Pain Doctor
“What you are describing to me is not consistent with pain”! Can you imagine having four (4) major surgeries in the past year and a few minor ones and hearing that from a “Pain Specialist”? I am living with Fibromyalgia and debilitating Osteo Arthritis. It has caused bone damage and deterioration to the extent of joints needing to be replaced and bones fused together. Imagine a Pain Specialist telling you that? And he gets paid the big bucks too! I was devastated. I waited months to see this doctor.
At my 1st appointment, he told me that he wanted to stabilize my mood. My mood?!!! My mood is stable. I take 2 antidepressants and I cope very well for someone who is living with constant pain. “Let’s stabilize your mood with this powerful (and dangerous drug with side effects that literally can kill you, “Lamictal/Lamotrigine”) drug and you can come back and see me in 6-8 weeks after your C3-C6 Posterior Cervical neck Fusion and Laminectomy. “We will discuss your pain then”. There’s a wait list several miles long to see this guy. My mood, really? This is what I had waited for, this appointment for over 6 months. I was hopeful at first. I thought finally someone would help me find a way to make this pain stop, at least temporarily or even for part of a 24 hour day. I came back for a 2nd appointment 6 weeks later. I waited the usual 10 to 15 minutes in the tiny secondary waiting room after 10-15 minutes in the initial waiting room.
The doctor came into the room and smiled and said, “What would you like me to do for you”? I thought “Wow, that’s nice. I haven’t even gone to medical school”. I thought this was “his” specialty and he is asking what I would like? I told him I really don’t want to take any more drugs or pain medication. I had heard about a lot of new super pain relief options. I had also tried a few of them. What was I hoping for? I thought that he would prescribe a new treatment similar to a “TENS unit” that sends a pulse to your brain by way of your central nervous system and basically interrupts/scrambles the pain signal. Yes, that actually exists. I thought that maybe my insurance would help pay for it. I broke my neck a year earlier for a 2nd time and had been out of work since late November of 2016 and it was now a year later.
Even though these remedies were fairly affordable, I had no income, hence the request for a prescription and possibly insurance coverage. He would have nothing to do with it. He actually yelled at me very loudly. I was sure the people in the outer waiting area could hear him. He said, “What are you expecting from me?” I thought I had given him a basic clue of what I would like. Instantly I became sad, disappointed and frustrated. I did the only thing I could do in that situation, I started to cry. Just tears came out, no wailing. But there are some people who can’t handle a woman crying and I seem to find a lot of them and very often too! So he did the only thing he could do in this situation. He yelled at me some more. He had told me previously that there were a lot of alternatives to drugs. That is what I wanted.
I was hopeful on this visit that I would get some relief without any more pills. He then started with the 1980’s psycho babel. “The same way your brain is causing you to react to me angrily right now is the same way you can retrain your brain to deal with pain”. I said reacting the same way! I wasn’t angry. I was sad and hurt (and kind of scared too) that he yelled at me. Either he didn’t believe that I was really having pain or he wasn’t listening.
Read this next part and I am quoting to the best of my recollection. He said, “You don’t want help! You just want to argue with me. I didn’t say that I don’t believe that what you think you are experiencing is pain. Actually it’s just fear you are experiencing. You are afraid that something is wrong with you and you perceive that as pain. That is your choice to feel that way. You can choose not to feel pain if you don’t want to. You just need to retrain your brain so that you don’t perceive that signal as pain”!!! So then I said, “Does this mean you are not going to help me?” Why would that make him mad? I think he was so angry he was looking for something to throw at me. I was afraid of him. I felt threatened alone with him in that tiny room. He was seething with anger. He stormed out of the room and went to the front desk.
