Day 28: pain and its relief

A couple of weeks ago I was flipping channels on Sunday night and I ran across an episode of 60 Minutes that was about teenagers who have died from heroin overdose after getting hooked on painkillers. Astoundingly, heroin is cheaper and easier to get than prescription painkillers.

The five minutes of the show that I saw showed a group of parents, probably a dozen of them, who were dealing with the unimaginable pain of losing a child to heroin overdose--something that anyone our age associates with inner city, ghetto crime, not life as we know it. I found myself tearing up as I listened to their grief and pain.

In each case, the teen had started with a legitimate prescription for painkillers after an injury or surgery. They quickly became hooked on the painkillers, and moved on to heroin when the prescription ran out. There was even some explicit blame placed on physicians for giving kids painkillers when they don't really "need" them.

I have such mixed feelings about this. I can't even imagine the pain these parents are going through, and I can't fault them for their anger and blame.

But I'm someone with a legitimate need for painkillers, and as anti-narcotic sentiment grows and grows in our country, it makes life more and more difficult for those of us with genuine need.

Here's my experience. I generally have 8-10 migraines a month. I take generic Maxalt, a triptan migraine med that is not narcotic, when I have a migraine. If I take one of those with half a Norco (a mild narcotic painkiller), I feel 80% better in 30-40 minutes. If I take the triptan by itself, it takes 3-4 hours for me to feel any better, if it works at all.

I think I have a legitimate need for narcotics. I don't abuse them. I rarely take more than half a pill in 24 hours. In the 30 years I've continually had narcotics in my possession, I've taken them when not having a migraine exactly once-- in my late twenties, the first time I'd heard of people like me taking narcotics for recreational use rather than for pain relief, and I thought I'd try it.

Apparently, if I take narcotics when I'm not in pain, I just feel dizzy and nauseated. Not much fun. I've never done it again. So, yeah, we constantly have narcotics in the house. They never get used for anything other than pain relief.

I'm lucky. I'm married to a medical practitioner, and although he doesn't prescribe my meds (for obvious reasons), I know my doctor personally and she is a colleague of his, which probably makes it easier for me to get my prescription filled.

I know there are plenty of people out there who are suffering from the backlash against narcotic pain relief who aren't as lucky as I am. They have legitimate need, but they can't get relief because physicians are reluctant to prescribe. Current sentiment says most people who have access to narcotics abuse them.

I can't even blame the physicians. When my spouse prescribes narcotics, he has no way of knowing if the person he prescribes them to is going straight to a bar to sell them for $10 a piece. Physicians are under tremendous legal and societal pressure to not prescribe narcotics at all.

I don't know what the answer is. It's a very complicated subject. I do know that if you have legitimate need, the best way to handle it is to find a single practitioner and to stay with them, so that they can monitor your usage and see that you're not abusing.

It's obvious I'm not joyriding on my painkillers because I get 30 every 5-6 months. I voluntarily scaled back from Percocet to Norco last year just so it would be extra clear to everyone that I'm not in this for the thrills. Norco doesn't work as well as Percocet, but it works well enough.

What do you think? If you have an opinion about this, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.