Dear Mr. President-Help Chronic Pain Patients

Dear Mr. President,

My name is Suzanne Stewart and I urgently need your attention please, Mr. President. I’m so sorry for all that is happening these days that is making it so difficult for all of us and for you as the President. I know goodness will prevail. I need your help on behalf of millions of real and true Chronic Pain patients. Please don’t stop reading this letter now because of those words. For some reason they seem to make people nervous. Let me explain briefly, what I am asking from you. Mr. President, so many chronic pain patients in these United States of America are really and truly in horrific pain on a daily basis. I live with a horrible nerve disease called “RSD/CRPS” and aka “Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy” and “Complex Regional pain Syndrome”. It is #43 on the McGill pain index; only superseded by terminal cancer and about as painful as the amputation of a finger without anesthesia. There are many very real painful illnesses out there and I have several of them, following a car accident in 2002. A man ran through a red light and totaled not only my car but my body as well. I have had 8 surgeries and after the 7th, I was diagnosed with RSD/CRPS. In 2013, I was supposed to have a pacemaker replaced, but instead I ended up with a total pectoral muscle reconstruction surgery. The Dr. tried to head off “full body/systemic” CRPS, but it did not work for me. I now live with full body, systemic, CRPS disseminated and severe. I also have several herniated/bulging cervical and lumbar discs with Degenerative Disc Disease, Arnold Chiari Malformation I, with Chiari migraines and Polyneuropathy in Collagen Vascular Disease (which is equal to Ehler’s Danlos Syndrome type 4-Vascular, or EDS-4) and there’s more but I don’t want to belabor this subject.

There are many Americans who live with daily chronic pain illnesses and we implore you for help. The CDC and DEA and “Big Brother” Pharma companies are trying to “hurt” the American chronic pain people. We need your help and the help of Tom Price, the HHS person, who you chose because he would do a good job, right? Please help us, your pain community to not lose the medications that many need so badly. We seem to be losing our medications because of heroin addicts being “lumped together” with us. Every time a celebrity dies of an overdose, they blame it on the pain meds and not the misuse and abuse of pain medications along with the use of recreational street drugs. You are an NRA spokesperson and you believe in the constitutional right of the “right to bear arms”. Then you need to believe in the right of the established and true chronic pain patients, to have the right to take the appropriate pain medications that have been prescribed diligently by their Physicians and/or Pain Physicians. No Dr. should be afraid to prescribe Opioid pain medications to their patients because of repercussions from the CDC or DEA. But our Physicians are leaving in droves because of all of the “uproar” about an “Opioid epidemic”. Senators, Joe Manchin (D-WV), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Angus King (I-ME), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Elizabeth Warren, (D-MA), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) proposed a “Budgeting for Opioid Addiction Treatment Act” (aka “LifeBoat Act”), to force chronic pain patients pay a tax, called “the Lifeboat tax”. It would have meant that pain patients would have to pay .01 cent for each milligram of Opioid pain medication that they take on a daily basis! This money was then going to be used for addiction treatment centers! This is not right, just as that tax on medical devices was and is completely wrong and punishing people for being ill.
Mr. President, we are not addicts and we are not “addicted” to our medications. We only use them for pain control. If you ask most true chronic pain patients, they would tell you that they hate taking the medications and wish we did not have to depend on it. This is the key word, sir, and that is “dependent”! We are not addicted to our medications and we do not get cravings nor do we get “high” from them. An addict seeks out their drugs at any cost and looks forward to taking them because of the “high” they get. As pain patients who take our medications responsibly, we get some kind of relief from the daily chronic pain that we live with. Imagine that just taking a shower, takes so much out of you because of the pain? Just showering and possibly doing our hair and brushing our teeth makes it so that we cannot schedule anything else that day! We are “dependent” yes, but NOT “addicted” to our medications. We need the physician / patient relationship to choose what is necessary and best for our pain control. The P.R.O.P. Dr.’s who are against Opioids and others against them, are just misinformed and some want to make money off of us. Some of those against Opioids for pain control, don’t want us to take them because they own...