LAURA KIESEL: I'm Laura Kiesel.
And I have chronic pain, and I work as a freelance writer and editor.
The onset of chronic pain was really gradual for me.
It didn't happen suddenly with an accident or anything in particular.
I was born with a really severe case of clubfoot.
I had to have, as a child, several surgeries
and wear a cast till I was three.
And that left me with some structural discrepancies and issues in my body.
Like my leg is shorter on my left side than my right, and the muscles in it
are underdeveloped.
And the foot has no arch and is sort of pronated.
So over time as I got older, I had more and more stress
on my hips and my low spine.
So I always had some pain as a child and as a teenager,
but it hasn't been until the past several years
that it's become just daily.
It was usually more sporadic or intermittent growing up.
I also have, unrelated to that, endometriosis,
which is a disease, a reproductive disease, related to menstruation.
So starting in high school I started getting very painful periods.
And it wasn't until I was 24 that I was able to finally get surgery
to have a lot of it removed and have it diagnosed.
So I had pain during those days, and I had some other pain.
But it wasn't daily until the past few years,
where I've started to have a lot of degenerative changes in my hips
and spine.
They think partially from that discrepancy from my legs,
and just the wear and tear as you grow older of walking,
with those kind of structural abnormalities
kind of wearing on my body.
So when pain becomes a daily reality, it can
be a very hollowing, almost dehumanizing experience after a while,
because it's just--
you wake up and you're still in pain.
And you go to bed and you're still in pain.
And you don't sleep well because you're in pain.
And so it can be very distracting.
I think it's very hard until you've had that be your daily reality
to realize how much it can affect your concentration, affect your mobility,
affect your ability to do things that you took for granted.
So many things that used to come very easily to me now take a lot of effort
and even sometimes just bandwidth.
Like the mental or emotional bandwidth to deal with something
when I have a really bad pain day is much lower on some days than others.
Some days I just can't handle a workload at all and I just need to be in bed
or just take it easy.
And other days I'll have a good day.
But even if I'm very productive, usually it's like then I run on a deficit
the following days for having a high-energy day.
It's never-- nothing is ever free anymore.
It's like you're running constantly on a certain amount of borrowed time
and bandwidth and physical energy or tolerance to pain.
I've only been offered not even really what's
considered pain medication, primarily, but things like anticonvulsants,
like Gabapentin and Lyrica, which are primarily for epilepsy,
but now are being used for people with fibromyalgia and nerve pain.
So I've tried those.
I didn't have-- they didn't really help much.
They took the edge off a little but not much.
And then the side effects kind of outweighed any benefits.
So I stopped taking them after a few months.
Other than NSAIDs, or like ibuprofen and Tylenol,
like I don't really have much else that's been offered to me.
The only time opioids have really been offered to me--
I know now they're cutting back, so it might
be the timing with which my chronic pain has really blown up--
has been really acute situations, where they've only given me a few days worth.
Like when my disc first herniated, I got a few days worth of codeine.
The only thing I take semi-regularly is I
take Flexeril, which is a muscle relaxant, a few nights a week
when I really need to try to sleep through the pain.
Most people I know in my chronic pain group, and friends
who have had similar issues, are on opioids or at least
were for a time, an extended period of time.
But because I have a family history of addiction, a really prevalent family
history of addiction to opioid drugs, I did not want to take that.
So I've never really inquired.
And even when I have for very acute situations, like when my disc first
got injured, I made sure to ask for the lowest type and the lowest dose.
Because I just don't want to even risk going down any kind of pathway
to addiction, similar to my family members.
My mother was a heroin addict.
She did not start with opioids.
She started straight from experimenting with different drugs like cocaine,
and then started with heroin and she became a heroin addict.,
So my mother was a heroin addict for many years.
And then she got on a methadone program, and she wasn't on heroin anymore.
But when she became a cancer patient--
and she had terminal cancer for many years.
It was terminal but it was five years before she died--
she was given an opioid prescription.
I don't think they did any evaluation of her history.
Or maybe they also figured just because she is terminal,
to overlook her history.
But my brother was in the household with her.
She started giving him her pills, so he became addicted to Dilaudid.
And when she died, he actually suffered very badly from withdrawal
because he suddenly didn't have access to her prescriptions anymore.
And he took to the streets and he got arrested.
And he finally had to check himself in for a couple of days.
And then he got on Suboxone and got off opioids.