Per Mona: Cancer pain is no joke….it’s like living in eternal hell with no way out….it’s not necessary to have to suffer when you’re dying. Whoever said that?
This is a follow up from a post that made the first of the week Update 12/15/2021:Denial of pain: University of Louisville Hospital- stage FOUR metastatic cancer
I tried to reach out to Mona & her Husband and was only able to leave voice mails and I got no return calls. Given that this Tik Tok was posted about midnight last night, apparently they did listen to the VM’s that I left. I was very concerned about her and the actions of the pain doc that she was seeing while in the hospital and was the first time that this pain doc had seen here abt one week earlier.
In this video, she appears to look as if her pain is being managed much better than the pt that I saw in the hospital this past Tuesday. Hopefully, her internists got back into the picture and got her back on her pain meds, that she had been taking – for some 5-7 yrs – before entering the hospital.
I never had the opportunity to speak with the pain doc and even though I requested to have the hospital’s patient advocate and the palliative care team on Tuesday – after waiting for FOUR HOURS…NO ONE BOTHERED to grant my request.
I was able to talk to those physicians that had overseen Mona’s radiation therapy that day and a second year resident that stopped by. Each one, I impressed my concerns about what was I hearing about what Mona’s post discharge pain management would be and it was – IMO – NOT GOOD ! I tried to impress on them that someone – UP THE LADDER – needed to be made aware of what appeared to be inadequate pain management proposed.
Any practitioner that refuses to consider what the pt’s prior medication therapy that has worked well for the pt and decides to take the pt’s therapy in an entirely different direction lacks a lot of concern for the pt’s QOL and more may be about feeding the practitioner’s EGO.
While Mona’s prognosis is still not good, her QOL seems to be as good as it is going to get … and for that, I AM HAPPY.
Filed under: General Problems
Thank you for getting ‘on top’ of her problem. DEA guidelines have certainly not benefited chronic pain patients one iota.
It often seems that too many prescribers are reacting to the DEA fear mongers and forgetting their first responsibility to their patients.
Empathy appears to be a dying art for many institutional prescribers.
Keep up the good fight !!
Doctors and pharmacists are frozen with terror, …so much so most of them are working hard to put any hope of an opiate unreachably far away, …and they used this patient to do it – among MANY others.
Who or what could cause them so much unfounded fear? The best science says that medicinal opiates are safe and effective and very, very, very few legitimate chronic severe pain patients ever get into OUD. sell or overdose with them.