I am betting we all have these days. Days when you wake up pissed off and can't figure out why. Lately I have been pissed off all the time and I know why. I am in pain. That is it. The whole freaking reason I am pissed off. I am tired of living my life in pain. I want it to end. Not my life just the freaking PAIN. That is how it is in my life. All caps P_A_I_N ! Yes it dominates my life. Yes it is here 24/7 with no days off for good behavior, no time off while I sleep. My wife tells me I moan in my sleep. I wake up multiple times a night from the pain. You know what pisses me off even more. The fact that a doctor, who is supposed to be helping me manage my pain says it is okay for me to still be in pain 24/7. His office thinks that a pain level of 5 is just freaking wonderful.
I warned you in the title what this was going to be like. This isn't one of my normal diaries where I complain and yet act like I am normal. I am fed up. I want to shout, scream and destroy something. I want to blow my top at my pain doctor, well actually his staff since I have never seen the freaking idiot. I want to rage against them because they think it is just fine. 100% A Okay to leave people at a pain level of 5 and not try to get it lower. Until this time I have always had a 2 way relationship with my doctors. I may not do everything they say like quitting smoking but I try to at least work to better my health with them. These PM workers however seem to not give a rats' ass about what I want. It is all about what they want and what they will do not what I would like to try. Whenever I bring up things I would like to try they ignore me. Hell it took almost a year to get them to actually write a referral to a water based PT program and then I have to go find one. They just basically gave me a script for it. Like I could get it filled at the corner Walgreens. One year of mentioning it time after time. I think they gave in just to shut me up.
So at my last visit the oh so wonderful Dragon Lady says she will never up my medication again. They are just in a holding pattern until I hit 50. SO I get to watch the next 2 years drag by as my pain level increases and the drugs do less and less to relieve my pain. They worked at first for about 6 hours. Now it is under 4. How much longer will it be until it is under 2 hours ? How much more pain am I supposed to be in because they refuse to do their job ? I have an appointment with them on Tuesday. I know I need to get my anger out before then. If I don't, I know myself. I know what will happen. I will go off on them. Then they will dismiss me because I went off on them. Hell they have threatened to do it repeatedly just for not getting their shots. So my goal is to keep my cool and not blow up while I wait patiently for the new PM clinic I want to go to to see if they will take me. I have fingers crossed but until they say yes I am stuck where I am.
Jump down below that orange jungle gym to hear me rant some more if you wish
So why is this crap allowed? Seriously, any other branch of medicine would NEVER allow a patient to be treated half way and left unless it was because the treatment may kill the patient. Then they stabilize the patient and then continue treatment. That is not what is being done in pain management. The only patients who seem to be allowed to get as much relief as they can handle are terminal cancer patients. The rest of us are left hanging with an average pain level of 5. That is halfway up the pain scale which runs from 0, no pain and feeling dandy, through 10 curled into a ball and begging for death. Yes the only way to rate a patient is through self reporting. I could lie during my visits to PM and say it is higher than it is so I could get more relief. In fact I am betting some patients do this, not because they are trying to get high or sell the scripts they get but because they hate being left in pain. I don't. I am not that good at lying to people. So I tell the truth and am left in pain.
Allowing people to live in chronic pain is not a good thing for the body. In fact it is downright dangerous. It is more dangerous to leave a person in chronic pain than it is to treat them with high doses of opioid pain medications. Undertreatment of chronic pain patients is a shameful fact in the PM branch of medicine. This can lead to high blood pressure, something that is finally being controlled with medication for me but at one point it was averaging 210/153. You can't tell me that isn't dangerous. Hell the pain management PAs kept flipping out over just how high it was. It also leads to stress. That's another bad thing. Stress can lead to early heart attacks and other malfunctions in the body. Then we have depression. It is really depressing to be told oh you are only worth being given medication to get your pain down to X number and usually it is 5. We won't even try to get the pain down lower so suck it up. Be a man and just deal with it. Grow some balls. That is the basic PM clinic approach to chronic pain.
I have to say that chronicling my journey here has helped with my frustration at being left in pain. It has allowed me to become friends with some others who are in the same boat and making the same journey I am. It has also allowed me to get to know others and realize I am not alone. Having support in our fight is really important. I talked about depression and how it affects those of us in chronic pain. It is a very real danger that can overwhelm us without support from friends, family and even complete strangers. That depression can lead to suicide in some who feel they have no other recourse to stop the pain. I can understand this completely. Living in pain day after day after day really sucks and it sucks your energy right out of you. So if you know someone in chronic pain you can help them by being a friend. You can't fix the issue but you can listen to us rant and rave. That helps. You can hold our hands and let us know you are there. Just being there for us is often enough to help keep the depression under control.