truvy
Monday, March 04, 2002
Pain in the neck
It's sometimes really difficult to talk with my Mama. Not because I don't enjoy speaking with her, in fact I do, and we're very close, especially for a Mother/Son living half a country apart. It's hard to talk to her sometimes because there's nothing I can do to help. She's in fairly constant pain with degenerating disks in her spine and neck, bone spurs inside the spinal column that pinch & block nerves and a host of other problems that all stem from that. She's had a few different surgeries for it, the last one was last July. However, nothing has seemed to work. The orthopaedic surgeon that operated on her neck sounds like an arrogant cocky little fucker who is not interested in how the patient feels, but rather in "his" surgery and how successful he thinks it went based on x-rays. When my mother responded to his "Damn, I'm good" (I mean that literally, he said this while looking at an x-ray) with "Well, it might look good, but it sure doesn't feel good", he snapped at her - all but accusing her of being a whiner and a hypochondriac. Now, I know she is a Southern Lady, and we in/from the South have a tendency to dramatize things de temps en temps, but I'll tell you one thing, Mama is no whiner. She disdains complaint, especially complaint about physical ailments. She has often commented on the male lack of ability to withstand pain. So for her to say to me "Sometimes the pain is so bad I want to take a gun and shoot my head off so it will stop" is more than a little disconcerting. I just don't know what to do beyond cursing my choice of profession. Why didn't I go to med. school instead of law school so that I might be able to actually HELP someone (as opposed to the meaningless job I have)?
I'm trying to get her the name of a really good pain management specialist in Dallas, so hopefully that will do some good, but she's reluctant to do anything like try to control the pain until the next course of action is determined with the neuro-surgeon that she's now seeing instead of that fuck of an orthopedist (I'm not against orthos - my sister is an Ortho. asst. & her doctor is wunderbar, just for the record, just against that certain type of doctor who is passionate about the process and the procedure, but not the patient & the actual pain & feelings that drove them to seek help in the first place). There are so many things I would change in this world if I could just twitch my nose and make them better.
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