Opioid overdose has supplanted car crashes on the list of causes-of-death according to the National Safety Council.
Opioid addiction, the malady that most often leads to overdose deaths, even happens to people who follow their doctor’s instructions on the use of pain medication to the letter.
Just ask Mary Paglia, lifelong Hall County resident who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer late in 2012. “And so began a journey of doctors, hospitals, pain, pain medicine and recovery,” Paglia told the audience of over three hundred people in the banquet hall of First Baptist Church on Green Street.
Thursday evening was the fourth of four opioid-focused public forums sponsored by The Partnership for A Drug Free Hall. The theme of Thursday’s forum was “Non-opioid Options for Pain Management”.
“Opioids are like the Mafia, or a gang; once you spend about a week or ten days with them they don’t let you go,” Paglia said.
It took Paglia two years of grueling treatment but finally doctors told her there was “significant shrinkage in the cancer and my physician said I could come off my pain medicine.”
Paglia said she was not given specific instructions on how to end her regimen of pain medications so she, “stopped ‘cold turkey’ without the slightest idea what I was about to experience.”
She then described the horrific symptoms she began to experience in the days that followed and was sure she would die. She admitted rather frankly to contemplating ways to speed that end.
“I had been fighting cancer for two years, I had never cried one tear, and suddenly I was crying,” she explained. “I didn’t care, I just wanted to die. Over the past two years I had struggled to overcome a massive surgery…radiation, brutal chemo treatments, and in just a matter of four days I was ready to end it all, I had no fight left.”
She said she had no idea what the source of her new misery was until she “Googled” her symptoms and “heroin withdrawals” was the result. Shocked at the internet diagnosis she said everything suddenly made sense. “It never occurred to me that a compliant cancer patient could become addicted to your pain medicine. I took my medicine exactly as prescribed.”
Paglia’s advice as she looks back on her experience: “Be your own best advocate.” She said to ask questions about your medications and learn as much as possible about the drugs and their effect on your body, and if there are other options.
Available alternative means for dealing with pain was the theme of the evening, as vendors and providers had tables set up in the lobby. Three pain management options made brief presentations: acupuncture, physical therapy and chiropractic specialists explained how their specialty was a viable option to opioids for pain management.
Judy Brownell, Director of Prevention with event organizer Center Point of Gainesville, described the forum as presenting, “alternate options for pain management…what’s been happening and what other people do.”
Brownell said she could see that efforts to turn people away from opioid use and abuse were beginning to work. “But we still have a long way to go… (many) patients still don’t even know what an opioid is…so information and education are vital and cannot rest.”
http://accesswdun.com/article/2019/1/756695/opioid-alternative-forum-continues-effort-to-awaken-enlighten-hall-county