A woman who had her life changed by chronic pain is speaking out about her experience with the health care system and opioid use.

Natasha (who wishes her last name to withheld) lives in Swift Current and suffers from TMJ with disc displacement, a condition which affects the jawbone, and suffered from chronic pain resulting from this.

Natasha said that she first noticed that her jaw made a clicking noise, which progressed into a lump behind her jaw on the right side of her face by her ear that her doctor attributed to stress.

One night when Natasha was eating supper with her family, she felt a pop in her face where the lump was, the pop was the cartilage in her right jaw joint had popped out of place.

Natasha said that the pain she felt when this happened was worse than her experience with childbirth.

"I would go every couple of months to my doctor with new symptoms and she was just like 'it's stress, it's stress,' and then the one night my family, we were sitting around, my husband at the time had made steak, we were eating steak, and I heard an extremely loud pop in my right ear, then just excruciating pain, pain like I've never felt before."

After the injury occurred, Natasha and her family moved to Loydminister after being referred to the head of TMJ oral-facial pain at the University of Alberta.

Natasha's injury occurred in 2007, and it took until 2009 for her to be able to see the doctor. 

After hearing how much pain Natasha was in, the specialist prescribed Natasha Percocet, a habit-forming opioid drug.

Natasha said she was prescribed around 250 pills a month.

According to Natasha the University of Alberta then referred her to the Cronic Pain Clinic in Camrose, Alta., where they increased her prescription, and changed her prescription to Oxycontin for slow relief, and Oxycodone for breakthrough pain.

"(They) slowly started, as my body got more used (to the medication), because your body adapts to that dosage, and then you start to feel the pain again, so they just slowly, over the matter of four or five years, increased my dosage to a really huge insane amount."

Natasha had surgery on her jaw two times, but said even the replacement that they did did not resolve the pain.

"It made everything worse because they had left it for seven years. So all my nerves, all of my muscles, everything was used to working with it out of place by then."

At this point, Natasha said her dosage of opioid painkillers was increased again, this time reaching their max of 480 milligrams of Oxycontin and 140 milligrams of oxycodone a day.

Someone who is inexperienced with opioids typically starts out with a prescription of 20 milligrams a day.

Last month Natasha had a procedure done where nerves on the right side of her face were numbed to help dull the pain for her.

Natasha said that her experience in dealing with healthcare in the Saskatchewan Alberta area had been less than desirable.

"It's been crap. Honestly I have been begging since 2010 for someone to do this procedure on me, and all that happened was that I got more painkillers thrown at me until I couldn't function anymore, I lost my career, I lost my marriage, I had to give up my son because I wasn't capable of looking after him."

Other than the treatment of her injury, Natasha also said she was unhappy with the way she was treated by employees of the healthcare system.

"I basically got treated like a junkie by a lot of people. Anytime you would tell (someone)... I would go to the hospital for something different, and they would ask what pills are you taking, and you say you are on this huge amount of narcotics, they instantly treat you differently. You are no longer a person coming in with a legitimate complaint, you are a junkie, and you're there seeking drugs, they just treat you differently. There was a marked difference in the way I was treated prior to having this condition to after."

Natasha said that she would have much rather had the surgery in the first place, due to the fact that now she has to recover from the operation as well as deal with the withdrawal from the opioids.

Unlike other drugs, going into withdrawal from opioids can be deadly and is required to be a slow, gradual process.

"Coming off of a high dosage of any opioid is extremely dangerous," Natasha said. "Your body goes through extreme withdrawals, so that's where you get the shakes and the constant throwing up, and the sweating, your skin feels like its crawling."

Currently, Natasha is taking 120 milligrams of Oxycontin and 80 milligrams of Oxycodone a day.

She expects that it will take an extended amount of time to slowly work herself down to not needing any opioids.

When asked why she thought doctors did not recommend getting the face numbing surgery, Natasha said that she thought money was a driving factor.

"Unfortunately in our health care system, doctors make a lot more money writing prescriptions than they do by finding a cure, or finding the answer for a patient. I actually had to do research myself, and find the doctor myself who would do this for me, and my dentist is the one who made the initial referral for me."

Speaking on the financial situation that the opioids put her in, Natasha said that it had created a lot of stress for her.

"I'm not able to work anymore, I haven't been able to work for many years now, and part of that was from the opioids and such a high dosage. I went from having a very luxurious life, to now having to live on assistance."

Natasha said that she is looking forward to working in the future.

Remembering something that a doctor at the Cronic Pain Clinic in Camrose said, Natasha said she was told that these opioids were non-addictive.

"There was no ceiling. That's what I was told. There is no ceiling on Oxycontin and Oxycodone, we can prescribe up as high as we want to go, and you will not get addicted to these, especially if you're using them for pain. That's what I was told," she shared a brief laugh with herself. "What a crock. There is a ceiling, there is definitely a ceiling and that ceiling is zero. These things should never be prescribed to anybody; these medications can ruin lives, they are horribly addictive."

When asked for comment on prescribing opioids, Dr.Kevin Wasco, physician executive for the Saskatchewan Health Authority had this to say:

"Prescription of opioid drugs is ideally a shared decision-making process between patients and providers," he said in a written statement. "Opioid drugs are often prescribed after non-opioid analgesic options have been exhausted (medications or other non-medication options)."