Following up on Dopesick and my own experiences.

I have had a week to mull over my previous post regarding the series Dopesick and the specific element I highlighted.  How did an educated and experienced group of people take an incomplete piece of information and run with it as if it was a multi year million dollar study.  At some point someone had to read this short letter and decide to build an entire marketing campaign on it.  I am not writing this to investigate the motives of the players involved.  I am not really qualified to do this.  As I said last week, I will let you all watch the series and make up your own minds.  My aim is to help myself and others make decisions using information that is available to us.  Decisions that make us fulfilled, prosperous and safe.  The motives of sales people, executives and professionals are irrelevant to me in the end.  I guess "Buyer Beware" is more the theme of this blog.

In the series Dopesick there was one short story line that was introduced in the beginning and was rarely mentioned after the third or forth episode.  One of the US attorneys, Randy Ramseyer was suffering from prostate cancer and had to have surgery to remove the tumor.  After the surgery he is in his hospital room and the doctor comes in and prescribes Oxycontin for pain.  Paraphrasing Randy's response; HELL NO!  Even after the doctor assured him that the drug was safe to take, Randy was having none of it.  Eventually Motrim (a brand of ibuprofen) was prescribed. This is the kind of situation and decision I am most interested in addressing.  How do we as lay people decide what is the best course of action?  Do we just listen to the "experts" (in this case the Doctor or nurse).  Even though he reported his pain level as 1,000 on a scale of 1 to 10 he was not going to take oxycontin.

I relate this back to a bad bicycle crash I had in 2009.  I broke my collar bone in 4 places and broke a bone in my hand.  After surgery to do all the repairs (4 plates and 15 pins in the collar bone and 2 screws in my hand) I was given morphine IV.  I do not recall being asked if I wanted it or not.  I also do not recall being warned about any addictive effects.   I do have to say however it was a welcomed relief.  I also did not realize that after the first couple of doses the morphine was only available if I requested it and if I was in severe pain.  I never asked for it so I was not given it again.  I was released with a prescription of pain meds and returned home.

I took the pain meds for about 2 days and stopped.  The pain meds did very little to relieve pain and just made me feel lousy.  I had much better luck with just over the counter ibuprofen.  A few years latter I had another crash and I think I had broken a few ribs (not quite sure, bicycle crashes start to run together after a while LOL).  I was x-rayed in the ER and surgery was not required.  I was sent home with a prescription for pain meds.  I read the prescription before I went into the pharmacy and the quantity was 30 pills.  I asked the pharmacist if I could only get some of the pills.  I was quite certain I would not be taking all 30 pills.  The pharmacist said he was only allowed to dispense medication based on the doctors prescription.  I still had the memory of how I had reacted to previous pain meds and there had been recent articles about the beginnings of the opioid epidemic.  Specifically affluent adults getting hooked and switching from prescription meds to heroin.  So I decided that I was not going to fill the prescription and I would "tough it out" with ibuprofen.  I also went through my medicine cabinet and found a few other opioid prescriptions that I had filled in the past and never taken.  I found that the local police had a prescription return policy.  I took the unused prescriptions to them.

I did take a few pills recently post gall bladder surgery.  I only took them for a couple days.  The prescription was for hydrocodone.  So what does this all have to do with decisions and information.  Looking back at this post it all seems to come down to control.  Other than reckless bicycle behavior all of these decisions have been about control.  My experience in the hospital after collar bone surgery put pain meds and my reaction to them on my radar.  When presented with the option again my goal was not to understand everything about opioids and addiction.  My major tactic was to garner as much situational control as possible.  That is probably why I only wanted a small number of the pain meds and not the entire prescription.  Control is probably why I took pain meds in the hospital for a blocked intestine.  I could not control that pain on my own so morphine was prescribed.  Apparently a blocked intestine is as close as a male will every get to the pain of child birth.

So if our goal is to make decisions that make us fulfilled, prosperous and safe control is on vital aspect of the process.  Maybe I should apply control to decisions on my bicycle LOL.