You know it’s a bad day pain-wise when you find yourself doing a Google search on “Does removing legs make severe axonal neuropathic pain go away?”
Google reminded me that doing so will not necessarily stop the pain. I could end up with phantom pain worse than before.
I just want the pain to stop. Is that too much to ask?
Duh, of course it is.
We often think doctors are miracle workers, but when it comes to severe nerve pain, medical professionals have very few treatments in their bag of tricks: Gabapentin, pain meds, injections, ablations, hot/cold packs, and implanted nerve stimulator.
Rarely are these treatments permanent; and that is if you can get insurance to pay for it.
Unfortunately, as chronic nerve pain patients will tell you, this sort of pain rarely goes away, regardless of the treatment.
Personally, I’m grateful for whatever relief I can find, but some days I wonder . . . and when I “wonder” it can lead to interesting Google searches.
I still have both legs. All I want is for the pain to stop. Until that happens, I have no other option but to bite hard on the stick of modern medicine, hoping for a bit of relief.
Another day, another fight with pain and my very existence. There’s a new problem . . . Wild swings in blood sugar level. A 24-hour glucose monitor tells a story of a man with gastroparesis and exocrine pancreatitis insufficiency; a man whose pancreas is out of sync with his stomach and digestive track, leading to the abnormal highs and lows he is now facing.
It is what it is.
My partner has long since drifted off to sleep. Not me. Sleep eludes me as it has almost every night for 30 years.
1:00 AM . . . Cymbalta popped
2:00 AM . . . Cannabis gummy ingested
4:00 AM . . . Hydrocodone swallowed
Headphones on, as the sweet British voice of Jon Cohen prepares to sing me to sleep.
4:20 AM . . . I roll on my left side, pull my legs into a fetal position, and pull a large, firm pillow to my chest.
Soon after, I fall asleep,
Finally, sleep. If my blood glucose level drops below 55, an alarm will sound, hopefully waking me up.
8:10 AM . . . Partially awake, my first thought has earth shattering implications. What’s the correct word for backing up a recording; you know like backing up a car?
Dammit, why can’t I remember this word?
Too tired to care. I’ll message Carolyn later. She knows everything. Well, almost, anyway.
Back to sleep.
OCD-brain says, Wait a minute, there’s an unanswered question for you to answer!
Leave me alone.
Surely you jest. Answer the question!
Back up the recording?
Rewind the recording?
Reverse the recording?
No, dammit. What is it called when you back up-rewind-reverse, no, no, no! Dummy. It’s . . . uh . . .a time mark? Yes, that will work for me.
Finally, sleep arrives. All is right in the world, at least until I awake again a few hours later.
Come on, what’s a little gallows humor in the midst of a dark, trying, and at times overwhelming, season of life. Sometimes, laughing in the face of suffering is all any of us can do. I know that’s the case for me, anyway. Not that I sit around laughing as I writhe in pain. No, in those moments I want to swallow a handful of pills and drift into sweet, peaceful nothingness. I want to think better days lie ahead for me, but my gut and seven decades of life suggest otherwise. I could be wrong, as I oft have been over these many years, but, at the very least, I’m on the short end of life. Instead of grand plans for the future, managing health struggles consume my daily life, often demanding I live by the hour instead the day.
I won’t give you a long recitation on the current status of my health. Doctors remain perplexed, and while scans and blood tests reveal oddities here and there, nothing that screams: Eureka! We found the problem. You are still going to die, but at least you will know what killed you.
I see a new endocrinologist next month. One doctor wonders if some of my symptoms might hormone related. More tests, looking for the proverbial needle in a pile of almost identical needles. I find myself thinking, “Can’t I be on the winning side of the odds just once before I die?” 🤣 A raspy, heavy voice from the dark laughed and said, “Surely, you jest. God is punishing you for saying God Dammit in 2005.” Well, God Dammit, Jesus, must you be so petty? It’s not like I ate a forbidden apple, picked up sticks on the Sabbath, or masturbated. Now, those are some “sins” that require severe punishment, right?
