My dad is a heavily tattooed man. Like, arms, legs, fingers, neck. He’s heavily tattooed because he’s a tattoo artist.
Around late 2010 he realized something was wrong with his shoulder, or at least that’s when I remember him first making mention of it. Nothing serious, it was just sore a lot. Tattooing didn’t help it but it didn’t seem to be hurting it and he had three kids to feed and he loved making art. Fast forward to 2014-15-ish, my dad’s pain is getting to be too much. He’s taking extended days off of work, he’s spending days in bed because it’s the only thing that makes the pain lessen. He’s seen doctors, but they’re skeptical, especially up here where the opioid crisis is hitting hard. They see a man covered in tattoos with a big beard and take a wild guess what they think of him.
My dad’s pain gets so bad he has to stop tattooing all together. He had to close the business he raised from nothing because he couldn’t afford to keep his tattoo shop open anymore.
(Which is a shame all in of itself because it was genuinely the only 100% clean and safe shop WITH decent artists in the area, most others are, owned by people who stole from my dads shop, a pair of awful parents, skinheads, people who’ve attempted to murder their girlfriends twice, etc. but I digress.)
My dad goes back to school, keeps seeing doctors. They send him to physical therapy, the physical therapist actually makes it worse. They tell him to rest, put heat on it, that does nothing. They essentially do everything in their power to avoid giving him any real help to avoid prescribing him any sort of pain medication.
Fast forward 2016, my dad’s family moves downstate. They’re living in a college town with a lot better doctors than we have up here. The doctor he sees immediately send him to a chiropractor. The chiropractor tells my dad his shoulder and neck look worse than any car crash victim he’s ever treated. He had a disk in his neck that was pinching a shoulder nerve because of the way he’d been holding his tattoo gun for years and years and years. He’s had at least three epidurals and is on mild pain meds now and he’s been recovering kind of bumpy and slow, but well. All because a doctor took his pain seriously.
That said though, because of the years of mistreatment, my dad is nowhere the artist he used to be. He used to teach colored pencil drawing seminars at tattoo conventions because he was absolutely amazing at blending Prismacolor pencils in an incredibly smooth way. He cannot do that anymore. He might be healing, but he will never be able to apply that same pressure to the pencil again.
Doctors can be horribly biased people and it’s downright unethical the way they dismiss people with serious pain issues just because they think they might be looking for drugs.
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