I can speak from experience and I can tell you it’s downright scary. I’m a chronic pain patient who takes morphine and oxycodone every day. I’ve been taking these drugs daily for about ten years now, so my tolerance is quite high. Recently I underwent surgery to have my gall bladder removed. When I woke up in recovery my wife said I was screaming in pain even though they had me on a morphine drip. The problem was that my body is so tolerant to the opioids that controlling the pain was damn near impossible for the OR staff.
During a follow up visit with my surgeon I asked about this and he told me that the staff had given me so much pain medication that the attending nurse was afraid they were going to kill me. He said that the nurse was literally in tears because I was suffering and there wasn’t anything more she could do for me. He then told me that the doctor who put me under was scared as well because of the amount of anesthesia (sp?) It took to put me under. He told me that they were walking a fine line between keeping me sedated and killing me. He said that the entire operating staff was sweating bullets and all were quite relieved when the surgery was done.
Dental procedures are a pure nightmare for me with novacain (sorry my spelling isn’t worth crap tonight) being almost useless. My last root canal was a nightmare, the Dentist shot me seven or eight times with zero effect to dull the pain. We had to stop and try again a few days later, this time I had to be sedated with a handful a valium to get the job done. Even nitrous had no effect on me.
Bottom line is I’m very terrified of something happening like an accident and the doctors bring unable to control the pain. I wear a medical id that states that I’m opioid tolerant as another fear is being mistaken for a druggie as I have a feeling that there isn’t too much sympathy for one. Ah, good times, good times.
Being a pill popper in my early days, I refused pain medication when I broke my wrist. I managed on Aleve and Tylenol.
I know a former heroin addict who was hooked up to a morphine machine after major surgery. When it was discovered he wasn’t using it, the hospital sent in a psychiatrist! He told the guy “I know I can stand the pain. I don’t know what the drugs will do to me.”
Doc told me that if I started to get a buzz, I needed to call him. It probably meant that I did not need so much because I was getting more than pain relief.
Best thing is to find a Doc that knows addiction & who listens. Actually a bit hard to find in my experience.
6 years after my original answer in this thread, I stand by it.
Now having undergone extensive shoulder repair surgery with a HELL of a lot of bony pain pre and post-op, I did require a lot of opioids to save my sanity. But as I mentioned earlier, I put my wife in charge of the meds, used as directed, kept in touch with my recovering cadre, and came off the meds when it was time to do so.
I have heard it said that if someone is given prescription medication under a doctor’s care, it does not count as violating their “clean date”.
In other words, it’s OK to take pain killers provided they were given under a doctor’s care and the doctor knows about the patient’s history to narcotics.
Personally, I always considered this be bogus and if someone felt they absolutely needed relief from excrutiating pain, it would be OK if they revealed that they had taken the medication under a doctor’s care and they did not continue to take it beyond a limited period of time.
I tell my recovering addict patients this. It’s no relapse for an addict to take prescribed opioids for such things as heart attacks, broken bones, or post-surgical pain, to name just a few legitimate reasons for doing so. Under supervision, taking as directed.
I took heat back when I was hospitalized after breaking my back and neck because after a time I noticed that I really didn’t actually need morphine for pain, it was less painful than my monthly torment from PCOS driven hell and I started refusing it. They had never seen anybody that wasn’t previously an addict refusing morphine.
I just had a consult with the surgeon that will probably be doing my gallbladder op and we were discussing some odds and ends, and he saw my medication list and medical history and he is not accustomed to someone with moderate to severe arthritis who is not horking down hard core pain killers frequently. He was cross checking to see why I mentioned that I wasn’t calibrated to the usual 1-10 pain scale that everybody else used. Explaining that 20 of 40 years of chronic pain from the PCOS being ignored by the Navy docs reset me to being able to effectively ignore anything that wasn’t bleeding or actively in the process of falling of my body. That ‘niggling little pain’ I register may be someone else’s ‘throbbing, stabbing, Oh My God get that knife out of my body NOW pain’. [I have a couple bottles of meds I haul along for a pill count just in case. They may be prescribed for a frequency I simply don’t need.
Most docs are not accustomed to people with the documentation of reasonable need for painkillers to not actually be using them. I am in serious deep sympathy for the other chronic pain folks here - I am seriously glad I have not yet joined their company, though I do admit that that time will come for me eventually. I do hope when the alzheimers hits I will have offed myself so I am not the poor brainless corpse in the back room screaming from unrelievable pain and making other peoples lives hell.