This is … a little weird. This young lady has flesh-eating bacteria running rampant through her body, it’s already cost her some extremities. But she refuses pain meds:
USA Today — Aimee Copeland despises the use of morphine in her treatment, despite its effectiveness at blocking her pain, her father said in a Friday online update on his daughter’s condition. Her graduate-school study of holistic pain management techniques leads her to feel she’s a “traitor to her convictions” when she uses drugs to manage her pain, Andy Copeland said.
He also said the morphine has been making his daughter groggy, confused and has given her unpleasant hallucinatory episodes.
Aimee Copeland, 24, developed necrotizing fasciitis after cutting her leg in a fall May 1 from a homemade zip line over a west Georgia river. Her left leg, other foot and both hands have been amputated.
I’m not real sure what the point of that would be. Don’t get me wrong, it’s her body, her nervous system, her choice as far as I’m concerned. But I’ve had a few injuries and surgeries over the years where the only thing standing between me and attempted suicide to escape the pain was a big jug of IV narcotics dripping oh so gently into my vein or some kind of sedative.
I’m not sure what holistic pain management means. And granted I’m a middle-aged male so I probably don’t have the pain tolerance of a 20 something female. But if holistic pain management means some kind of Vulcan mind control, I’ve tried that. It does not work very well. There is pain, and then there is pain, the kind of pain that leaves you whimpering and writhing in agony begging for a shot or to be knocked out. I have sampled both kinds often enough to know the difference. Trying to get into some kind of zen state can help get you to the ER, or kill time before the next pain shot when the nurse is taking her sweet ass time getting to your room, but that’s about it. Sooner or later, intractable pain will break down any barrier you think you can erect, usually sooner.
And really, if my hands and feet are being eaten off by bacteria, or my sternum cracked open for heart surgery, or half my body surface burned to a cinder, I want to be groggy, I want to be drifting in and out, and more out than in. Sleep can be a great anesthetic and if one doesn’t like the effect of morphine, there are a bunch of other drugs in the hospital that will knock you out een better.
Other than someone suffering needlessly and the tragedy of it all, I’m not sure why this bothers me. But for some reason it does. There’s a tingling spidey sense crawling up my back that somehow this is related to traditional religion or new age nonsense or something like that. I get the same feeling as when someone brags about how they didn’t use an epidural or pain meds when giving birth. Maybe you decided you could get by without, but what about the poor baby? Isn’t that tiny bit selfish and holier than thou? Don’t you think s/he would have appreciated a little morphine before being shot out of a meat cannon into the cold, cruel world? I know I would.
I spent 6 years as an E.R. doc in the ’80s.
In the appropriate occasion, opiates are wonder drugs.
Many is the time when I saw a touch of morphine change white and shocky to pink and perfused.
I can actually understand not wanting pain meds. Some (Vicodin, darvocet, etc.) do nothing more than plain ibuprofen or acetaminophen for me. Stuff that actually “works” doesn’t so much remove or mask the pain as loop me out to the point that I have trouble articulating it. I really hate the feeling that being under the influence of these drugs gives me, even while experiencing the pain for which they were prescribed.
Not that I have a fetish for pain. Far from it, I wish there were a drug to remove pain without the narcotic effects. Those effects are a deal-breaker for me.
I can empathize with her about the hallucinations. My son was born via an emergency C-section, and I had a morphine drip for the pain afterward. Everything was hunky-dory as long as my eyes were open, but as soon as I closed them, it was as if a movie was being played against my eyelids. And as for the movie contents, picture a mash-up of the very worst scenes of Hellraiser, Friday the 13th, Hostel, Saw, and any other slasher movie(s) you care to include. All played in a fast cut style. Ugh.
As far as “holistic pain management,” WTF? If you have pain, real honest-to-peaches pain, then there’s help available. You don’t *have* to hurt! Pain impedes healing, and chanting or visualization or whatever other crap you want to try won’t work like meds do. Should our ancestors not have chewed on willow bark, but instead just realigned their chakras or something?
Constant long term pain is a really really difficult problem to manage. My understanding is that there are some bio-feedback methods that work as well or better than pain-killing drugs in the long term.
The side-effects of some pain-killers, such as mental fuzziness, is a bigger concern when you’re talking about having to deal with them over an extended period, possibly the rest of your life, rather than a short-term period.
Consider John Nash’s decision in “A Beautiful Mind” to go off his drugs because he couldn’t think and respond to others while on them. While this is a different situation, it’s still a cost to weighed up in such decisions.
The word you’re looking for there is ‘chronic’. Please help rescue this word from its misuse as a synonym for ‘very bad’.
‘holistic pain management” I have a one word answer to what it is (nod to Tim Minchin) Storm.
I found this story interesting so I did some follow up. She is now on pain meds but her family is asking for prayers (seems a little late for that).
Her father has a blog where he posted, “Please know that although our suffering is great, there is One who suffered more than any of us will ever know. Jesus Christ bore our sins on the cross so that we could come directly to God with our fears and pains.”
I really don’t understand this thinking. How can their god let this happen and then be asked to help lessen the suffering he allowed? This makes no sense at all, but I wish her well. It seems like the bacteria has nearly eaten her away (hands, feet, abdomen, groin). “Mother Nature” is a stone cold bitch.
In my experience, in this context “holistic” is generally a synonym for woo, as in quackery.
as has been said, if this god was going to respond to prayers, it’s more than a little late. The idiocy of theists, especially Christians, when they excuse their god’s impotence is sad. Sounds like this woman’s father is quite a moron when he claims that his magical man suffered anything like his daughter.
as for “graduate studies” in holistic pain management, I think I’ve seen ads for such nonsense in the back of some less than reputable magazines. Anyone know where she’s supposedly studying such things?
She would rather feel her flesh eaten gradually than admit her chosen method of “pain management” is ineffective.
She’d rather be in agony than admit she is wrong. Or does the article count as an admission of being wrong? In which case, she just likes to martyr herself every now and then so she doesn’t have to face the fact that her graduate studies were in fairy dust and moonbeams.