PAIN SUFFERERS DESERVE RESPECT

Tuning in to watch one of my favorite medical dramas, I expected to see the
usual plethora of traumas: broken bones, gunshot wounds, collapsed lungs.
Instead, I viewed a person with sickle cell disease being portrayed as a
drug-seeking menace.

Television programs have always influenced the thought process of viewers,
and those who may not be aware or informed about sickle cell anemia may base
their opinions and feelings solely on what they see, not taking the time to
research the pathology of this disease. As a young African-American woman
with this inherited blood disease, I have had the displeasure of being in
torturous pain and having an emergency physician look me over as though I
were less than human. I have even heard a doctor, when he thought that I was
out of earshot, say, "She's just another one of 'them.'"

Through tears and wails I have had to try to put into words the
indescribable pain that sometimes wracks my body and attacks my joints.
There have been times that I have stayed at home in tremendous pain rather
than go to the emergency room for pain control because of this scarlet
letter "J" for "junkie" that has been invisibly branded onto my chest.

As a nurse, I am in no way naive about the fact that people with sickle cell
can become addicted to the medications they use to keep their pain under
control. However, narcotic addiction is not more prevalent in persons with
sickle cell than in other chronic pain sufferers. The statistic of persons
with sickle cell disease who become addicted to medication is 1 percent.

The things most widely sought by those of us with sickle cell and all
chronic pain sufferers alike do not come in a pill form and cannot be
injected through IVs. We simply seek an ounce of compassion, a few
milligrams of understanding and a dose of respect.

Crystal Sykes

Newport News