On Pain

Everyone in life deals with pain. Sometimes you're privileged enough to only feel small pains in your life. A broken finger. A break up after a short relationship. A friendship going sour. Others feel pain we can hardly imagine, and have to experience it through books and movies to even receive a modicum of understanding. The loss of a cherished pet. The death of a child. Paralysis and decay. Those events leave wounds in our bodies and souls that can takes years to heal, if they even do at all. Sometimes all one can do is find a way to mold themselves around the wound, to adapt to the empty space as best they can and keep moving. They stay running, never flagging on the marathon of life, but never quite as fast. That pain flashes white hot and leaves an indelible scar, one you either live with or life for, turning that pain and heartbreak into your identity. Though the pain is one, the mark shows in their face every day.

The kind of pain that most people don't have to deal with is constant pain, what one might call chronic. I myself am still new to it, though I've become more accustomed to it than I ever thought I would. In the beginning of May last year a woke up on a Sunday morning with a pain in my neck, like I had slept wrong. I tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable position, but nothing worked. I massaged, iced, heated, took NSAIDS, still nothing. When the Urgent Care finally opened they gave me some muscles relaxers, which only helped a small amount. I gritted through the rest of the day and was able to make it to sleep, hopeful that the whole thing would just blow over and I'd be able to go to work the next day. Those plans were shattered at 4 AM when I was awoken by pain so terrible it forced me to make a one-armed drive to the emergency room. After some real painkillers and a ridiculous bill I had the last few hours without pain that I've currently experienced.

After a couple weeks of hassles with doctors, they finally diagnosed me with a herniated disk in my neck, which was pressing on the brachial plexus on my right side. This was causing not only pain in my neck, but also muscles spasms and jolts of pain throughout my arm, shoulder, back, and chest. I had to stop working for six and a half weeks and was put on short term disability. This left me with barely enough money to live and I had to borrow just to keep the lights on and my cats fed. They prescribed me Gabapentin, Meloxicam, and Methocarbamol for the pain, but those were only mildly affective. God forbid they prescribe painkillers to someone actually in pain. I applied for an MRI so they could determine what was actually wrong in my neck, but that was denied by my insurance. They wanted to see if physical therapy would smooth it out first so they wouldn't have to pay. All the while I'm still in pain, often not even able to write or sit upright.

I get through the six and a half weeks, still doing the physical therapy, and go back to work. The pain is still there, but I need the money. I stop the physical therapy a few weeks later, confident the last little bits of the pain will go away and I'll be able to move on with my life. The pain persists. I have good days and bad days, depending on what position I wake up in. I know what position to sleep in to help out my neck, but I move in my sleep. The pain starts to come back. I take off work early a couple of days, but I keep working. I need the money. One morning I wake and now I have a pain on the left side of my neck too. The pain in the arms and the muscle spasms come soon after. I keep working. I keep doing the stretches they showed me in physical therapy, hoping it will go away, but it gets worse. I keep working, because I need the money. I don't see the doctor, because I no longer trust my insurance to help me and I'm waiting for my new insurance to kick in at the beginning of the next year. All the while, I'm still in pain.

The new insurance is better, but the same hurdles still stifle me. It took until the beginning of February to see my PCP, which I needed to do to get a referral and to get back on the medication so I can deal with the pain. Then it took another month to see an orthopedist, and it's still going to be until April 1st that I get an MRI. Who knows when I might get to surgery, if that's even an option for me. All the while, I'm in pain. And I'm simply expected to deal with it. To sit back while people who are not medical professionals get to determine whether I get to have relief for that pain. While I'm told that I can't have the medication that would make that pain go away because of other people's mistakes. Is it any wonder that a young man, who had been dealing with back pain for years and had been repeatedly denied relief for that pain, lashed out violently at those preventing that relief? Do we honestly believe that it is fair or reasonable to ask someone to deal with physical pain indefinitely from a young age and sit quietly and accept it?

They say pain teaches you things, but not all pain. Pain that ends, that you can look back and learn from, sure. But pain that lingers, that goes and goes, it only makes you angrier, more tired. I'm not sure what's going to happen after the MRI. If it shows a single disc herniated, then I can go the surgical route, either a spinal fusion or a disc replacement. That, of course, depends on whether I can afford it. Due to how much procedures like this cost, that will depend entirely on how much my insurance company will cover. If I can't go that route, it's physical therapy and epidural injections indefinitely, which I will also have to pay for. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if they deny the surgery. I'm only 34. I'm not going to live the rest of my life in pain, getting injections in my neck just to feel some type of relief. I honestly don't understand what these people expect. If you put a huge barrier of profit between a person experiencing a lifetime of pain and finding relief then you're creating a ticking time bomb. Maybe when it explodes we'll finally realize that not everything has to be profitable, and that making a buck off every avenue of desperation you can find has consequences.