The Diet Nobody Wants: When Pain Starves More Than the Body

There are days when I sit at the dinner table and feel like a traitor.

My wife has just prepared something extraordinary: roast chicken with herbs, perfectly whipped potatoes, and perhaps something fresh and green on the side. It smells like home. It looks like love. But chronic pain doesn’t care.

It shuts down everything.

I stare at the plate and try to pretend that I’m hungry. I know how much effort she put into it. I know how proud she is. But inside, my stomach is waging its own war. The pain overrides appetite, kills joy, and turns food into an obligation. I chew through nausea out of respect for her effort. I swallow guilt with every bite.

I don’t want to disappoint her. But I do. That’s what this illness does.

Chronic pain doesn’t just haunt the person carrying it. It seeps into every room of your house and sits beside everyone you love. The patient suffers agony. The people around them suffer from helplessness.

This series isn’t about medicine or laws. It’s about that helplessness. The people who love us. Who stands beside us? Who would cut off their own arm if it meant easing our pain by a single percentage point?

But they can’t.

And that pain, the kind you can’t fix, is its own kind of hell.

Chronic Pain Series: The Stories That Don’t Fit the Narrative

Each one is proof that this is bigger than politics. It’s personal.

The People Who Can’t Fix It

No one talks enough about them.

The spouse who watches someone they love dissolve behind the eyes. The adult daughter Googling treatment options at 2 a.m. The best friend who just sits quietly nearby because words don’t help.

They bring the meals. They refill the ice packs. They drive to appointments. But mostly, they just watch. And wait. And ache in ways you can’t see on an X-ray.

These are their stories. Four of them. Four lives knotted up in the same invisible web: systems that don’t listen, pain that doesn’t quit, and love that has no outlet.

“No Damn Fun at All” —Jorg, 72, after lumbar fusion

I had five vertebrae fused with two stainless rods and ten screws. The surgery fixed the back pain but lit up a nerve in my legs. The first doctor didn’t believe me. The second clinic gave me a spinal stimulator, which helped a little. Finally, I got Butrans patches, which deliver micrograms of opioids across the skin.
They work. They are not a cure, but they let me function. The problem is that the system to get them is a nightmare. You have to beg every 28 days. If you call in early, you get flagged. If you wait too long, you go into withdrawal. Once, I went for 10 days without. That was brutal. Walgreens, where I’ve been a customer for 25 years, sometimes doesn’t stock what I need.
And if the calendar lines up wrong, where two orders fall in the same month, the system thinks I’m abusing it. Every four months, I have to see the doctor just to say, 'Yes, the pain is still here.' As if that surprises anyone.
So I ration. I test how far I can stretch each patch. Eight days is doable. Nine, not so much. Ten? Forget it.
I’m not a drug seeker. I’m a guy trying to walk without screaming. But the system sees me as a suspect, not a survivor.

You read that and can’t help but ask: what are we doing to people?

“I Don’t Complain, But I Shouldn’t Have to Count Pills Like This.” —Bruce, Stage 4 Prostate Cancer

Cancer got into my lymph system before they could remove the prostate. It caused compression fractures in my spine. Hormone therapy is working, and my spine’s healing, but it’s bent now. I get by without morphine, but I need 5mg of Oxycodone every four hours. Without it, the pain is unbearable.
My doctor’s been good. But the rules? They’re absurd. I have to ask for a refill every time. The pharmacy won’t fill it early, not even a day. I count every pill. Literally. If there’s a holiday and the pharmacy closes? I run out.
That happened on Monday. Two days of unnecessary suffering.
I don’t complain much. I’ve got friends who have it worse. But this is cruel. The fear of running out, the constant tension of being one misstep away from a flare-up, it’s exhausting.

Imagine this is your dad. Imagine it’s you. Still think regulation is one-size-fits-all?

“I'm Ashamed I Have to Take It.” —Anonymous, Missouri

I’ve broken my back. Survived a plane crash. Rebuilt shoulders. Every day, I wake up and count the hours until I can take the one thing that helps: 5/325 Percocet. One at 5 p.m. One at 9 p.m.
I can’t take them at work. I’m ashamed I need them. But they work. And they’ve worked for five years.
My pain doc just told me he’s going to start reducing my prescription. He hasn’t yet. But he will. He said it’s because CVS and Walgreens are clamping down after lawsuits. That means I’m going to suffer, not because I did anything wrong, but because of bad PR.
I hate meds. I don’t drink. I’ve done everything they asked: steroid shots, nerve ablations, disc fusions, and stem cells. None of it worked.
So now they want to reduce the one thing that does?

Here’s the brutal truth: when regulators tighten the screws on pharmacies, it’s not the abusers who suffer first. It’s the obedient ones.

“Take Four Advil.” —Teresa, Still Standing

I’ve lived with chronic, intermittent, debilitating pain my whole life. When I finally asked for help, a doctor told me to take four Advil. I tried it once. It tore up my stomach. That was the end of my experience with traditional medicine.
I didn’t have insurance. I turned to naturopaths. It helped a little. Not enough. I’ve just learned to live with it.
No one ever offered anything stronger. No one called to follow up. No one asked if I was still alive.

This is what pain does to the voiceless. It swallows them whole and buries the evidence in silence.

Final Thoughts

Pain makes you hollow. It strips you down to your rawest form. But the thing that makes it bearable, sometimes the only thing, is knowing you’re not alone.

My wife sits at the table with me, watching the meal she just cooked grow cold. She knows I’m not ungrateful. She knows I’m in pain. But there’s nothing she can do.

And that helplessness... It’s its own kind of suffering.

To every loved one carrying this invisible burden, you matter. What you do, the dinners, the patience, the quiet presence, it counts. It helps.

And to the regulators, insurers, and leaders with the power to ease this war: stop pretending that your spreadsheets reflect real life. Stop punishing the people who follow the rules.

Pain isn’t a crime. Compassion shouldn’t be either.