What? Didn't you get the message? Pain relief for the dying is politically popular, but if you have the audacity to keep on LIVING, well the word is, "too bad, sucker..."
You know how when you're a kid and you broke something, how you would try to hide it, or clumsily glue it back together, or make it look like your little brother did it? Well we are the people that the surgeons "broke." They would like nothing better than for us all to die or just go away or whatever so they won't be constantly reminded of how badly they f***ed up. Prescribing adequate pain control to the people that one has caused to be in chronic pain would be part of the grown-up-take-responsibility-for-your-mistakes way of conducting one's life. And for a lot of surgeons out there, "pigs fly" and "hell freezes over" come to mind to go along with the phrase "take responsibility for your mistakes."
-- cathy :-)