My Groceries Come to the Door. My Pain Medication Does Not.

I do not drive anymore. I sold the car, because there was no point in having one. I could not get to it anyway.

That sounds like a bigger decision than it was. By the time I sold it, the car had been sitting for a long while, and the only thing it was doing was costing money. My joints made the decision. I just signed the title.

So here is how a week works now.

My food is delivered. My groceries are delivered. Packages come to the door. Almost everything a person needs to stay alive in this country will now show up on your porch if you tap a screen, and I am grateful for that, and I mean it.

The mailbox is a different story. It is at the end of the walk, and some days the end of the walk might as well be across town. A letter that needs to go out sits until someone can take it.

And my pain medication does not come to the door at all.

**The one thing that will not be delivered is the one thing I cannot go without.**

The pharmacy will deliver a great many things. Controlled substances are not one of them. They can't deliver them. That is the answer every time, and there is no one to appeal it to, because it is not a decision anybody made about me.

I do not think the people behind the counter are villains. I think the system was built for a patient who can walk in.

So I depend on somebody else to go and get it.

I am not going to name him, because he is doing me a favor and this is not about him. But I will tell you what it is like to be on this end of it. He goes and picks it up when he goes. Some weeks that is right on time. Some weeks it is not. And in between, I wait, and the medication I am supposed to be taking on a schedule is sitting on a shelf a few miles away with my name on it.

People who have never been sick picture a pain patient as someone demanding more. What it actually looks like, most days, is someone waiting. Waiting for a callback. Waiting for records. Waiting for a ride that is somebody else's errand. Waiting for the thing that is already prescribed, already paid for and already filled.

This is what "access" means when you cannot get out of the house. Not whether a doctor will write the prescription. Whether it can actually reach you.

There is a phrase in the Texas Penal Code that I keep coming back to. It describes a person who, by reason of physical disease or injury, is "substantially unable to protect the person's self from harm or to provide food, shelter, or medical care for the person's self."

I read that line and thought: the food has been solved. The shelter is fine.

It is the medical care that does not come to the door...

More to come.