Thank you for your kind words.
Changing pharmacies helped for a while, but with that pharmacy attempting to prevent me from receiving 2/3rds of one of my pain prescriptions month before last through trickery (they failed, because there were also some caring pharmacy staff), and the DEA demanding an additional across the board 2024 decrease of almost 9%, I've done something I hoped to never do...switched to WalMart. (And they violated my HIPAA protections 4 times in just the few minutes it took me to sign up.)
(Why place the same restrictions on methadone, a valuable painkilling drug that (according to my pain doctor's staff), has caused zero deaths that they personally know of? Because this apparently isn't about protecting the public, and hasn't been for over a decade.)
And having either been followed home due to pharmacy staff making certain everyone in the pharmacy knew exactly what my medical needs were that day they tried to cheat me, or someone being informed of my address by pharmacy staff, my "travel bottle" of meds was stolen from my car within 36 hours of that very public display of their animosity (something I have feared for 20 years), and a month later (last week) someone tried to get into our house late at night. (Why report the issue, and watch the hate and risk spread further?)
We face condemnation daily, simply because we share a medical need with about one billion people worldwide. But in all the years I've personally been condemned for the circumstances of my fate, I've yet to ever be asked about my pain, or even why my pain is severe. I guess it's just so much easier to hate when we are not perceived as human, or having the same human medical needs in many cases as those very haters.
We lost Dad just before Christmas, and that's been hard. (Two days after his 95th birthday, which he spent at home thanks to hospice.) Now I just have to protect Mom for a while longer, and I can at least make my life choices with a bit more freedom.
B. Wilson, please keep in mind how much it means to be offered concern, rather than hostility. I'll be thinking of you today, and how much it helped me to express myself with this response.
