Saturday, December 22, 2007
I wonder about some medical procedures. My bride had to under go a biopsy yesterday. I was in the room while they took a tissue sample of one of her ovaries. Her Dr. is one of the sweetest kindest ladies you could ever meet and she did prescribe a couple of pain pills for the bride. But I don’t think they helped much. The procedure was performed with some of the strangest instruments I ever seen in my life. But when the wife cried out in pain and the tears were running down her face I knew it hurt and hurt badly. Now I have had a colonoscopy and the procedure is not bad at all and they sedated me, but on a painful biopsy almost nothing. The bride’s Dr. said that her partners in the practice don’t even prescribe the pain pills. It don’t seem right to me. Just one shot of something could make it bearable and that is not to much to ask.
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3 comments:
That has never made sense to me..if there is a dope to take care of the pain then the dopes should prescrivbe the dope.
I went for years without even a aspirin trying to be a tough guy and working trough the pain in my knees and elsewhere. But now I will not let it get ahead of me and take the darvocets..if I am addicted so what..at my age I had rather be addicted to pain medicine and have a life wit bearable pain then know that I had to live the rest of my life in misery..which would be not much life at all.
I agree I'll take what I can to easy the pain with no shame at all.
kenny, this is a huge issue in my life, and has been for years. I first got rheumatoid arthritis when I was 8 years old. I have no real memory of what it's like to not be in some level of pain. Every minute of my life, I'm in pain. Right now I'm grinding my teeth a bit. It's time to change my pain patch. I'm finally under good pain treatment - but it's still barely adequate.
I've had extreme levels of pain in my life from different things. One is fibromyalgia. We actually have pain nerve networks twice as developed as *normal* people's. Our brains, under PET scans, light up in a completely different area than normal people's, too.
We are hard wired, by nature, to feel pain at extremely intense levels, compared to others who don't have fibromyalgia.
Yet - strange thing, this - we also tend to be very tolerant of pain. Often, abnormally so.
In 2004 I had to get a terrible infection in my foot operated on without general anesthetic. They called the foot surgeon too late, and there was no time to wait for an operating room. They were all filled, none available for 24 hours. In that time I would probably have died.
Problem was, the doc knew he might have to amputate it in front of me. Apparently this can actually kill a person from shock.
I got lucky. The foot is maimed but it looks good enough on the outside, and I may be able to keep it for the rest of my life. It's badly scarred inside, in the bones and nerves and blood vessels. It's sort of half dead inside. But it's still kicking, for now.
Those are just a couple things in my life involving exceptional pain.
Years ago, I used to just live with it because I'm tough and I'm proud, and felt like I needed to prove that.
It took my husband to make me see how this was destroying my ability to function. So I had to rethink it all and figure out what to do, who to see. How to talk to them and make them understand I wasn't some sort of drug seeker.
Because of what I view as people trying to force their brand of morality onto my life, I've had terrible, traumatic experiences with pain docs over the years. The damage this attitude does to people is indescribable.
I've also seen, over and over, that docs are far more likely to prescribe adequate pain meds for males than for females. My husband has seen this too - over and over. It outrages him.
There is no reason whatsoever to NOT talk to the doctor first, and find out what they're going to do for the pain, in procedures like your wife's. Clearly, we cannot trust the doc to do the right thing without input from us.
At this point, I am adamant and unashamed about demanding adequate pain control. I still don't always get it. But if I find out they aren't going to give me enough pain meds before certain procedures? I refuse to go through with it, and find a new doctor.
What I mean is, if I'm not happy with their job performance, I fire them.
The docs work for US. WE are the bosses, not the docs. They tend to forget that. Sometimes we do too.
To hear stories like what happened to your wife makes me see red. It provokes a deep, ice cold, crystal clear fury in me.
It is cruel. We should not tolerate cruelty, not toward others and not toward ourselves.
I hope this might, in some small way, help your wife. I'm so very sorry she had to go through that.
And, that you - who love her - had to see her suffer, suffer for no reason.
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