To Every ER Denying Ethical Pain Care: You Aren’t Saving Us

Medical patients — especially those with chronic pain due to rare and painful diseases — continue to be denied ethical pain care in ER’s. This has to stop. We are NOT ‘drug seekers.’ We are suffering human beings that you are dismissing and judging from your ivory towers of ableism.
Chances are very good in our current culture of ‘opioid hysteria,’ that we have been denied ethical care everywhere else we have gone. If we come in your doors, it is because we are literally at the end of our rope and out of options. Please help us.
I’ve heard too many stories of chronic pain patients dying via suicide after being refused ethical care at an ER. I’ve heard far too many more of patients who refuse to go to the ER — at all — because of how badly they’ve been treated there in the past. Why go if you are just going to be shamed, bullied, disbelieved, and sent away without help?!
Please understand our visit to you, may be our very LAST ‘cry for help.’ If you refuse us care, there IS nowhere else for us to go. And if the pain is bad enough, we will not make it through the night.
And if we DO make it through the night?! You will have succeeded at nothing more than crushing our souls a little further, and pushing us one foot closer to our graves.
While you refuse us care and pat yourselves on the back for ‘saving us from ourselves,’ and ‘sparing us a life of addiction,’ or ‘weeding out another addict,’ we are dying from the effects of unrelenting, untreated pain on our bodies.
You AREN’T saving us — or anyone else you deny ethical pain care. You are condemning us to torture and death. It may be slow — our endocrine systems failing over time due to the strain of untreated pain and exhaustion from constant sleep deprivation due to pain, our hearts wearing out from chronic, pain-induced tachycardia. Or it may be sudden — our heart gives out, or we have a massive stroke because the pain drove our blood pressure too high for the last time…
But make no mistake. NOT treating pain is a death sentence to your patients. We lose our quality of life, our health, often family and friends, and finally, our very lives due to untreated pain. This may take years, or it may take minutes. But it IS happening. This is the reality of untreated, unrelenting pain. It WILL have it’s ‘pound of flesh’ and then some.
Please don’t add yourself to the long list of our executioners.
