Louisa O’Neil inhales deeply when she is asked about her history of pain. Then, dispassionately, like recalling a string of part-time jobs, she lists the history of surgeries, injuries, accidents and conditions that have rendered her in a near permanent state of pain for the past 16 years. Ligaments ripped off bone, regularly dislocating jaw, jaw replacement, endometriosis, fibromyalgia, separated pelvis, bone grafts, arthritis. It is a long list. It takes 10 minutes. “I wake up in pain, and I go to bed with pain,” she says. “There’s very few moments when I’m not in pain of some form or another. Its just the degrees of how much pain I’m in [that] fluctuates.” ‘I’d get in my car and cry’: the difficulty of breaking an opioid addiction Read more Over the course of the past 16 years she has been on a medical merry-go-round, and tried multiple drugs and […]