text: The concept of acute pain had always been somewhat abstract to me. Then I passed my first of several kidney stones. I had no idea anything could feel that bad. The first time it happened, a morphine drip bag at first hung a foot away for a million years. It took the edge off the chainsaw working its way through my abdomen from 9 pm to 3 am in the Royal Columbian ER in New Westminster - by far the longest six hours of my life. Around 2:30 in the morning when the little bundle of razor blades had mostly worked its way through my plumbing, an ER doctor said "think positive - that's the worst pain you'll ever feel. No exceptions." So when someone says they're in acute pain and they find that fentanyl, or any opiod, makes them functional, it's not up to a bunch of uninformed nitpickers to tell them they can't have it. I have no idea where this notion that an opioid "epidemic" has been partly caused by chronic pain patients comes from, but the hysteria needs to stop.