Long term readers know my medical history, so I won’t recite it here. Everything remains the same on that front, albeit somewhat worse depending on the day. What is of more immediate concern is my profuse sweating (especially at night), unregulated feeling of hot/cold, and precipitous drops in blood glucose levels for no apparent reason. As you might imagine, these problems are far from ideal, 🤣 so that’s why I’m seeing another endocrinologist.
Fatigue, chronic insomnia, and increasing immobility all make getting out of bed in the morning difficult, and some days impossible. Pleas from my life partner, “Bruce,You have got to get up,” followed by some sort of bribe hoped to draw me from my bed, no longer work. I know I’m at a bad place, but that’s where the car broke down with a blown motor, so here I remain. I try. What more can I do?
In February, I was diagnosed with melanoma skin cancer on my neck. The cancer appeared suddenly and quickly grew. It was successfully removed. I have a nasty scar to prove it.
Last month, I was diagnosed with basal cell cancer on my left hand and squamous cell cancer on the right side of my neck. I had both growths surgically removed. I also had a large cyst on my back removed at the same time.
Well, enough of this. I’m not whining or complaining. Just talking to my friends; letting them know that I’m down, but not out. I haven’t quit blogging, and I still hope to write again. Maybe even today or tomorrow. Until then, I appreciate your love, kindness, and support.
If you have written or texted me and I have not responded, please accept my apology for my negligence. I’ve had several people get irate with me because I haven’t responded to them. Sorry about that, but I’ve been forced to cut a lot of things out of my life, and that includes responding to emails, texts, social media messages, and voice mails. I hope to do better in the future, but I can’t make any promises. It’s interesting to note what’s not so important when death is stalking you. Life is quickly reduced to bare essentials; people and things that matter to you.I have thought about farming out contact form responses to someone who has read my writing for a long time and has an in depth knowledge of my political, social, and theological views. Someone answering for me would be speaking on my behalf, so it’s important they understand my beliefs. If this is something that might interest you, please let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Carolyn, my editor. As my longtime editor and friend, she knows what I needon this front.
While under the influence of the Spirit I thought . . .
(Inner Monologue)
Why do I feel so funny?
What have I eaten today? When is the last time I have eaten?
Hmm . . . 12 hours.
So my blood sugar is low. No need to check it. It’s in the 50s when I feel like this,
You need to drink a coke and eat something.
Ugh. Will I or won’t I vomit?
Okay, I’ll drink a coke and eat a sandwich.
My mind is now silent . . .
I think I will lie down rest for a moment. And then I think I’ll drink a coke, maybe even two.
To weak now to stand, I fall on the bed.
Weak as I may be, my mind is clear.
Fuck Coke. Fuck Sandwich too.
Sleep. When I sleep I’m not in pain.
I lift my head and nod.
Sleep.
Most nights a different voice says: Wake up. Think of Polly. Think of your family, your grandchildren. Don’t be a selfish prick. You owe it to them to suffer til the bitter end.
Tonight, this voice is silent. My mind is clear. Isn’t all death selfish? Do I owe anyone my continued existence? All I want is for this god damn pain to stop. You know like when you are under anesthesia. Wonderful, pain-free, thought-free sleep.
Sleep.
They say true love endures to the end. Almost, as in the love I share with Polly. But on this night, memories will have to suffice. I want the pain to stop. I want the nightlong-wrestling-with-pain-just-to get-an-hour-or-two-of-sleep to stop.
Sleep.
Just let nature take its course. No one will know but us. Who is talking to us, or is it just me? I’m confused, yet my mind is clear.
Pain.
Sleep.
Soon, nature wins this titanic struggle. Pain always knew that in the end nature wins. Nature always wins.
For in her kingdom, tears gone, crying gone, pain gone. (Revelation 21:4 kinda)
So on this night, with a clear mind, I selfishly choose blessed wonderful pain-free sleep. Tonight must be about me.
Sleep.
(Polly enters my thought)
I feel someone gently pushing on my side, calling out my name, asking if I’m okay.
No, I’m not okay. My blood sug. . . ar is uh . . . low . . . I need a Coke.
I’m cold, I mean really really cold. Unbeknownst to me, I had slept for hours, sweating the whole time, a sweat soaked bed witness to the deed. I’m freezing, as my glucose level continues to drop. Death draws ever closer.
I put my heavy blue terry robe on and lie back down. Just a little rest. Can’t I at least have that tonight?
