Rae's Story

One of the results of spending many years in a confidential support group is that you meet a lot of different people and hear a lot of stories. You meet the highly sociable and the lonely, abusers and their victims/survivors, the strong and the weak, the alcoholics and addicts who still use and the ones in recovery. They come with their pain and their anger, their resolve and their struggles, their grief and sometimes their joy. You learn not to flinch. Sometimes you learn how to cry. Once you’ve learned how to listen, people continue to come to you to talk.

I’d like to tell you about one of them. Although she’s not shy about sharing her story, I’m going to change her name to Rae. She deserves some privacy and compassion. She tells me it's Ok to do it this way. People who already know this part of her story will recognize her. The ones she hasn't confided this part of her life to don't need to know exactly who she is.

I didn't meet her in a support group. We struck up a friendship based on mutual interests, and one day she opened up to me. Rae told me about her history this way: when somebody introduced her to heroin at the age of 14, she suddenly knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

While she’s been recovering and “clean” for many years now, a respectable member of the community raising her own family, her years with the drug did some serious damage to her body. (My sheltered life led me to believe you either died from a heroin OD, or didn’t but forever craved the stuff. End of story. Nobody ever told me about other damage.) Liver damage is just a part of it. She needed a non-cardiac pacemaker to regulate a body function after its nerves sustained damage. A few months ago that pacemaker had to be removed because an infection settled in that area. Nobody knew quite where it had come from, but it was likely from an unrelated surgical repair several months previous to that. The infection likely lay dormant for a few months, then found a home and started to grow. With her liver damage, she can't fight infections well anymore.

At first everybody was terrified that it was MRSA, but testing showed it to be “just” a stubborn staff infection. She was given a course of antibiotics and all was well. For a while, that is. If all were truly well, there’d be no story.

The infection reappeared, this time in a toe and in an ankle. Rae has been told the ankle will need surgery to rid it of infection, but the toe presented a more immediate problem, and was partially amputated. It was considered a success that part of it was saved. She had been told she was to be put on IV antibiotics after the surgery, but was sent home with a prescription for pills instead. She was also sent home without a prescription for Vicodin for the pain.

Her doctor knows her history. He also apparently fears the new law regarding drug registry that tracks all restricted painkillers and the doctors who prescribe them as an attempt to keep them out of the hands of drug-seeking patients, aka addicts. Rae had to argue with him for her pills, the only thing that actually controls the pain for her. She’s taken Vicodin before, while recovering from both earlier surgeries. She’s never abused it or gone back for more after she recovered. He finally agreed to give her a very limited amount in an unrefillable prescription, which was all she needed or wanted.

In fact, she still has some left. She started to feel her body adjusting to the drug and decided to live with the pain instead of risking a new addiction. She demonstrated how much her hands were shaking after she'd implemented that decision.

But on Monday, more than two weeks after her partial amputation, her toe got worse. It started swelling and the pain levels increased to worse than before the surgery. She knew the infection was back, but when she called and complained to her doctor, he brushed her off, calling the pain and swelling “normal.” She’s convinced all he heard was “pain” and gave in to his preconceived notions of what recovering addicts do.

By Wednesday she managed to get an appointment with him to actually show him the toe, demanding he look at it, challenging him with, “Is this what you call ‘normal’ ?”

Thursday the rest of her toe was amputated. Her foot was opened up toe to ankle, irrigated to clean out the infection present, and bandaged, unclosed for drainage. The infection had indeed returned and spread. She still hadn’t gotten that IV antibiotic, but a new scrip for pills. Stronger ones this time.. Nobody knew whether all this had taken care of the infection, now diagnosed after a second look to indeed be MRSA. Her husband decided to seek an attorney.

Is this an isolated case? Or have the new laws actually interfered with the proper practice of medicine, creating such fear of prosecution in doctors that addicts, whatever their current status of recovery, can no longer receive proper medical treatment?

For that matter, can any of us expect proper pain management now?


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I first wrote the above a couple months ago, hoping it would appear in another blog. It hasn't, and I'm not waiting any longer for it to do so. I would like to say that some things are doing better for Rae now. The MRSA seems to finally be gone, although that took so much out of her that it's very hard for her to fight garden variety bugs these days, and she tires very easily. The condition of her liver already made that difficult. Now it's more than a challenge.

She needs a couple more surgeries, one already known to be needed months ago, the other to re-implant her pacemaker. She's not in a big hurry. She's really hoping to become well enough to be able to hold down a full-time job and be able to do more to take care of her family rather than having them have to take care of her.