D.F.P.S.

This is the story of a 59-year-old woman, who has had a life racked with pain.  At the age of 19 she was a nursing student who developed a viral like illness resulting in sleepiness and fatigue which lasted for many months.  She was in the Royal Adelaide Hospital for 18 months after the illness began.

Since that initial illness, she has rarely been well and has whole body pain, probably from the muscles, which is an intense and unrelenting.  For about 9 years she got really good relief from the use of the opioid medication, methadone.  Over the last few years however, she has had to try a wide variety of other painkilling medications including morphine, OxyContin, and Fentanyl.  Over time, she has become less and less sensitive to the painkilling drugs and has been requiring increasing doses, some of them huge, to give her any relief of pain.  This woman is an artist of considerable ability but is unable to paint or otherwise employ her talents because of her pain.

There have been consultations with many experts including an excellent pain doctor in New York but few of the suggested medications have helped.  At one stage she was given the drug Ketamine, but this was stopped by the health regulators on the grounds that they did not know anything about it.

Her pain has been so severe that at one stage she consulted Dr. Nitscke about the possibility of euthanasia.

She now continues to have very severe pain with considerably reduced quality of life, both for her and her carer husband.  The pain affects her whole body, is unrelenting, and cannot now be relieved in part because of bureaucratic insensitivity to her needs. 

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