"Bite the bullet"
I stopped medication
Thought it would be ok
Local doctors can help
Not a typical patient
Therapies I tried
Three "choices"
Medication, not drugs
They should have never treated my mother as a typical patient because she really wasn't a typical patient, both in terms of pain management and in her post operative course. She had a very extensive kind of surgery that would have caused anybody a lot of pain. They cut open her chest and removed a big part of her lung. They removed four ribs and she had a chest wall resection and had two chest tubes after surgery. They just started giving her medication after her surgery, treating her just like any other patient. They kept on telling her, it will feel a little better when they take the chest tubes out. The pain was not relieved after the chest tubes came out, but they never really believed her. The whole time she was in the hospital, and I'm very sensitive to this because I'm a nurse, the nurses never got to know who she was as a person and why she might have been reacting the way that she was to her pain. They never did things like learn that she had been on narcotics for a long time for chronic back pain, just the Tylenol with Codeine. So nobody, even at this place that was the Mecca of pain management, they never properly assessed her situation
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