"Good evening Sir, I am your doctor...er...maitre d. May I check your butt pucker?"

In yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald there was a story about doctors and society finally recognizing that chronic pain is a legitimate disease and sufferers may not be malingerers or drug seekers, (Recognition on way for sufferers of chronic pain. Sydney Morning Herald p.5 Kate Benson. Monday October 19)

Doctors have decided that some of those people claiming to be suffering pain and labeled as drug seekers may actually have pain. They also suggest that pain may be a condition on it’s own rather than needing to be a symptom of another issue to be recognized.

I don’t get this at all. I am crippled by pain and physical trauma. My hip, leg- upper and lower, knee, ankle, foot, arm, elbow, spine and shoulders have injuries with results that are obviously painful so I have had all the signs that I am in pain and that it is massive and debilitating pain.

I have spent thirty years watching my life going down the toilet because doctors refused to treat my pain as anything but a phantom condition I was using to get drugs they didn’t want to give me. I have lost my chance at a family, my businesses, my ability to work. I got so ill I lived on the street and had to use illegal drugs to self-medicate so I could stay alive. Then they used the fact that I used illegal drugs as a reason I could not be assisted with pain management.  I have been an outcast for much of my life because I was in pain and for no other reason. I have suffered mental illness, attempted to commit suicide three times.

Here is my favorite. It took weeks to get emergency mental health assistance when I was suicidal and beginning to lose my ability to look after myself. An appointment with a counselor called Leonie or something at Wyong Hospital. She asked what is wrong and I said I was in so much pain I wanted to die, I couldn’t look after myself. She actually closed her file, looked at me as though I was scum and walked out saying it wasn’t her problem.

The efforts to re-educate myself and work and have a business have been enough of a struggle to fill some of those ABC and SBS documentaries with heart-breaking and inspiring moments and then it was all lost because some doctor decided I was pond scum for needing help.

Basically we have been dealing with a bunch of vindictive witch-doctors who based critical elements of their treatment of us on superstition, stereotyping and dinner-party analogies and they have finally admitted it.

If these self-important and opinionated big-wigs were ever to take responsibility for the authority they get paid so much income to wield there would be a doctor pulling weeds in our gardens, another washing and ironing our clothes and another rubbing our/my temples and making me a cuppa because I am ill again and in pain and these have been some very bad days… again

These guys have put thousands like me through more pain than the Americans did to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib or whatever that place was called.

So…. the fact that they might finally have agreed to put aside some small part of their doctrinal superstition is nice but anti-climactic and far too late for thousands who have been on the wrong end of the malice and cultural barbarity doctors have served them.

I don’t see how we can trust people who are prepared to stand by and watch us sink into hellish conditions and mind bending pain while the watcher holds the key to release. Controls the key, is a gatekeeper to, has total authority over, the relief of the pain.

I am really sick of  having to fight my way through unexplained prejudice to get some unnamed thing that will give me some control over life and finding that the keeper of the prescriptions is a monster.

I lost, by the way. I didn’t receive the help to save my life, life style or family. They let me fall until all was lost and even my mind unstable from the isolation and pain. (actually I tell an untruth, There are a small group of good-hearted and brave doctors who have watched over many of us and also doctors who are just good doctors…you know who you are…thank you) While I was falling I was in a hell filled with people just like me.  Medical ideology’s collateral damage!

If doctors were ever made to take responsibility for the power they get paid so highly to enforce one of them would follow me about ready to kiss my arse just before I was seated so my behind would be warm and sporting a nice tight pucker!