The Opioid Crisis Is About Real People. Real People in Pain.

I am just a statistic, but don’t take my pain medication away from me.

The Centers for Disease Control released a report roughly a year ago concerning chronic pain statistics. It said just over 20 percent of the United States adult population suffered from chronic pain. The estimates were based on the 2016 National Health Interview Survey. That survey included over 33,000 adults.

To estimate the prevalence of chronic pain and high-impact chronic pain in the United States, CDC analyzed the 2016 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data. An estimated 20.4% (50.0 million) of U.S. adults had chronic pain and 8.0% of U.S. adults (19.6 million) had high-impact chronic pain, with higher prevalences of both chronic pain and high-impact chronic pain reported among women, older adults, previously but not currently employed adults, adults living in poverty, adults with public health insurance, and rural residents. Centers for Disease Control

Reading that quote, I recognize myself. I recognize friends and relatives, too. If their estimate of 20% of U.S. adults suffering from chronic pain is even close to accurate, people in your life are represented in these numbers as well. Maybe even you.

Every day there seems to be another headline referencing the opioid epidemic our country is experiencing.

The Nation is in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic. More than 130 people a day die from opioid-related drug overdoses. The Health and Human Services Administration

Twelve years ago, I began having leg pain. It began small and increased over time. There was no injury I could point to as being the cause. My healthcare professionals were baffled.

The pain increased. Now it was constant, 24 hours a day.

At first, it seemed as if it were a hamstring pull. That seemed unlikely, but I dutifully had three rounds of physical therapy. Then there was a pain management doctor who ordered tests, gave me a TENS unit, then tried injections. The pain increased. Now it was constant, 24 hours a day.

Although my MRI showed three bulging discs in my lumbar region, my back wasn’t the problem. My leg was. Since I didn’t respond to physical therapy or injections, I was given a tennis ball and told to go home.

At no time during any of this process did anyone offer opioids.

My husband was expected to push at my piriformis muscle with the tennis ball. Basically, he was to push against my left butt muscle as hard as he could. This would hopefully cause an immune response that would attract white blood cells. It might help with the pain.

I have no idea if it would have done something. When the doctor showed my husband the technique, it was very painful. I limped out to the car and we drove home.

My husband turned off the car in our garage and said; “There was no way in hell I am going to hurt you like that. The whole idea is crazy.”

I have zero problems with my husband not wanting to cause me pain. I don’t think I could do it for him.

I gave up trying to get better. I tried to sit in ways that didn’t make the pain worse and spent a couple of days a week laying on the couch trying to get my muscles to stop spasming.

At no time during any of this process did anyone offer opioids. I took massive doses of Advil, which played hell with my ulcer. Sometimes I had a drink.

It was a matter of deciding which pain was worse. Almost always I chose the burning in my gut over the aching in my leg. It wasn’t until one of the discs ruptured that I got some help. The help was Vicodin. It was magical.

After a couple of days taking the opioid, I looked at my husband and said “Right at this moment I don’t hurt. It is the first time in three years.”

Surgery reduced my pain by about 80%.

I had a double lumbar fusion and tapered off the Vicodin. There was damage to the nerve running down my leg. It may have been injured during the surgery, but I tend to think it was caused by the three years the nerve was compressed.

Surgery reduced my pain by about 80%. As far as I am concerned, it was the best decision I ever made. And I’ve made some good decisions. Remember that husband who refuses to intentionally cause me pain? I rest my case.

I have taken Tramadol as needed ever since. Sometimes I need it three or four times a day. Sometimes I can skip it. Most of the time, in order to have a life filled with exotic activities like grocery shopping, I don’t skip it.

In the back of my mind, always, is my life before surgery and pain medication. I remember being homebound a lot. I remember dragging my leg through Safeway on the days I felt well enough.

Sometimes I gave up and ordered my groceries delivered. Usually, I took my daughter with me to push the cart and reach for items low or high on the shelves. My daughter has since graduated from college and begun her own life with her fiancé. She doesn’t live at home.

Every time someone starts talking about making pain medication harder to prescribe, I get nervous. Tramadol, and the Lyrica I now take, gave back some of my normal activities. Not all of them.

I take the elevator rather than the stairs if I have a choice. When we visited Yosemite a few years ago, I sat on a bench when my husband hiked up any sort of incline.

I do not want to give up my access to the pain medication that allows me to have this quality of life. Would you?

It is so easy to say something else will help, without proof that it would.

But what about the 130 people who are dying daily due to opioid-related causes? Is the ability of a 55-year-old woman to do her own grocery shopping worth that? I don’t know. Maybe the 55-year-old woman in question shouldn’t be the one to decide that. She is, after all, biased.

It doesn’t feel comfortable to leave it in the hands of people who don’t understand what it is like to live with chronic pain though. It is so easy to say something else will help, without proof that it would.

The thing is, I’m not abusing them. When I have gone a day or two without taking them, I had no negative reaction. I don’t want them to go away and hope that something else will work.

If my brother or sister or spouse were one of today’s 130 death statistics, maybe I’d feel differently. I don’t know.

Why aren’t these things easier? Why isn’t there a solid right or wrong answer? A strategy that is obviously the correct one?

I don’t know that, either.

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