A Painfully Irrational Refusal to Treat Agonizing Pain
She had breast cancer in a form that Western doctors rarely see anymore — the tumor had burst through her skin, looking like a putrid head of cauliflower weeping small amounts of blood at its edges.“It bone! It booonnnne lie de fi-yuh!†she said of the pain — it burns like fire — in Krio, the blended language spoken in this country where British colonizers resettled freed slaves.
No one had directly told her yet, but there was no hope — the cancer was also in her lymph glands and ribs.
“It’s the intense fear of addiction, which is often misunderstood,†said David E. Joranson, director of the Pain Policy Study Group at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, who has worked to change drugs laws around the world. “Pain relief hasn’t been given as much attention as the war on drugs has.â€
Not that atrocities from opiophobia never occur in the U.S., either — indeed, they are rampant. But the superstition appears to be even worse in some poorer nations. As for Mrs. Sesay, until she mercifully dies, she is being given “generic Tylenol and tramadol, a relative of codeine that is only 10 percent as potent as morphine.”
But hey — she won’t die high, or an addict, or taking in substances the DEA hates. These are the important considerations, as I’m sure she’d affirm if one were to ask her.
Comment by MFB —
September 11, 2007 @ 3:22 am
Yeah. My mother, when she was dying of gangrene (long story) was given mammoth doses of morphine by the hospital at long intervals, so she was either too spaced out to know who I was, or too agonized to talk. They knew perfectly well that she was going to die, but it was policy not to give smaller doses at regular intervals. Like you say, she might have died addicted . . .
Comment by Barry —
September 11, 2007 @ 10:07 am
“generic Tylenol and tramadol”
I’ve been on that for arthritis. After a while, that wasn’t enough. And that was arthritis, not terminal cancer.