I was to have an appointment this morning with my pain clinic provider.  My pain medication and steroid shot provider.  But first thing this morning I called into the clinic and got a less than understanding person who would only tell me her screen was different from mine and was rude, belligerent, and not really on the same brain level as I was.  The result was I had no appointment today that would give me relief and let me walk.   

This was important to me because my ability to walk or even function is getting less and less, but the clinic has been in the process of moving and has been the target of anger from the largest profitable medical providing system in our county.  Ron and I worked for that system.  They don’t like any company that provides services they have in house or contracted doctors to do so they try to either take them over, have cooperative agreements with them (meaning they get a cut of the cash) or destroy the competition.  Thier responce is to try to either ruin any competition or to fold it into their company.   So my pain providers who once worked in partnership with that hospital system but then refused to submit to them agreeing to be folded into the hospital system the hospital system is endeavoring to destroy.   Sadly for the hospital system the patients like me were loyal and stayed with the providers we had instead of abandoning them.

The pain group grew and merged with some other groups  because they needed protection from the hospital system that runs the majority of medical services in our area and provides the only hospitals for doctors that business requires access to hospital type services.  Blackmail on display for the for profit healthcare system in the US.  

The building they had was far too small, so they are moving.  I had my last visit on the first of June as a telehealth because they couldn’t get the city inspection certificate to allow them to use the new building.  My pain doctor listened to me and said I needed the next in person visit to get muscle injections and then an appointment with my pain surgeon for spine shots.  

That has led to this where I get multiple emails and texts of appointments that then never appear on my patient portal.  So today I got showered and dressed  and Ron put my walker in the car.  But then the appointment disappeared from my patient portal list and several new appointments were listed.  

Which leads me to the point of this post.  I was emotionally rocked at 7:45 this morning after finding out I did not have an appointment for the relief I needed and was depending on.  I went to work doing the cartoons / memes / news post for today.  But by 10 I was in serious pain.  I took my noon medications early.  It did not help and by noon I couldn’t walk.  At 1 pm I took an additional 15 miligarm extended relief morphine and another 15 miligarm instant relief.

At this point Ron had done everything all day in the house and seeing how much pain I was in wouldn’t even let me do the easiest things.  Ron had been doing that for weeks now trying to make sure I did not do anything that might cause me pain even to the point of getting into arguments if I should do the dishes even though for the washing part I could use my grand rolling stool.  

That did not help so at 3 pm I took another 30 miligarm exstened relief morphine and another 20 miligram backlofen muscle relaxer.  That did the trick.  It was slow in helping but by 4 pm I could feel the relief and the frantic desperate need for the pain to stop was dissipating.  By 5 pm I felt almost pain free, as pain free as I can ever be.  

So why this post you might be wondering.  Several reasons.  I still have to finish tomorrow’s cartoons / memes / and news posts and want everyone to understand why it might be late.   But most important are the draconian laws about pain medications that have swept the country mostly driven by republicans but also some democrats that want to look tough on drug abuse since they got caught doing nothing over the OxyContin scandal.  So if one company convinced doctors on lies to overprescribe medication leading to massive addiction issues when those pain drugs were withdrawn politicans with no medical backgrounds or information just started setting abartary rules which made no medical sence.

 So state legislators who had no expertise started to push laws that limited the amount of medications that doctors could prescribe.  I want you to understand how that affected me.  I was receiving a combination of medication that made it so with all my dying bones, all my bones growing in very painful ways, my immune system attacking my own body that let me live a normal life.  I could walk, I could garden, I could grocery shop.  

But then those drugs were taken away or reduced by nonmedical people in the Florida legislature who wanted to look tough on illegal drugs.  Remember my legal drugs were prescribed by doctors that had years of experience in pain medication.  So for a politician to run for reelection on being tough on illegal drug use I had my medications reduced and restricted.  That was the start.  Over the years legislators who were realtors or other wealthy people with no medication criteria or education background created more laws in Florida resticted my pain medication amounts that could be prescribed to me. 

Which leads me to this year.  I was down to the barest amount of pain medication daily along with having to have trigger point muscle injections every two months and every 6 to 8 months having spine epidurals.  That of course increased the cost of each visit to my pain doctors.  Grand how the government is looking after the lower incomes.  But I no longer could do any yard work, couldn’t do any real house work other than folding clothing or doing a small amount of dishes.  I had been basicly reduced to sitting in my chair at my desk.  Then came the new fuck you from the tRump people.  

RFK Jr. decided that people like me were getting too much pain relief and all we needed to do was live like he did.  So he sent out a directive to all doctors that they had to get all their patients to 100 morphine equivalent levels with the goal of taking them to less than 50 morphine equivalent levels or those that did not comply would be fined and possibly lose their license.   

I was well above that limit set by a toilet seat snorting cocaine addict that made his millions refuting real medical science while playing off his family name.  So I got taken down another 15 milligrams of instant release with the pain doctors having to keep every visit to justify my being over that and risking their license and practice.  To day I had to dip into my saved medication to function.  What am I to do when they are gone?

My primary pain doctor along with my pain surgeon has recommended and sent a referral to a neurosurgeon to have some of the vertebrae/nerves repaired.   But I have to have eye surgery, Ron needs eye surgery, and all of this is not covered completely by medicare.  So we are on the hook for the costs.  We recently paid $2,800 for Ron’s heart catheterization, which thankfully turned out he did not have any real blockages.  Was that collusion between the people who did the scan and those that did the heart catheterization? 

But his eye surgery will be at least $ 1,000 and mine for my eyes will be at least twice that.  So my back surgery is not going to happen anytime soon.  As I let everyone know my eye doctor would not even give me a prescription for glasses as she said my vision is far too compromised.  Yes I will address that issue, I promised Randy after he chewed my ass off for a long time over the issue.  My point is that we have a lot of medical issues and it will take time.  

That flows to my last point.  Tomorrows cartoons / memes / news post.   It is not done yet but I am working on it.  Now that I am not in excruciating pain with every breath I will try to finish up and get it scheduled.  However, and I am going to regret mentioning this.  Due to the medication and pain I did eat anything but a small breakfast.   I simply can not stomach food now.  I know the wonderful people here will tell me to use MDavis’s grand advice to use a nutritional shake and I will do so.  But I wanted to be honest as I am always here even when it is painful for me, I just can’t stomach food now.    Best wishes for everyone and hugs for those that want them.