AnnieOakley18

Sometimes when someone looks at me through the lens of opioid pain medication, they aren’t actually seeing me. They’re seeing the person they lost. A son. A daughter. A husband. A wife. A brother. A friend. Someone whose life was consumed by addiction or ended by an overdose. And I understand why the word opioid can carry grief, fear, anger, even rage after that. I genuinely do. If you buried someone you loved, I would never tell you that your fear is irrational. But this is where it becomes unfair to chronic pain patients: I cannot become a substitute defendant for someone else’s tragedy. I am not the person you lost. My prescription is not their story. My diagnosis is not their addiction. And treating my pain does not dishonor someone who died. Two devastating truths can exist at the same time: People have died from addiction and overdose. And people living with severe chronic pain can suffer tremendously when effective pain treatment is taken away. Compassion has to be big enough to hold both. We should be able to fight addiction without treating every chronic pain patient like an addict-in-waiting. We should be able to acknowledge the devastation of overdose deaths without requiring another suffering population to pay the price. Their grief is real. Addiction is real. Our chronic pain is real too. We can mourn the people we’ve lost without making the people still here suffer for it.