I often think I understand despair, but I can’t help but feel inexperienced when confronted with a person in your situation. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know. All of us eventually have to suffer injustice. It is only a matter of degree, and the degree is not fairly distributed. In fact, it seems almost random. We live in a very sick society and we have a very sick, corrupt, and distorted government and justice system. Until it effects us personally, we often try to avoid thinking about it and we avoid reaching out to those victimized by it. We have done this, as a society, to ourselves. We stopped educating ourselves several decades ago, and we casually followed extremist political movements that have taken our society to the brink of destruction. In the last few years, our out-of-control government has killed some 150,000 Iraqi civilians, apparently under the traditional doctrine that an enemy was embedded somewhere within those masses. Over 3700 young Americans have perished. Most were not old enough to even understand what they were involved in or why they might die.

Our prisons are full of scary people, but they are also full of innocent people and political prisoners like yourself. You should be able to find human contact in that context somehow. Seek the services of mental health people in prison, and let them help you even if they are obviously not well trained and not very wise or ethical. If I can help in any way, I will.

I have decided to take on this cause as a serious effort on a permanent basis. Not only do I want to remember daily the horrible situation that many pain sufferers are in, but I also want to remember the situations of people like yourself.

Somehow I feel that if I had come to you as a patient, I would have been treated properly. I have been abused and neglected by many physicians. I have been misdiagnosed and left undiagnosed by physicians who were so convinced that I was drug seeking that they did not look for the sources of my pain. I had a serious disease for years before it was diagnosed because my chart had DSB in it, and all symptoms and complaints were assumed to be drug seeking behavior. Now that I have been properly diagnosed, and my need for pain treatment has been documented, I still avoid reporting pain. I am afraid to use opioids for fear of losing the faith and attention of my doctors. That is sick and wrong. I have to remember every day that there are doctors like yourself, and I am lucky that I have found one who is currently treating me. Unfortunately, I can not bring that good doctor under suspicion by taking opioids regularly, so I just bear the pain.

I will be in touch. If it is hard to write to a stranger, I will understand. But I am willing to correspond with you if it would help.

You are a hero.