This past December, a woman named Jessica Fujimaki died of complications from opioid withdrawal. Her doctor was suspended by the DEA for helping pain patients and she was unable to find another doctor to prescribe her opioids before the lack of adequate and necessary medication killed her. This is a fundamental example of why pain kills.

She is not the first. She will not be the last. Whether it’s suicide from lack of sufficient pain relief; overdose from using illicit opioids unknowingly laced with fentanyl; or death from complications due to withdrawal like Jessica Fujimaki — pain patients are dying. People continue to discuss overdose deaths from addiction, as they should, but the plight of the chronic pain community is overlooked so that only addiction related deaths are covered in the news.

How can so many people be dying and it doesn’t make the news? For starters, because of the nature of our condition we often have no energy to properly advocate for ourselves. I have tried to advocate for myself, but even what little I can do is so damn hard. The fact I can’t even post more here is just one example of this struggle.

A lot of addiction-related overdoses that make the news focus on affluent white people who had everything going for them until they had surgery and got addicted. While I’m not saying that can’t ever happen, the real story of addiction is a lot different, but rarely do they make headlines. No one wants to talk about the societal issues behind addiction and fact-based responses. It’s easier to just blame the pills and the doctor that prescribed them.

The unsaid reality is that the stories of a young girl dying of an overdose evokes a tragedy in the public that a chronic pain patient does not. In fact, I would argue that people can’t imagine living with chronic pain and think that maybe dying is for the best. I mean, Canada has come under scrutiny lately for approving euthanasia for their poor disabled citizens as opposed to the benefits that would make their lives far more livable.

Due to opioid-phobia, there are far fewer people willing to advocate for the chronic pain community. People have no idea what our suffering is like, so it’s easy to lecture us about alternative medicine or therapies that don’t work. Yes, our condition is tragic to many, as mentioned above, but still not worth getting decent pain relief. Better dead than an addict, right?

I’m so tired of this. I’m so tired of begging people to care and they just don’t. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis is still framed as a prescription crisis when it is entirely about illicit fentanyl now.

We are being punished for being in pain, and our deaths are entirely forgotten. Because why would anybody care about a poor nobody home-bound and living off disability with no hope of working again?

Better off dead? No. A life worth living. I know because I am still living it.