I’ve often marveled at the typical pain reliever commercials on tv these days. Whether it’s pills, cream, or braces they all tell you how you can feel better and do whatever you want. You’ll see Shaq promoting Icy Hot and playing basketball, or Voltaren showing an old man dancing like he’s twenty. I’ve often wondered, for how many people does this work? I already know nothing I take, except opioids, can help me get up and go. But even then, it’s limited and short-lived.

When my mom talks about how taking two pills of Aleve can help her deal with arthritis, I know I’m living in a different reality than she is. In her reality, her pain meds aren’t demonized, and over-the-counter medicines actually work. Meanwhile, over on my planet, everything I do potentially leads to more pain and I worry every month if my pharmacy will decide to just not fill my medication. I’m lucky and grateful I have access to my medication, but is not treated like other prescriptions, which is incredibly frustrating.

In fact, the more I thought of it the more I realized how people don’t understand that for some people pain dominates every aspect of our life. To start, we must make sure we track our prescriptions and pills, making sure we have enough to deal with flares and high activity days without running short before my next refill. Then I have to decide what activities I can do for a day and how much can I push myself. Do I have enough energy for these tasks? Will a certain task cause a pain flare and ruin the plans I have the next day? What are things I can do to minimize the inevitable pain a task will cause? How much time do I need to recover? Will the people in my life be understanding when I have to cancel because of pain? It’s like a daily calculus I never wanted to learn in the first place.

There is a well-known essay that put forth The Spoon Theory, which helped to explain the energy rationing disabled people often have to deal with. The essay used spoons as a visual for your energy for the day and removed them for even the simplest tasks like brushing your teeth and cooking. Little actions that abled people can do without a second thought are often huge mountains for disabled people to overcome. This is partially what I’m talking about. Energy rationing is not that much different from pain rationing, I just think there’s an extra level of complications thanks to opioid stigma. Deciding when you get to take an extra pain pill for high levels of pain may mean you don’t have that pill for a flare down the road that is even worse. Someone who takes Advil for pain doesn’t have to worry about making the pills last because of arbitrary restrictions.

There’s no world in which dealing with severe chronic pain is simple, but it could be simpler. We can stop stigmatizing pain and making pain patients jump through hoops to get necessary and beneficial pain medication. In some places, pain patients can’t even get a month’s worth of opioid medication in a desperate attempt to stop pill diversion. Focusing on asinine rules like this will never stop a crisis that is driven largely by illegal drugs.

I know those of you reading this can’t change this problem. However, I can tell you one thing that can make a difference: checking in on the disabled people in your life and doing your best to accommodate their needs so they can take part in social events and enjoy going out. You will never know the scope of decisions someone has to make to deal with pain, but you can do your best to try and make these choices a little easier.