Our society's bizarre attitudes towards pain and drugs and surgery
From: cathy:- (anonymous@medispecialty.com)
Tue Apr 30 17:30:03 2002
Our society has the most bizarre attitudes towards drugs and surgery, ya
know? I read through Karla's quilt story, or any of dozens of quilt
stories of people who have had dozens of surgeries, with most surgeries
making things worse rather than better. At the same time that surgeons,
and society in general, can look at Karla and say without blinking that
there is nothing unreasonable about the 50-some operations which one
after the other mutilated Karla's body, then they gasp in horror at the
mere POSSIBILITY that IF someone in chronic pain who takes opiates were
to get cured, THEN that person would have to go through withdrawl, or
might have to stay on a small dose of methadone for the rest of his/her
life.
Look at it this way. Take the following hypothetical scenario: Suppose
spray-gel really is the cure for adhesions. So you go and have an
adhesiolysis with application of spray-gel, and you are permanently
pain-free. You use methadone to wean slowly back from your pain meds.
You get down to 5mg/day, but you find that, no matter what you do, you
can't get below that level without triggering a nasty withdrawl. Because
the opiates HAVE caused permanent physical changes to your brain, and
you are permanently physically dependent upon methadone to prevent
withdrawl. Just like your uterus and ovaries are permanently gone after
your hysterectomy, you can't reverse those neurological changes. So
there you are, utterly triumphant after this long and horrible battle
with adhesions, left with 1) a road map of scars on your belly, 2) a
lifetime need for a tiny dose of methadone (which has no effects on you
beyond keeping withdrawl at bay) and 3) a lifetime need for hormone
replacement therapy to keep the menopausal symptoms at bay.
So like WHY would anyone POSSIBLY think that the methodone need is a
problem????? They don't think that it is a problem that a woman needs
HRT if her ovaries are removed, right?
Sometimes I think our society is just nuts...
At Tue, 30 Apr 2002, Sally Grigg wrote:
>
>Dear Cathy and Tish, Hi, sometimes I try to cut back or go without my
>medication just to see if the pain is still there. I'm always hoping it will
>have just gone away. LOL. Anyway, all that does is make me feel terrible
>because it takes a while for the meds to build up in my body freeing me from
>some of the horrible pain, so I'm going to just accept that I need to take
>my meds at least until they find a cure. Because the pain is so great I just
>can't handle it, and not taking something that helps me to feel human is
>masochistic. But someday I'll stop and be pain free, I have to believe that.
>Love to all, Sally
--
cathy :-)
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