Someone covers me with another blanket.
You need to drink something. If not a Coke, how about orange juice?
There’s the gentleness of love in her voice, tinged with concern, yet she knows I have long talked of this day, even more so recently. Is it not his choice, and not mine?
I just want to sleep. I’m tired. I can’t stand the pain, the incessant suffering.
I could argue mental incompetency or dementia. Don’t my wants and needs matter?, Polly wonders.
Not at this final moment in time. We all will one day stand at this very point.
A stifled cry, a soft voice, reminiscent of the girl I met fifty years ago, says I understand.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 1997. Since then, I have added osteoarthritis, degenerative spine disease, gastroparesis, exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, and severe axonal neuropathy to my health resume, along with a plethora of debilitating symptoms that afflict me day and night.
Over the past thirty years, countless people have suggested I do this or that for pain; that they are sure if I will do ___________ that all or most of my pain will magically disappear. Anecdotes abound. I know a person who did __________ and their fibromyalgia went completely away! I know another person who took this or that supplement/magic food, and all their pain disappeared! And so the emails, texts, and social media messages say, day after day, month after month, year after year. Never mind what I want. They just KNOW that if I will follow their anecdotal proclamations, I will be healed.
What follows is a list of things I have tried for pain since 1997:
Prayer
Pleading with God
Asking others to pray for my healing
Pretending I am not in pain
Magnets
Genie massager
Chiropractor
Darvocet (removed from market due to causing heart problems)
Tramadol
Flexeril
Restoril
Amitriptyline
Lyrica
Guaifenesin (off label use)
TENS unit
Diet change
Exercise
Supplements
Hydrocodone
Gabapentin
Steaming hot baths (with magnesium epsom salts)
Distraction
Moved to Yuma, Arizona, hoping the weather would be good for me
Electric heating pads for legs, neck, and spine
Gel boiled water heating pads
Padded bed covering
Weighted blanket
Aspirin and Tylenol
Massage by Miss Polly, the sexy masseuse
Surgery
Therapy
Steroid and lidocaine injections
Physical therapy (a waste of time)
NSAID creams and patches (worthless)
Ambien
Gabapentin again
Flexeril again
Pain medications cut or removed per medical practice policy
Hit other body part to take away pain in extremity
Cannabis
Cymbalta (for neuropathy in legs)
Crying
During this time I read books about Fibromyalgia and chronic pain. I also saw more doctors than I can count: primary care doctor, rheumatologist, neurologist, multiple pain management doctors, and neurosurgeon. I’ve been seen by teams of doctors at the University of Michigan and Toledo Hospital. In 2007, I had a complete day-long work-up for multiple sclerosis (MS).
Here’s what has worked — so far:
Hydrocodone
Aspirin and Tylenol
Massage by Miss Polly, the sexy masseuse
Genie massager (a professional electric massager used in therapy/chiropractor offices)
Hot baths
Electric heating pads
Cymbalta (for neuropathy)
Cannabis (for sleep and nausea, doesn’t do much for pain, outside of helping me sleep)
Distraction (particularly cats, grandchildren, and writing)
As you can see, I have done what I can to alleviate my pain. The “miracle” jar is empty, and no cure is on the horizon. I fully expect to live the remaining days of my life in pain. It is what it is. I can accept that, though it seems other well-meaning people can’t. They are certain that if I will just listen to them and do ___________, my pain will markedly decrease or go away. Their “certainty” turns them into prophets of woo — a term used to describe beliefs involving pseudoscience, superstition, or magical thinking.
Want to help me? Continue to read my writing. Send me an encouraging email or message now and again. Comment on this blog. Donate (see, Bruce is in it for the money). Write a guest post. Promote my blog far and wide. Suggest to me subjects to cover with a blog post. Send Polly a note, thanking her for putting up with my shit. Bethany too. Both of them deserve better.
Thank you for your continued love and support.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted a meaningful post in nine days. Outside of my life partner, Polly, and my writing partner, Carolyn, I haven’t talked to family or friends about my current health status.
