My Story: How Opioid Therapy Saved Me and My Family
/By Kim Halvorson, Guest Columnist
I have had reoccurring pain episodes since I was 16 years old. The one and only doctor we had on the Flathead reservation in Montana created even more problems for me than he solved. First, he offered me opioids (it was the 70’s) and wanted to inject the knots in my body with cortisone, without any diagnoses. My mother and I decided against his advice and began nutrition, exercise and therapy -- both mental and physical.
When I was almost 30, the same doctor offered me a "new miracle med" that would block the pain signals in my brain. He prescribed the antidepressant amitriptyline, and I had my one and only manic episode. If he had taken any time to recognize my hyper self, maybe he would not have given me an antidepressant without any warnings about its side effects. The strongest medicine I had ever taken, at that point in my life, was Tylenol.
It took me a few years to recover from that total breakdown. Waking up in a psych ward is more than a little scary. But the psychiatrist there listened to me and tried many different medications, until we landed on Klonipin and Trazodone to help me sleep. That was my answer for almost 30 years.
When my two sons were active toddlers, the pain bouts became too much. My first opioid, at age 40, came with common sense and compassion from a wise and caring doctor. She could not find the underlying cause of my pain, but knew I was telling the truth. After all, I had said no to opioids for 25 years.
She would write only 3 opioid scripts a year. If I needed more, then we’d have to find out what was going on inside my body. That worked for 10 years. And it taught me discipline.
KIM HALVERSON
At age 50, I broke my back in 3 places and required daily opioids to move at all. The doctor linked my meds to better physical function, and I was on that dose for 5 years without an increase. Opioids helped me to hold onto our house and attend my sons' games --- both of them are athletes.
Then came the "big scare" as I call it. When Florida lost its mind and went after the pill mills. The country over-reacted to the opioid crisis and in many places still is. The truth about Florida became a fiction about Montana and everywhere else, it seems. The pain clinic that had saved my little family for 5 years got rid of me and many other patients to protect their practice.
For the next 4 years, a local clinic and a brave nurse practitioner bucked the system and got me half of what I needed. It was better than nothing and I “saved up” pills by staying in bed until a game was on or some work had to be done. Those 4 years were hard on me, and I ended up in a wheelchair and incontinent.
I kept looking for a reasonable doctor and eventually found one. Once I was put back on the dose that worked for those 5 years, it only took a few months to regain my strength enough to face surgery and get a new artificial hip.
The new hip was supposed to reduce my pain, but my pain level doubled. A new doctor found out why. I had scoliosis, and the surgery that was supposed to help me had locked me into pain 24/7. The first year after the new hip, a lump formed in my back and my body felt the pain I had been trying to avoid all my life.
I know what is causing my pain now and why certain injuries were far worse than I thought they would be. That hip that looked “blown up” on an x-ray was the fulcrum of my frame, a curve in my spine and I have been wrestling with since I was 16.
Even knowing all of this, my pain doctor felt pressured to stop helping people like me or anyone with opioids. I was abandoned, but found another doctor who just recently stopped calling himself a “pain management specialist” because of what is still happening to other doctors.
I am already looking for the next reasonable doctor, just in case, but it is not supposed to be this way. We shouldn’t have to fight this hard to live any kind of life.
All of us need to join the fight. We need to start with ourselves and our support team, and then we must find allies within the medical profession and help them help us. I will protect my three doctors completely. I never do anything that could be misconstrued by anyone and often supply them with information to protect themselves, just in case.
And then we all need to share our story. Help each other with those stories. Become our own best experts and advocates.
Kim Halvorson lives outside Missoula, Montana.
Do you have a “My Story” to share? Pain News Network invites other readers to share their experiences about living with pain and treating it. Send your stories to editor@painnewsnetwork.org.
