They Call This Health Care

I was a victim of the super virus back in 2003.It was the most painful thing imaginable and I was never put in hospital and never given proper pain medication for what was chronic and horrible pain.I foolishly thought that as I had been addicted to opiates for most of my life that it would be a no brainer to put me on an opiate pain medication and allow me to manage my pain for whatever time was left to me.I had my 60th birthday last month.The only thing the medical system has done is with hold any real help and to claim that they are doing this because they don't want me to be addicted.They have been giving me methadone for the last 10 years?Methadone is a lousy pain killer and the reason it's used in heroin treatment is that after a relatively short time it has no effect on you at all.So it does very little if anything to help with my pain and because it was designed to block the effects of heroin and other opiates it reduces whatever possible good I may have received from the morphine they give me.In fact morphine is what methadone is the most effective at blocking.I have to take the methadone and the morphine together in a witnessed ingestion daily.Just what a person in chronic pain really needs,a daily trip to the drug store.I have been on a waiting list for St.Paul's pain clinic for almost 15 months.I was just informed that that is not even half of the time I'm expected to wait for an assessment at St.Paul's.I lost the entire lumbar section of my spine and lost 5 and 1/2 inches in height.I am forced to spend 18-20 hours a day in bed or suffer incredible pain.I am depressed,have panic attacks which are becoming more frequent and suffer 10 times as much in winter.I have been getting by on the assumption(based on what I was told by my neurosurgeon)that I would be accepted by the pain clinic in 6-18 months.Now I'm told this is only the warmup for the real wait.I stopped all street drugs when I was first put on pharmaceuticals in the belief that I would rec eive timely and proper medical treatment.This is worse than a bad joke.I have been told that pain of a chronic nature shortens a persons life expectancy in direct relation to the time the persons pain goes improperly treated.I have been in pain since 2003 for a number of reasons.Some were of my own making through misunderstanding and most are because the system doesn't care one whit about my suffering.All they are concerned about is how it will look if an addict is given the necessary pain medication.I have never once been asked if the medication is working or how the pain is.I was crawling into my doctors office with two umbrellas as canes and not once was I asked why.Every practitioner I've seen has either lied to me or been deceptive to where it could pass as a lie .I have been met with concern for their careers and nothing else.What kind of medical system do we have when treatment is withheld out of fear of reprisals by the governing body.Specialists won't prescribe at all.Regular doctors know nothing about pain or how to deal with it.I was forced to take 20 full strength ibuprofen just to stop the spasms that were so painful death would have been welcomed.Now it looks like I'm to be left to suffer because I might get addicted to something other than the government approved medication.They've even taken to using methadone as a painkiller in short term cases so they can justify this kind of brutality.I'm sure the reasons they would give would be different but it's a known fact that as a painkiller,methadone is the worst possible choice. So why else use it.The methadone clinics even tell their cilents that they are to be considered as clean and should be allowed in 12 step and other programs that require sobriety.Do you get the feeling there's a whole lot of malpractise going on.Damn right.I seriously doubt that I'll live through two more years of the kind of misery that is my life.I guess I just wasn't punished enough in prison.We have no pain management in B.C.What there is is overburdened and underused.Waiting lists vary from over two years to your guess is as good as mine.Don't get hurt in this province.I don't know about other places but here they would rather sit back and watch you die than do anything humane.I have no idea how much pain medication I need to control my pain to where I have some semblance of a life.I do know that as long as I have to go through a methadone clinic to get it it will never do me any good.Have I asked to be taken off the methadone.You bet but it seems a methadone doctor can only prescribe medication to a methadone patient.Catch 22.I've seen the way the elderly are treatwed in this province and we all know how insane government gets when the word drugs is brought into the picture.Better everyone suffer than one guy get high on a lie.That leaves those of us with legitimate need and a neurosurgeons reference waiting for endless years while our health goes steadily down the toilet.