For new readers who may not know what’s ailing me, I am battling several diseases: gastroparesis (an incurable stomach disease that causes vomiting, nausea, satiation, weight loss); exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (a disease of the pancreas causing the insufficient production of digestive enzymes, leading to diarrhea, weight loss, and malnutrition); severe axonal neuropathy (a painful nerve disease in my legs and feet causing burning, numbness, and increased falls and injury); fibromyalgia (a chronic disease that causes widespread muscle pain/weakness and fatigue); osteoarthritis (a chronic degenerative disease affecting my joints causing pain and debility); degenerative spine disease (affecting my neck and spine causing pain and limited mobility); skin cancer (I have had five cancer surgeries and chemotherapy treatments, the last being surgery on my neck for melanoma three weeks ago). I am also being treated for high blood pressure and diabetes—both of which are well managed. My latest a1c was 5.8.
Of late, my pain levels have been impossible to manage. I could always take more narcotics—they work—but then I will spend my days unable to do anything other than exist and sleep. The rest of the stuff is out of my control. I regularly see my primary care doctor, take prescribed medications, eat properly, and sleep when I can. “Sleep when I can” means I sleep in short 1-3 hour blocks throughout the night, and then nap throughout the day. I am never not tired or fatigued.
Of late, I’ve been losing weight again. I have lost a total of 120 pounds. I’m down to what I weighed 30 years ago. I have little to no appetite, so eating has been reduced to “eating because I have too” unless I want to starve myself to death. My diarrhea and vomiting have gotten to the point that I fear going out in public lest I have an accident. Two weeks ago, I had an abdominal CT scan, with contrast. Down went the contrast, up came the contrast, in a waiting room of people. I was so embarrassed to make such a public scene. I’m a private person, so there’s the added psychological stress from embarrassing myself in front of others.
My daily life has come to a standstill. Three weeks of unopened mail sits on my desk. I haven’t filed our taxes—which I’ve done for 50 years. I contacted one local man about doing our taxes, but he wanted $250 to do them (W-2 wages, social security, one Schedule C for my blog income/expenses). That’s not going to happen, so I need a “good” day soon to file. Blog-wise, I haven’t answered reader emails in several months, and my writing output has declined 90 percent. Writing is one of the few pleasures I have in life, so I find the inability to do so distressing.
There’s no cure on the horizon. All doctors can do for me is help to manage my symptoms. There are days when I feel “this is it.” A week ago, for some unknown reason, my blood pressure dropped to 98/50, with a 120 resting pulse rate. I also had dangerously low blood sugar. I woke Polly up, stammering and unable to talk in complete sentences. She got me a Coke and some high carb junk food to eat, and my blood sugar rebounded to a low normal level. Polly took the day off of work to care for her dilapidated, but still s-e-x-y, man. Gotta have some humor, right? 😂
There are other problems I’m dealing with health-wise, but they are inconsequential compared to what I’ve shared above. I suspect it’s time to ask family to come in and help, but I find it difficult to make my problems theirs. They have their own lives to live. My family will say of me: “Bruce/Dad/Grandpa is a stubborn, prideful man who doesn’t like to ask for help.” When I was a strong buck, I was the master of my domain, but such is no longer the case. As anyone with chronic pain/health problems will tell you, one of the biggest problems to deal with is the inability to be self sufficient.
I hope to do some writing tomorrow. Of course, I’ve told Carolyn that every day for a week. Maybe Tuesday will be the day! 😂 I texted Carolyn earlier, “As you might have divined, rough days and nights lately. Still I hope, so tomorrow is another day to write.”
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Recently, I heard an Evangelical woman say on a podcast that God makes people sick so they will one day have a testimony of faith. Surely, you don’t want to miss out, in the midst of your suffering and affliction, on an opportunity to testify of your great faith in the triune God, right? What a disgusting way to look at suffering.
Worse, God is known for killing innocent people to get a believer’s attention. Who hasn’t heard an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preacher warn that, if necessary, God will maim or kill our loved ones to make sure Christians stay on the straight and narrow way? Imagine God giving your wife uterine cancer to get your attention. She dies a year later, and you are left with three children to raise. Does unnecessary suffering drive you closer to or farther away from God? Did you praise Jesus for your wife’s cancer? You better or God won’t be happy.
