I miss my Fentanyl

I can’t hate the medical establishment enough

There is “no end to the animus, prejudice, and malice directed toward chronic pain patients. If they’re not liars, manipulators, or malingerers, they’re dirty addicted junkies…The truth is that [most] chronic pain patients are people with serious medical conditions. Millions have been irreparably harmed by politicians, bureaucrats, and… physicians misapplying the half-baked CDC Guidelines." Dan Laird, M.D., J.D.

I’d lived with chronic pain for over twenty years before my world-class Mayo Clinic rheumatologist diagnosed its cause: “Rheumatoid arthritis; premature, degenerative, inflammatory arthritis; and Chondrocalcinosis 2” or CCAL2… “an extremely rare [genetic] disease characterized by the accumulation of calcium pyrophosphate dihydrate (CPP) crystals in and around the joints. Signs and symptoms...severe chronic and acute joint pain...extremely painful episodes… stiffness, swelling and progressive damage of the joints… severe… pain that is not relieved... there is, unfortunately, no way to prevent or remove the buildup of [the] crystals in the joints… pain can be severe and very disabling. There is no known cure for CCAL2.” 

However depressing, I was relieved to finally have a diagnosis of a disease — that according to my rheumatologist could be seen on plain old-fashioned X-rays — instead of suggestions of fibro or hypochondria, chronic fatigue syndrome, “it’s-all-in-your-head,” or drug-seeking. 

She said the best, and only, since there is no cure, treatment was to continue the opioid treatment on which I’d been for over a decade: two weekly Fentanyl dermal patches and a small prescription of IR (immediate release) opioid pain medicine (like Percocet or Vicodin) for breakthrough pain. By the way, I remember reading an early 2000s paper saying that the fentanyl dermal patches were a miracle treatment for chronic arthritis pain. I cannot find the paper anywhere; the author has probably been chased out of existence. 

Wonderful! Except, no one would prescribe that “cure” for me. My local clinic and GP, who had prescribed my pain meds for years, had fired me – a part of their pain-patient cleansing – but surely, I thought, the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t deny me the only treatment for a disease that their own expert had recommended and diagnosed? 

Wrong. I couldn’t even get an appointment in the Mayo’s Department of Pain Medicine. I won’t bore you with the scandalous, disgusting details of how the Mayo Clinic treats pain patients. Suffice it to say that however much I despise the Mayo Clinic administration and the medical establishment, it isn’t enough. 

My Mayo expert had prescribed the “cure” for my condition, and I couldn’t find a single doctor on the Mayo campus to prescribe it. The advice from Mayo was, do let the clinic door hit you on the way out. Hard. 

They didn’t even taper me off my pain meds, so I got to experience DIY opioid withdrawal, which according to their own website is “dangerous, and symptoms can be severe.” Yes, like feeling 24/7 for weeks that your heart is going to explode out of your chest. While taxpayers pay medical  professionals to make sure the drug addict darlings don’t kill themselves shooting up illicit fentanyl and heroin, pain patients are kicked to the curb sans pain meds and sent home to a DIY tapering of Gatorade, icicles, and barfbags.

I don’t like to dwell on my condition – some people talk about their illnesses as if they’re their pets – but just to give you an idea of what CCAL2 feels like, the reason it’s called pseudogout is because it’s like gout. But there’s nothing “pseudo” about it. As the Mayo website says: “An attack of gout can occur suddenly… waking you up in the middle of the night with the sensation that your big toe is on fire. The affected joint is hot, swollen and so tender that even the weight of the bedsheet on it may seem intolerable.” Now, imagine that sensation in any and every joint of your body.” That’s CCAL2.

The government and medical establishment decided that in order to prevent opioid – mostly illicit fentanyl – overdose deaths, the solution was to ban licit opioids for pain patients who rarely abuse their pain meds or illicit opioids. Prescribing pain relief for me would ostensibly save the life of a drug addict, who’d chosen to abuse the drugs I needed for a disease I didn’t choose. 

Most doctors know little to nothing about chronic pain management. The Mayo Clinic promotes the bald-faced lie that clinical treatment of pain employing opioids entails a “high immediate risk of opioid addiction or mortality… Both assertions are not only untrue but fraudulent. Forty plus years of CDC mortality data reveal that prescription opioids have never been a dominant factor in the widely touted US ‘opioid crisis’ and are not now.” According to government data, addiction to prescription pain relievers has been relatively stable at under one percent in this century. Pain patients are much more likely to drop dead of debilitating, soul-crushing pain than opioid addiction. 

When the government took away my pain meds, they took away my life and a relatively pain-free existence from a debilitating disease; my ability to be a healthy, functional mother and wife, and my part-time job as a manager at our local college bookstore. Instead, they gave me debilitating pain, which caused depression, high blood pressure, and insomnia. Which, of course, my doctors won’t treat. When I’d been without my pain meds for months, my GP (who has retired from the Mayo)  prescribed a pediatric dose of lorazepam to help me sleep, but the Mayo powers-that-be have now also banned benzodiazepines. God forbid you feel a moment of relief. 

The opioid hysteria epiemic is alive and well. Unlike the pain patients on the receiving end of policies meant to save the lives of people who have chosen to destroy their lives at the cost of people who didn’t choose chronic, painful diseases.