By Madora Pennington, PNN Columnist

When I went to Cedars-Sinai Urgent Care in Los Angeles recently, screaming and crying, my blood pressure dangerously high, my foot ballooning and turning blue from a household accident, the doctor wouldn’t give me opioid pain medication.

They x-rayed my foot. Two bones were broken. They gave me a shot of a NSAID that, they said, would wear off in a few hours. It did. They gave me crutches, a boot to immobilize my foot, suggested I see a surgeon and, in the meantime, take Advil. What?

It wasn’t personal. This is Cedars-Sinai’s policy. In urgent care, they won’t give opioids to anyone for any reason.

I had gone to Cedars-Sinai because I have a complex medical history. There, my records are most complete. This makes the appointment easier for the doctor and me.

Also in my records is my long-term opioid use history. I was on Vicodin and morphine daily for about six years, to treat chronic pain from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes all the joints to be loose, or rather, permanently sprained.

When I started on daily opioids, an option no longer available, I had pain that I could not live with, no quality of life and was planning my suicide.

Those drugs gave me enough relief to endure. I became less of a burden to my caretaker. I could focus on trying to improve my health. If your day is spent fighting extreme pain, being productive is not possible.

Then I got very lucky.

In 2014, experimental treatment had improved the strength of my tendons and ligaments. My body hurt less. I went straight off the opioids and stayed off.

Withdrawal was a harrowing marathon of torture. For years after, I suffered from the physical damage opioids left behind. But I didn’t go back on them because I had never become addicted. Why? I had been warned at the start of my opioid treatment to take the drugs for physical pain only, not for emotional relief. This patient follows orders.

As a result of the war on opioids, many chronic pain patients are being denied adequate pain relief. Some forced to taper end up committing suicide from the agony of withdrawal plus untreated pain. This became such a problem, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued new recommendations in October, advising doctors to look at each case individually and not to put patients on rapid opioid tapers or abruptly discontinue them.

But I had never heard of someone with a severe, acute injury forced to suffer. Even I can’t be trusted? I have a proven record of responsible opioid use with no addiction.

The doctor treating my injured foot, clearly embarrassed, told me, “This is urgent care. If it’s something severe, the patient should be in the ER or at a pain doctor.”

But I had called before I came. “Would they see me for a possibly broken foot?”

The receptionist said to come in, they would x-ray me right away. She didn’t say I would not be given adequate pain medication.

Has the war on opioids gone too far? If doctors and hospitals are too afraid of lawsuits or prosecution to prescribe, then yes.

A Mayo Clinic study found that only about 1% of patients given opioids in emergency rooms went on to long term use. Another study found less than 1% of patients being treated with opioids for post-surgical pain developed dependence or abused opioids. Does that mean the other 99% of us should not get pain medication?

Not according to the CDC, which suggests three days of opioids for acute injuries like mine.

After I left urgent care that day, I took Vicodin which had expired a year before but I’d never gotten rid of. If it hadn’t worked, I would have had to call an ambulance and gone to the ER that night, just for pain treatment.

After surgery, the podiatrist told me, “One bone was in pieces. I bolted together what I could. Some bits were too small so I picked them out and threw them away.” Well, that explains the pain I’d been in.

I vowed never to leave things on the floor that someone might trip on. And I set up Google Home to process a command to make a phone call for help.

I also filed a complaint with the state against the doctor. Medical care is about the patient, not hospital bureaucrats.

Madora Pennington writes about Ehlers-Danlos and life after disability at LessFlexible.com. Her work has also been featured in the Los Angeles Times.