I really, truly did not understand why I made him so angry. He’s over 6 feet tall and a very big man. I am just over 5 feet (and shrinking rapidly). I sort of ran to catch up with him. I said to him, “You told me there were alternatives to drugs for pain, why won’t you help me? He handed me some papers and said, “I printed you two sets of these so in case you don’t understand the first time you read them, you can read it again a 2nd time. Then he kind of laughed. Was that supposed to be funny or make the tears stop? I said, “Well then after I read these papers, will you help me?” He said, “Sure you can come in and have another appointment anytime you want.
That was not reassuring! With that being said, I had to assume my appointment was finished because he turned and angrily walked down the hall away from me as fast as he could. I think it also probably didn’t help that my appointment was at 4:30 pm and I may have been his last patient of the day. He appeared to be having some kind of low blood sugar attack or a psychiatric breakdown. I’m not a doctor, I’m just guessing by his behavior! I was certainly his last patience of the day!
These were 2 very expensive sets of pages he printed out… 3 sheets of paper filled on both sides. They seemed pages from his Alumna, UCLA medical school, from the 1980’s, which was when he attended. Old “New Age” propaganda. There were YouTube videos to watch and other websites listed for help with guided meditations to help you deal with pain. He had circled several paragraphs before handing them to me like a prescription and said, “There were online groups I could join to meditate with, so I could learn how to control pain. He suggested in the paper he printed to do things to get my mind off of the pain and stop thinking about myself! “Get out and volunteer, get involved in sports, ride a bicycle…”
Yes, I was crying all the way out of the building to my car in the parking garage! I bet my insurance was paying this guy at least $500 for a visit for this “advice.” For $500, I could have bought and paid for the supplies and tools I needed to relieve my pain for years. What a big jerk. Just my humble opinion. This doctor gave an entire new meaning to the term, “Pain Specialist”.
I had been by another pain specialist a year earlier. Dr. Steven R. Surrett, MD. He was a very kind, compassionate doctor and a perfect gentleman. He had joined Oregon Medical Group’s Interventional Pain Management practice, Pain consultants of Oregon, which could not afford to stay in business.
He sent me to another special doctor, to find out the reason for my pain – a nerve conduction study, lab work, blood tests, MRI… He was very thorough. He was kind, caring and attentive and he asked me a lot of questions. He wanted to help me in any way he could. He gave me a prescription for Lidocaine Ointment for my arthritis and joint pain because I wanted an alternative to drugs. I was sorry to find out I could not see him when my prescription needed to be refilled. He was my first choice for pain management. You can imagine my horror when I mistakenly assumed that this new pain specialist might show similar compassion and attentiveness. I know now that was wrong and knew better than to ever assume anything.
I know the way I was treated was wrong and not the way to help a patient who is in pain. You don’t tell me that I choose to feel this way and I can retrain myself to not perceive these signals as pain. I can also put my hand in scalding hot water and tell myself it is ice cold. It’s still pain and it still hurts.
I would think that someone who was a “Pain Specialist” for over 30 yrs would be on top of all the latest and greatest technologies of the 21st century. I would hope he would want to make a name for himself as someone who knew how to help people feel better, not hurt them and cause more pain. You know what I learned from this situation? You had better never tell a doctor what treatment you would like to receive. I think they take it as an insult. Maybe he was offended and was thinking that “This patient thinks they know more than I do”. I will be the first to admit that I am not a doctor and that I don’t know everything. But I’m not an imbicile and I do a lot of research. If I find an answer that sounds logical, I will check its credibility with several other sites until I can confirm the truth.
This is why I decided to write this blog. The amount of information available out there in cyberspace is staggering. Science has made huge strides in the field of health and healing medicine technology. It’s all there on the internet, in black and white, in video, in big color pictures and illustrations, explaining the new science of using Energy to heal our body’s. The ancient Chinese had figured out a lot of this “medicine”, over 5000 years ago. Now it has been perfected and made available to everyone. What an opportunity this is for me to share everything I have learned. I will continue to study and research so that if I can help people who are in pain get on with living their lives, pain-free and drug-free!
TO BE CONTINUED!