The longer I deal with in my own life chronic pain, suffering, and debility, the more often I come into contact with fellow sufferers. These are women and men who have been suffering for years, often praying and pleading for deliverance — without success. Why is God so silent towards pain and suffering? We are told he’s the Great Physician, but he never opens his black bag. Here we have an all-powerful God who could immediately cure ALL cancer, yet eight million people die worldwide of cancer every year — 625,000 deaths in the United States alone. I suspect that many of these cancer sufferers earnestly prayed for healing, or, at the very least, enough relief to sleep and enjoy life in their last days on Earth. Most cancer sufferers die painful deaths, often alone and without adequate pain relief. They find themselves tossing and turning while their pain-wracked bodies try to find a respite from never-ending suffering. It would be surprising if people didn’t cry out to God, the universe, a dead loved one, or the void. If I polled readers who have chronic pain, I suspect most of them, atheist and Christian alike, would admit that in the midst of Top Five pain day, they pleaded, “Please, help me.”
I have said this very thing in recent years as my health declines and I no longer find adequate pain control from narcotics and other medications. I’m confident there is no God. I know the Christian God doesn’t exist, so my plea is not to God as much as it is a psychological practice I use to keep from stabbing an ice pick through my left temple — I’m a liberal. 🙂 Other times, I will indeed get an answer. Not from God, but from a very real person named Polly. Long term sickies know how much their suffering affects their partner, children, and grandchildren. You don’t want it to be this way, but your body determines your path, not your personal wants and desires. Suffer long enough and you learn, despite TV advertisements that suggest otherwise, that your disease(s) dominate your life. And if it dominates your life, it can’t help but play an outsized influence on the lives of your family.
Have you ever been in pain and “prayed” please help me? If you are an atheist, how do you reconcile that with your unbelief? Is this just a carryover from your religious past, or is this a tool you use to control your suffering? Please share your experiences in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
In a prolonged fit of pain and agony, I cried into the void, “Please help me.”
Jesus replied, after 3,666,669 prayers, “I’m here my son . . .”
Loki chimes in, “Silly boy. No one is available to take your call. At the sound of the tone die.”
Loki turns to his younger brother Jesus and says, “Another one healed in your glorious wonderful name, Jesus. Just remember death cures everything. Why heal Bruce when we just can wait for him to die?”
What an awesome God, right?
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Thirty years ago — I was thirty-eight — I pastored Our Father’s House in West Unity, Ohio. As Polly and our children will attest, I was a busy preacher, a workaholic who rarely took time off from the ministerial grind. In the summer of 1995, I started feeling tired all the time. I wasn’t sleeping. My muscles ached. I wondered, “What is wrong with me?”
I sought out the care of a primary care doctor in Defiance, Ohio, who gave me a half-assed exam, drew no blood, and decided that my real problem is that I was depressed over my mom’s death FOUR YEARS EARLIER! That, of course, was so far from the truth that it wasn’t funny. I told this medical school reject that I wasn’t depressed. My body hurt, and I needed to figure out why.
The next year, I saw a primary care doctor in Bryan, Ohio. This man is still my doctor to this day. After months of examinations, tests, and research, he concluded that I have fibromyalgia. The past thirty years have proven this diagnosis to be true. Over the years, other diagnoses were added to my chart: gastroparesis, endocrine pancreatic insufficiency, osteoarthritis, and degenerative spine disease — all incurable. All doctors can do for me is treat my symptoms — to varying degrees of success.
There are other health problems that I have given up on. I have been to numerous specialists, each concluding that they don’t know what’s wrong with me. I asked one doctor what I should do next. All I got was a shoulder shrug and an “I don’t know.” My primary care doctor told me that I am an enigma to him. I am oh-so-special, right?
Americans want to believe that doctors are miracle workers. They are not. Skilled, competent practitioners of medicine? You bet. But miracle workers they are not. They all have patients like me, people they can’t do much for much for. This is especially true for chronic pain sufferers. I saw a neurosurgeon last week. More surgery may be on the horizon, though I am weighing whether I want to have it. I asked him about the severe neuropathic pain in my legs. Unbearable, at times, to say the least. He bluntly told me, “No, there’s really nothing that can be done for your pain.” Of course, I already knew that. I know my body inside and out. When doctors tell me something I don’t know, I go home and research the hell out of the subject. I know that there’s not much that can be done for neuropathic pain. Live with it, or die. Some days, the latter seems preferable.
