I am still in pain. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is what else I now have to fight.
This column is the next chapter in a story I never wanted to write. You can find it here: The Fight of My Life. It lays bare what it’s like to live in constant pain and how I’ve fought, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, to hold on. What follows now is the fight I never expected: the one against the very system that’s supposed to help.
For years, I’ve lived with pain that doesn’t sleep. It settles in my spine, joints, and muscles, relentless and merciless. Morphine wasn’t my first option or even my fifth. It was my last resort, prescribed cautiously and reluctantly alongside oxycodone by doctors who knew my condition and understood the limits of lesser remedies.
I hate taking it, I hate what it means, and I hate that it’s become part of my daily routine. But it works. It dulls the screaming nerves just enough for me to move, rest, and think. It gives me a narrow window of peace. Without it, the pain swells like floodwaters, crashing through every moment.
Then I lost my job. Along with it, my insurance. I scrambled for new coverage. What I found allows me to keep my doctors, but not the medication that makes their care effective. My new insurance does not cover morphine.
No discussion. No appeals. Just a flat rejection. One of the best pain medications known to medicine, used for many decades and prescribed by my doctors, is now out of reach because it’s not covered. No warning. No alternative offered.
This is the fallout of America’s “war on opioids.” A well-intentioned crusade against addiction has metastasized into a system of suspicion, blanket denial, and cruelty. Yes, we had, and still have an opioid crisis. Yes, people were overprescribed. But now, patients who legitimately need these medications, like me, are collateral damage.
Morphine is not my addiction. It is a lifeline.
I’m not trying to escape my reality; I’m trying to endure it. But insurance companies don’t see nuance. They see cost. They see liability. They see headlines, lawsuits, and political pressure. So they treat all opioid prescriptions as suspect, even the carefully monitored, medically justified ones. Especially the expensive ones.
According to the CDC, over 50 million Americans, more than 20% of the adult population, live with chronic pain. Of those, 17 million suffer from high-impact chronic pain, which limits basic activities like working, walking, or even getting out of bed. And yet, opioid prescriptions have dropped by over 44% in the last decade, not due to a miraculous reduction in suffering but because access has been systematically choked off by bureaucracy and fear.
So I’m left with a decision I should never have to make: do I spend hundreds of dollars I don’t have to fill a prescription I desperately need, or do I cut it out and gamble with my body?
Out of necessity, I’m exploring the idea of dropping morphine entirely. Maybe I can switch to gabapentin if my physician deems it safe. It’s cheaper. It’s non-opioid. And it’s covered. But it comes with a cost of its own.
Gabapentin can cloud the mind. That’s the trade-off: less pain, maybe, but at the expense of clarity. People report feeling foggy, disconnected and slow to think or speak. I’ve felt it, too. It’s like someone wraps your brain in gauze, softening every edge. That might be tolerable for some but for me? Clear thought is one of the few freedoms I have left. Writing, reasoning, and communicating these aren’t luxuries. They’re my last intact tools. If the pain doesn’t take them, the medication might.
So again, I find myself walking a tightrope: weigh the price of pain against the price of thought. Stay sharp and suffer, or dull the agony and drift. It’s a hell of a choice.
But that’s the choice people like me are forced to make. Because somewhere in a glass tower, an insurance executive decided morphine is too costly, and my pain isn’t worth the line item.
And pain doesn’t just live in the body. It infects relationships, too.
There’s someone I love, someone who’s walking this road with me. She and my family and friends have been patient, supportive, and kind. But I know I’m wearing them down. Because pain doesn’t just make you suffer; it makes you talk. You confide. You cry. You explain, again and again, what today feels like, and how it’s just a little worse than yesterday.
Eventually, you start to see it in their eyes. That tired look. Not of boredom or annoyance but of helplessness. Of emotional fatigue. You start to feel like a burden. You begin to censor yourself, not because the pain has eased, but because you can’t bear to break them with it again.
And so you pull back. You go quiet. You lie.
“I’m fine.”
Because there are only so many times you can say, “It hurts,” before you feel like the pain is no longer just yours; it’s theirs now, too. And that guilt becomes its own kind of agony.
Meanwhile, the system keeps grinding. My small crisis is one of millions. I know there are people in worse shape than I am, people who need biologics, infusions, surgeries, or rare disease treatments that cost tens of thousands each month. And they’re getting denied, too. They’re fighting the same battles, with even more to lose.
That humbles me. It devastates me. Because if I, with a relatively simple and well-understood prescription, am being cut off, what hope do they have?
This isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s a failure of compassion.
Insurance companies like to present themselves as partners in health. But they’re not. They’re gatekeepers. They’re masters of avoidance. They excel at pushing decisions downstream until patients fall through the cracks. The war on opioids gave them the perfect cover to turn suffering into savings.
We need to talk about addiction and chronic pain in the same breath without assuming one invalidates the other. We need to stop treating all opioids like contraband and all pain patients like criminals.
This isn’t a question of abuse. It’s a question of access. And right now, the people who need help the most are the ones being left to suffer in silence.
So if you’re reading this and you’re in pain, real, relentless, every-day-is-a-struggle pain, I see you. I’m one of you. You’re not weak. You’re not a burden. And you are not alone.
We are being failed by a system that no longer sees our humanity, only our cost.
To the insurance executives and policy architects who use the opioid crisis as an excuse to abandon patients like me: shame on you. You are not protecting the public. You are abandoning it. You are letting real people rot in pain because you’re too cowardly to tell the difference between a prescription and a crime.
We don’t need your pity. We need our medicine.
And we won’t stop speaking up until we get it.
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