#but he lived with chirrosis for over 5 years and had ascites the whole time

[zilla-m]

This is a major factor in what recently killed my father. Instead of giving him the pain medication he needed when the back pain first got too bad to take, they told him to try 'alternative' pain management (lose weight, something hard to do when you have chronic back pain that affects all your bones and muscles because of compensation) and if it got too much, take ibuprofen. It was too much for so long, it eventually led to him taking so much he developed chirrosis (something the doctors actually told him not to worry about because it's 'rare' that anyone can take that much for that long) and then they basically told him to stop taking the ibuprofen without giving him something else. The fun thing about many painkillers is that in prolonged high doses, they cause damage to the liver (and kidneys, though that doesn't apply here),but he only ever needed the lowest dose of oxy, and even then only took it on days when the pain was so bad he otherwise wouldn't have been able to function properly. He only got this at the end of his life when his back problems were so exacerbated by the years of compensating them due to medical negligence (he desperately needed surgery to correct severe stenosis) that his disks started bulging and pressing against his spinal cord, taking away his ability to walk.

Also, since doctors are so adverse to prescribing even very low doses of opioids, he spent three weeks in the hospital with no diagnosis because his back pain prevented him from lying still long enough to get an MRI. So, they sent him home without a diagnosis because they couldn't diagnose with a CT scan or the partial MRI they got.

It took another couple weeks for another hospital to agree to see him (hospitals don't like taking patients that have been long term treated in another system, he just so happened to have connections on the inside). Within six hours of him being at this new hospital, they had given him a little oxy and Ativan and gotten a full MRI with diagnosis and treatment plan. Unfortunately, by this point, his body had been so ravaged by the other hospital's negligence and mismanagement that his body couldn't tolerate the surgery he had to undergo and he ended up passing away from complications that could have been prevented 30 YEARS AGO if his pain had been taken seriously and not put down to weight or ignored because he was good at hiding it.

And, after all that, when he was on hospice, a brand new rotation nurse tried to tell my mom they shouldn't go straight to oxy, the thing we know worked (because my dad had high tolerance to drugs to the point where even oxy only took the edge off), and instead tried something a little less addictive. He died two days later.

THIS!!

THIS IS AN AMAZING WAY TO THINK OF CHRONIC PAIN