I'm with you 100% on this. People who don't deal with chronic pain struggle to understand.
I was on long term disability at age 22, unable to work, barely scraping by on 67% of my prior income, and running a crazy gamut of getting multiple spinal and facet injections, trying all kinds of different anti-inflammatories and other expensive meds that made me break out in gives everywhere and had my hair falling out in clumps.
Finally got frustrated enough with the lack of improvement to try pain management, and ever since have been able to work full time and have a mostly livable life with cheap pain meds and muscle relaxants that cost under $100 a month.
Literally made the difference for me in being a burden to society, staying at home miserable all day vs. being able to have a career, buy a house, and support my own life. I'm still in pain, and I still can't do everything I would like to do, but I would have zero quality of life if not for pain management.
Yes! To everything you said! I think one major misconception that people who don’t have chronic pain hold is that if a person isn’t writhing in pain, they shouldn’t need pain medication. They think “well, I’VE thrown my back out, or I’VE passed a kidney stone, and it was excruciatingly painful, and I got through it without opioids, so YOU must not need them as you’re physically able to go about your day...having a career and buying a house and all that!”
The key word in all of this, IMO, is “chronic”. A person doesn’t need to be bowled over in excruciating pain every minute to be a chronic pain patient. MODERATE chronic pain is a huge and debilitating thing to live with IF it isn’t treated. Most of us with it don’t want to take super strong pain meds; we don’t want to feel wonky or fuzzy or buzzed, because we want to be able to function normally...ie work, own a home, raise kids, etc. In my case, I’ve taken Vicodin daily for over a decade and STILL take the same dosage as I did back in 2009. This is a big thing that non-chronic-pain sufferers aren’t aware of: that a person CAN take an opioid medication for years and NOT become an abuser or addict. In that decade, my career involved driving over 30k miles per year, and successfully presenting and selling to clients...all of this time taking Vicodin as a PART of my treatment regimen. I was a much safer and careful driver whilst taking my low dose of Vicodin (I was ONLY distracted when my pain wasn’t well-controlled and thus I was focused more on my discomfort than I was on the road and traffic around me). Without pain medication, I would have been unable to work.
Like Everjaded, I don’t want to get high from my meds. I don’t want to lie around on the couch all day. I don’t want to be disabled. We just want to be functional humans. And some of us humans have chronic pain that requires management from many medications and supplements, including controlled pain meds. And speaking for myself, and possibly for everjaded as well, our lower dosage of pain medication does not eliminate the pain; it just keeps the pain levels low enough to be background noise. To achieve NO PAIN, we'd need to be taking much stronger medications...but the huge downside is that we’d be unable to work, drive, and function normally under those meds. So we willingly suffer varying degrees of pain in order to not be “drugged up” in a way that would render us incapable of performing our normal life tasks and duties.
So please don’t assume that everyone who takes opioid pain meds does so for funsies. I ask that you acknowledge that there are individuals (such as myself and everjaded) who require these medications in order to live normal lives like you do.
Everjaded and I are examples of how prescription pain medications are necessary for some of us to live normal and productive lives.
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