the social brownie points of helping the poor cripple soon discover that we're not going to die, we're going to continue to need help for the forseeable future. Rather than gracefully admitting that they don't have the ability to help us in perpetuity (which would be perfectly understandable!), most people choose to lash out at us, we must be abusing their kindness, they helped so we must surely be better by now. Compassion fatigue seems to hit every single human being that interacts with us, as if merely existing while disabled is wearing on their ability to remain civil. (Compassion fatigue: https://tinyurl.com/2-week-fatigue )
Doctors have even less compassion than that. In the backlash of the 'crisis', they have begun to treat anyone who complains of pain, unilaterally, as a drug seeker. And those of us already in treatment? Are addicts in need of rehab. (More examples: https://tinyurl.com/drs-no-compassion )
Despite study after study (Studies: https://tinyurl.com/no-taper ) showing that tapering chronic pain patients unequivocally causes severe harm, up to and including death, the pain management team said to my face that I am, direct quote, "addicted to heroin" and "no different from my four year old grandson, demanding a choccy biscuit because he doesn't know they'll rot his teeth. And I have to smack him and tell him NO! And I'll smack you, too, if it'll get you off those drugs!" (Somehow my complaint that a doctor had literally smacked his hands in front of my face to demonstrate that he was sincere in his threat to physically assault me.... mysteriously got lost.)
I have been denied treatment for other (non-opiate) methods of reducing my pain because, direct quote, "it doesn't matter as long as you're on those drugs, opiates actually make you more sensitive to pain in the long run, so there's no sense trying anything else if you won't get clean." They talk to me like taking my medication responsibly, as prescribed, is the same as shooting up black tar. All in the hopes of bullying or shaming me into "voluntarily" tapering.
Honestly just living under these conditions alone would be enough to snap my mental health in half, but you have to remember that I'm not only facing all of this systemic bullying and professional misconduct while also living with pain that has often been compared to late stage cancer and chemotherapy ( https://tinyurl.com/fibro-chemo ), as well as debilitating fatigue, and a shroud of fog hanging around my brain and clouding my memories and judgments (and at times, my ability to speak English). Everyone's first reaction is "did you report them? you should report them. why didn't you report them!" as if I'm too stupid to have thought of that myself. But I don't have the energy for the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare that is dealing with the NHS's administration, especially not when I could have my entire life destroyed by a doctor's bruised ego penning into my file "patient was uncooperative and combative, suspect drug abuse".
It's only a matter of time before I choose suicide over another sleepless night of laying in bed and praying for death. And when that time comes, I hope that my name is added to the long, bloodstained list of people who have killed themselves not out of any sort of depression, but because their entire existence is built on pain and suffering and enough becomes enough for the last time. Drop my body on the steps of the CDC, which is the main driving force behind the opiate witch hunt. Maybe death will at least bring me some measure of peace.
