I went to my doctor because I was in pain, but she told me that they’re outsourcing that sort of

thing now so I had to go to head office in Ann Arbor, MI, and I could be mad at them and not her

(but I wasn’t mad at her because when you’re mad, no one cares that you’re in pain) so I went

nicely to Ann Arbor to the doctor who has a degree in pain and when he asked me why I was

there I said “because I’m in pain,” but he felt like maybe I was too young to be in pain so he laid

me down on a paper-covered table and used a needle to poke at a few nerves in my legs which

determined—definitively and quantitatively—that I am in pain which meant that he could take

me seriously but it also meant that I’d have to come back in a few weeks for a post-procedure

follow-up because a doctor can only do so much at once, so I scheduled the post-procedure

follow-up for the following month at 7:45AM, hoping that my new doctor was a morning person,

and when I showed up he asked me why I was there and I said, “because I’m in pain,” and he

pulled up his charts and diagrams and procedure notes and asked me a few questions, to which I

responded, “8; aching; sometimes; suicide” and then he thought some more and said, “your

current medication is grossly inadequate” and I had to bite my tongue to keep the sarcasm buried

as the pain expert wrote me a new prescription for a medication 25x stronger than morphine,

which is great, except my pharmacist wants to know what a 21-year-old needs with such a potent

poison and I have to keep it locked up like a gun and it’s so strong they can’t make it into pills,

but other than that and the dependence and judgement and withdrawal, I say “it’s working pretty

well” whenever the pain doctor calls.