MSI Press Blog

  From Dennis Ortman PAIN PATIENCE “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope will not leave us disappointed.” Romans 5: 3-4   What is more natural than to seek pleasure and avoid pain? We Americans entertain high ideals. We aspire to greatness, to being the best, number one. These aspirations, however, may at times shade into excess.    Our remarkable advances in technology promise to fulfill our dreams. So we seek lives of the most pleasure with the least pain. The pharmaceutical industry invests billions of dollars to help us attain this goal. Their medications promise wellbeing and the possibility of killing all pain. This mentality and the easy availability of drugs spawned the opioid epidemic. We sought a better life, a pain-free life, through chemistry. Soon, the dream of wellbeing turned into a nightmare. The more pills we consumed to escape the pain, the more we needed to take, until we rea...

  When Carl lay dying in home hospice, we were given three vials of morphine for pain. Oddly, we used very little of it. He did not need or want it. At one point, his liver was grieving him, and we gave him a small amount and called the hospice to find out what we should be giving since the bottle said only "as needed." We were told that we had given a pediatric dose -- for a 300-pound man. He did not seem to need more at that time, though, but the next couple of days, a couple of times, he indicated he was in mild pain, and we tripled the dose as suggested by the nurse. He, however, after that, never indicated he was in pain. Our son asked if he might like to be given at least a small dosage prophylactically, to which he responded, "You wanna turn me into a dope addict?" Carl had a limited tolerance for pain all his life, so if he said he was not in pain, he was indeed not in pain. Had he been in pain, he would have taken anything and everything available!  The opp...

Yesterday, Julia Aziz, author of Lessons of Labor, was interviewed by a doula on the Hanouts on Air in a podcast, titled "As a Birth Professional: Birth as Life Teacher. The podcast can be heard here .