Intervention

I love Intervention… it is such a good show… the episode with brooke, the girl with rheumatoid arthritis, brought up a whole plethora of emotions that I haven’t felt in a long time… chronic pain sucks and it can change a person in so many different ways… it can change everything about them… it did for me… when my back problems first started and we couldn’t get my pain under control my dr. referred me to a pain management dr… the first dr. I saw immediately put me on oxycontin (and laughed when he told me he was going to put me on them, making some sort of reference to Rush Limbaugh) along with several other meds… talk about being messed up… the dr. told me how to take me meds and what my options were when the pain wouldn’t subside… family, friends, & co-workers saw me taking meds… like the girl on Intervention sometimes I would pass out from the meds… that was the sweetest relief… not being in pain… I wasn’t abusing the meds… I was taking them like they were prescribed… my family and some friends didn’t agree… they saw what they saw and thought I was abusing them… how can you tell me that I’m abusing them when you have no idea how I feel… I would do anything for no pain… and if that meant staying doped up and pilled out all the time (and the dr. said it was ok) then that’s how it was going to be… the dr. finally listened to me when I told him that the oxycontin weren’t working… he pulled me off of them (no gradual decrease in the meds) and put me on morphine patches… I had already given R my last two oxy’s and told him that no matter what happened do not let me have them… the withdrawals I went thru were so bad… to this day I have never experienced anything like that before… and I hope I never have too again… my body had become physically addicted to the meds and getting off them was a living hell… before this whole thing happened I could never understand how someone would chose to stay on the meds (or keep using)… after the withdrawals though, my whole perspective has changed… I can totally understand how it would be easier to just keep getting pilled out than to have to deal with the withdrawals and everything else that your body goes thru… I was reading this article about a lady dealing with her addiction and she said, “The withdrawal was horrific, I’d sleep 24 to 48 hours at a time. The worst would pass in a few days. But then I’d look at my life and feel bad. That’s the real pain when you’re an addict: Using hurts, but reality hurts worse.” So true, so very true.
Lucky for me, after getting off the oxycontin and my head cleared up a bit I realized that I did not want to live this way. Something needed to change… so I changed doctors… we worked to get me off all the “hard” medicine and then I was just taking pain pills… breaking the pain pill addiction isn’t as bad as the oxy addiction… I’ve broken the pain pill addiction several times and it doesn’t get any easier but at least I know I can do it… I know I have an addictive personality and I know I need to watch what I do… but dealing with chronic pain is a whole different ballgame altogether and it made me sad to watch Intervention and feel her pain, to understand and know what she’s going thru… my whole back ordeal has really opened up my perspective to a lot of things… and the one thing I keep trying to remember is not to judge someone else by their actions alone, you don’t know what they’re feeling or what they’re going thru…

Ok, now if you’ll excuse me I’ll step down off my soapbox.



I am so grateful that my back problem is no more... it has been taken care of and now I just need to take care of myself.