Pain Education?
You want to know about the Sackler Family?
A Pharmaceutical Ford Pinto!
Pain education could have prevented all of this mess:
The Family That Built an Empire of Pain: The Sackler Dynasty’s Ruthless Marketing of Painkillers Has Generated Billions of Dollars and Millions of Addicts. Patrick Radden Keefe, A Reporter at Large, The New Yorker, October 30th, 2017.
I’m just sitting here, here being Johnny’s Coffee shop, writing and thinking (in the reverse order). I’m back after about three years. It’s a long story, but at least I’m back. I do love this neighborhood coffee shop and hangout. It’s critical for the health of this little piece of Carrboro.
PAIN:
It’s rarely necessary to take OxyContin or other opioid drugs for pain. You just have to sometimes, as I did following chest surgery in January of this year. I can’t stand these drugs, but sometimes you have to take your medicine – always consider alternatives first.
People are generally drugging themselves up for totally the wrong reasons, as in emotional pain. In this case, they just need to build a healthy village around themselves, as in the story in my book from Dave Demming (You’ll have to buy the book to read it, sorry).
For instance, you don’t need drugs to fix this, though I’m sure many do.
LOVE SICKNESS: A little story from my latest book, published through KDP for now, to test the market.
“Love sickness, or limerence sickness (see Recommended Reading) really, is one of the standard pains of life. It hurts a lot. The chances are you’ve been there. But how can you fix this horrible emotional discomfort.
I was in my mid-40s, and had been single for a while, when I met and fell for a lady for whom I (a) was totally ill-suited, and (b) wasn’t ready for. I was still processing the end of a 20-year marriage, terminated more than a year before, through no fault of either party. Twenty-five years later, we still care for each other and our then teenage kids were fine. In fact, you can cause your children a lot of pain by holding a grudge and expressing anger at their other parent. Just get over it, for their sake. Easy said. Not easily done, necessarily.
Anyway, we had to move on, so enough said!
The real problem with my single hood was lack of experience. I’d only dated one person in my life, until that point. In the single’s scene, in my mid-40s, I was clueless and vulnerable, and down I went. The limerent euphoria lasted three months, and then exploded, leaving me horribly lovesick. Boy! Was it painful.
One fine day a few weeks later and in need of a shave, I went to the pharmacy to buy a razor. At the checkout there was the usual question:
“Is that everything, dear?”
“Well, have you got anything for lovesickness?” I asked.
The cashier immediately replied that she used candy bars. Then she called across to a nearby staff member. “Margaret, what do you take for love sickness?”
“Ice-cream,” Margaret immediately replied.
Then one of the other shoppers said he found that a drink helped in the short term, but not in the long term. Before I new it, about 15 people were standing around the checkout counter telling stories of love-sickness, and how they’d attempted to cure it. All agreed that time was the “almost-solution,” while letting go and then finding a new partner finished it off for good.
I left with a fruit and nut, chocolate candy bar, a childhood favorite, but it didn’t do any good. What really helped was learning that I wasn’t alone. All those people, so willing to talk about a subject I suspect they’d rarely talked about before, in public at least. Knowing you’re not alone is powerful consolation, and a great way to ease heartache. The alternative might be the therapists couch, which is where Dave Deming’s story comes in.
Having purchased a copy of my latest book, Prepare For Aging, Dave mentioned the fact that he liked my storytelling approach. This led to my recounting my love sickness story; not my last bout of this painful condition, I hasten to add.
He said that my story reminded him of an experience of a friend of his, who suffered from chronic depression…”
Sometimes it takes a village, not a drug, such as a candy bar or OxyContin!
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