Feature
Pain killers
IR can play a critical healing role for patients as the United States battles an opioid epidemic and pain crisis By Melanie Padgett Powers
G
ene Johnson was eating biscuits and gravy on a Monday night with his wife, Jeannie, and his elderly
mother. “That was the last thing I remember until they were tubing me in my driveway and taking me to the hospital,” he says. In the middle of dinner at his home in Rome, Georgia, Johnson suddenly stopped chewing and put both arms on the kitchen table. He stared blankly straight ahead and didn’t respond to his wife repeatedly asking what was wrong. She called 911. He stayed unresponsive in the chair until paramedics arrived. He had suffered an accidental opioid overdose at age 70.
14 IRQ | WINTER 2019
Johnson began taking painkillers for chronic pain after neurosurgery for multiple myeloma and associated spine fractures in 2013. It was later discovered that the neurosurgeon had accidentally cut a nerve that led to excruciating ongoing pain. In addition, Johnson had four rods in his back and one in his left arm. He eventually went to a pain clinic, where they tried several pain medications, including hydrocodone and Lyrica. “They kept giving me opioids and nothing would help,” he says. Then they gave him OxyContin, which, it turns out, would be the last opioid he would ever take.
In 2017, Johnson took one OxyContin pill on a Saturday, then one on Sunday
and another on Monday. Just three pills before he collapsed with an overdose. However, he was continuing to take various other prescription painkillers he had been given, not realizing the danger. After surviving his overdose, Johnson swore off opioids. “We just threw away all the opioids in the house. I just hurt instead,” he says.
A pain epidemic About 25.3 million U.S. adults like Johnson, or 11.2 percent of the population, suffer from chronic pain— defined as pain that lasts three months or more—according to a 2012 National Health Interview Survey.
The opioid epidemic has received a lot of attention in the past decade. But it goes hand in hand with a pain epidemic in this country. Many people who have become addicted to painkillers or even overdosed or died started by trying to find relief for their chronic pain. The first wave of opioid overdose deaths began after physicians increased their prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2016, CDC released stricter guidelines on how to prescribe opioids for chronic pain, leading to fewer and shorter prescriptions.
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