I have an EMG (electromyography) scheduled next week. The neurosurgeon wants to see if he can pinpoint the locus of my neuropathic pain. I am not optimistic that anything will come from this, but since I have never had an EMG on my legs, I thought it would be a good idea to have the test done. Maybe a miracle diagnosis awaits, right?
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
According to the Bible, pain and suffering are tests, trials, and punishments from God. God punished Adam and Eve for eating fruit off a forbidden tree:
And to the man he [God] said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you,‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3:17-19 NRSV)
While Evangelicals love to protect God’s honor, the Bible is clear: all pain and suffering comes from God himself. I have firsthand experience with pain and suffering. All of us, if we live long enough, will have similar experiences, though the reason, degree, and length will vary from person to person. Most of us have experienced acute pain:
Acute pain is a sudden, short-term pain that signals a specific injury or illness and typically goes away once the cause is treated or healed.
Chronic pain is pain that lasts for over three months. You may feel the pain all the time or it may come and go. It can happen anywhere in your body and has countless causes.
Chronic pain is pain that doesn’t do away. It may get better or worse, but this sort of pain never goes away. This is the kind of pain I have had since the late 1990s. There’s not been a day since I was forty years old that I have been pain-free. What started with fibromyalgia has grown like a brushfire with osteoarthritis, degenerative spine disease, gastroparesis, and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency. Today, my life is one long, exhausting struggle with pain. My goal every day has been to control my pain well enough that I have enough energy to write and do work around the house. Some days, it is impossible for me to do anything more than survive; to live to face another day. And other days, all I want to do is die. I love my family, but sometimes my pain is so severe that all I want, in the moment, is for the pain to stop.
Chronic pain sufferers know that pain medications become less effective over time. That’s the case for me. I’ve been taking narcotic drugs for twenty years. Over this time, I have unnecessarily suffered because of the government’s and Parkview Hospital’s war on chronic pain sufferers. I take fifty percent less morphine load today than I did five years ago. I have largely found that local pain doctors are worthless; more concerned with doing injections and procedures than they are managing the suffering of chronic pain sufferers. And even worse, local pain doctors, to the person, oppose cannabis use. Figure that one out.
If the goal of medicine is to lessen suffering, why don’t doctors do more to help their chronic pain patients? My primary care doctor plans to retire in four years. He told me it is unlikely, due to clinic policies, that another doctor will write my narcotic scripts. I replied, “No problem. I plan to be dead by then.” My doctor thought I was being funny, but I most certainly was not. Without narcotic pain medications — yes, many people really need them — I will not survive. “But, Bruce, aren’t you worried about becoming a drug addict?” Are you kidding? Of course not. I have CHRONIC pain. It never, ever goes away. I suspect my pain will only get worse with time. How could it be otherwise? My spine — from neck to coccyx — shoulders, and hands continue to structurally deteriorate. I can easily see a time when I can no longer type or walk. As it stands now, I use a cane, walker, or a wheelchair to get around.
If I am a chronic pain sufferer, why does it matter if I become “addicted”? If I was in hospice with terminal pancreatic cancer, would I be given narcotics for pain control? Would the goal be to ease my suffering? Of course, it would. Why, then, is it any different for chronic pain sufferers? Just because we are dying “slowly” doesn’t mean we aren’t in just as much pain as those who have terminal illnesses.
I do all I can on any given day to manage and control my pain: heating pads, steaming hot baths, Tylenol/aspirin, TENS unit, stretching exercises, massage, cannabis, and, yes, narcotic pain medications. I also take medications to manage symptoms from gastroparesis and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency. Cannabis has reduced my nausea and vomiting, so there’s that, for which I am grateful.
I see a neurosurgeon later this week; the same surgeon who did my surgery a year ago. Hopefully, he will provide an answer for my lower back pain and awful neuropathic leg pain. If so, I will have surgery again, though I am hesitant to do so. All I know to do to is gather information and decide accordingly.
Are you a chronic pain sufferer? Is your pain well-managed? Please share your experiences in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
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