this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Unless you are either female, a minority, young, or have chronic pain in which case any mention of pain you have, no matter how extreme, is considered a drug seeking attempt.
The ER will diagnose people based on their race, sex, gender, and age before they'll diagnose you based on your symptoms. It doesn't matter how much you are suffering, how much pain you are in, or how close you are to killing yourself because you can't take it anymore. ER doctors have no empathy unless you fit a certain demographic.
You don't think age and sex are medically relevant? A 5 year old will scream about a scratch on their knee, but I'll walk several miles home after making a meat crayon out of myself with my electric longboard and patch myself up.
You speak like someone with no conception of what pain is like outside of your own narrow experiences.
Trust me, lots of us out there would trade being meat crayoned 10 times over to get rid of our painful conditions. You can't compare other people's pain to your own if you haven't experienced what they have. Even then, that's not an excuse to deny people human pain treatment.
The problem here is that doctors would rather let 9 innocent people suffer to punish 1 drug seeker. You can't judge how much pain is in by how someone 'looks'. There is no 'look' to pain, especially in people chronic pain sufferers who have mastered the art of suffering unendingly without writhing on the floor because that's not an option while going out in public.
I have been permanently in pain for 4 years, to the point where I have forgotten what painlessness feels like. Everyday, I wake up to a body that felt like it was sunburned for hours, fell down 3 flights of stairs, and ran 10 miles after. Everything fucking hurts and the smallest bump onto furniture feels like being stabbed with a knife. And yet, I go to the grocery store holding every whimper and tear in because I can't shop if I'm busy writhing in pain. People see me and think I 'look fine' and have no idea the suicidal levels of suffering that come with invisible disabilities. Please don't be one of them.
I'm really sorry to hear about you dealing with this. I have trigeminal neuralgia, which is an extremely painful nerve condition in the face. Thankfully, I finally found a medication regimen to keep the pain to a minimum where (supplemented with cannabis) I can handle things. But recently, I've been going through a mystery health issue and one possible cause is a reaction to one of my medications. It's unlikely, because I've been stable on them for so long, but the only way to find out for sure would be to stop taking both of them and then only take one to see if the symptoms go away. And I don't know if I can handle that because I was at your level a few years ago and I don't think I can go back there.
I don't wish my pain on anyone. Not my worst enemy. And I had to deal with it, like you, all day every day. Excruciating pain. For years. I was even on disability for it because you can't have a job when you have pain flare-ups that make you scream.
And, also like you, I "looked fine" most of the time. Only my wife learned the signs of when I was in lots of pain in public and got me out of there. Because you can't function at all if you can't "pass" as being healthy.
So, again, I am really sorry you have to deal with it. I sympathize 100%. I hope you find a solution. It took me years, but I finally found one.
I was once in the emergency room for hyponatremia and you know how in triage, All the patients are in one huge room But no one can see each other because all the beds are partitioned off with curtains So we have some illusion of privacy in there.
anyway I overheard this twenties-something well-composed polite Caucasian male trying to explain to the doctors that he's in pain and he needs medication and it was fascinating to listen to because I could tell the doctors had to use all their analytical judgment to determine whether or not he was really in pain or if he was just seeking the good stuff like benzodiazepines for the high (or whatever drug or effect theyre seeking, I dunno) Ultimately the doctors sent him away with Tylenol.
I experience pain on a scale of seven sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night It hurts so bad, and all the doctors give me is Tylenol and I can tell you it does nothing to numb the pain, but I have no desire to seek anything stronger than Tylenol because yeah reasons because I don't want to become addicted to the good stuff I guess. I've heard and read and seen too many stories of people caught in that spiral and life is hard enough already and I don't want to deal with benzodiazepine addiction on top of all the other shit life throws at me.
It's recently been proven that NSAIDs are entirely useless too.
All I remember about NSAIDs is that they're bad for your liver or kidneys or something like that, But in general they are designated for treating inflammation and pain and fever. Are NSAIDs still useful for treating those three things? or are they going to be banned by the FDA?
There's a very free select types of inflammation they're useful for, and not common types.
I completely agree with you. None of that really has much to do with my point though.