Your Gubmint and Pain...

I used to shoot pool for money.  

Big money.  I picked up a stick at the age of 13 and played an average of 6 hours a day for the next twelve years.  From the time I was in middle school until I was drafted.  And that involved bending over a pool table.  For every shot.  Perhaps a million games.  Plus all the other games after I hung up my stick as a professional, preferring to then teach others.

So that gives you an inference as the subject of this rant.  I started with what my doctor called "degenerative disc disease," and then abused it over the period of a million games of pool.  So that by the time I was 45 I was wracked with pain.  My back was so bad I had to seek help.  And that help came in the form of opiates.  Hydrocodone.  You may know it as "Vicodin."  Six of them a day.  Pain eased.

And then, about 15 years ago the Gubmint decided all by its lonesome that 6 a day was too many.  That I, along with millions of other sufferers, could get along just fine with 5.  Five a day, not six.  Learn to cope.  

It's the Gubmint.  We did.

Oh yeah, and then a thing called Oxycodone was invented, which is like Vicodin times ten.  And the Stackler and Purdue families, who owned Purdue Pharmaceuticals, decided to collude with the drug stores in Kentucky.  And pretty soon nearly everyone in Kentucky was addicted.  Because it's very addictive.  Much more than heroin, if that gives you an idea. 

I know from personal experience.  After my first back surgery I was prescribed Oxycodone.  Instantly my ferocious pain not only went away, I wanted to go dancing.  Singing and dancing and hiking and jogging.  And staying up late.  And drinking too much.  And this was a week after L2-3 spinal fusion surgery.  I decided to take myself off the stuff as soon as a I could, and did.  I could sense the danger this stuff carried with it.  For me and for others.*

So I had to do with Vicodin.  But by then the Gubmint decided that 5 a day were too many.  That I and others could manage on 4.  And so I've been taking 4 a day every since.  During which I had 4 more back surgeries.  I'm screwed together "From asshole to appetite," as my neurosurgeon quipped.  So increasing pain, and lessening pain medication.  It would be bad enough, but then the Gubmint decided to make it even worse.

Along about this time the Gubmint decided that your family doctor, and mine, could no longer be trusted to write us prescriptions for pain meds.  They wanted to prevent future Purdue's and Kentucky's.  That's how to fight against corruption, they said.  Except what they replaced it with was so-called "Pain Clinics."  Another step between you and your doctor.  These are folks you must now go to, the Gubmint says, every month, in order to gain those prescriptions.  

And what does that entail?  Nothing.  You must only prove you're still vertical, that you can wobble into and out of the pain doc's office, which looks like the Bar Scene from Starwars, and tell the physician's assistant that you're just fine.  That you're not selling your Vicodin pills on the street corner.  And for this service, MediCare pays the pain doc $256.00 per visit.  And it's usually so short that you can leave your car double parked and running.  

What a boondoggle.  And all of you out there in InternetLand who experience pain know it to be true.  I'm just willing to admit it.

If there's such a thing as reincarnation, I'd like to come back as a pain doctor.  I've been going to my pain doc's office for 10 years now and I've yet to meet him.  Maybe some day the Physicians' Assistant will get sick and he'll have to stop by.  Probably while driving a Brinks truck... 

*   And now, the rest of the story.  Turns out my pain guy was the "drug dealer to the stars."  Nearly everyone in Hollywood and all the network talking heads were his clients.  I watched him marched out of his office by the sheriff.  He and his office manager went to the Big House for some remedial training.  Looks like I dodged a bullet...