‘Hard life to live,’ 74-year-old veteran seeks treatment for chronic pain during COVID
In April 2020, Vietnam veteran Ralph Richards was in the emergency department at the East Alabama Medical Center (EAMC).
He doesn’t remember the project he was working on the week before going to the hospital, but he remembers the pain he felt while cutting a 2”x6”x16’ board.
Richards was sitting down. Instead of standing up to lift the heavy board, he reached forward and out to pull it closer to him, causing his back to erupt in pain. Despite it, the veteran kept working, making his injury worse.
After talking to his chiropractor about his back, Richards went to the emergency room to ask for an epidural injection. He suffered from severe pain that radiated over his right buttock, down his right leg to his knee.
This hospital visit began a long journey of just trying to find relief, treatment for a chronic pain that plagued the veteran throughout the pandemic as COVID-19 halted nearly all elective surgeries and made longer wait times in the VA.
‘Sit back and wait’
Around the beginning of 2020, Richards complained to his primary care physician at the VA clinic on 13th Avenue about pain in his right shoulder. X-rays didn’t show the problem, and treatments didn’t get rid of it either.
After getting an MRI done at St. Francis-Emory Hospital in November 2020, doctors were able to diagnose Richards with a severely torn rotator cuff.
Getting treated during the height of the pandemic was difficult for Richards, and he regularly traveled to Montgomery or Tuskegee to receive treatment from both the VA and private providers.
One doctor canceled Richards’ appointment four times before he could see her for a variety of reasons. The fourth time it was canceled, it was because he’d been tested for COVID-19 – even though the results came back negative.
The VA doesn’t have a wait-time measure for the Veterans Community Care Program, so it isn’t known how much the pandemic affected scheduling appointments. However, about 172,000 referrals created between Jan. 2020 and Jan. 2021 remained unscheduled as of March 24, 2021, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Richards’ shoulder pain made it where he couldn’t pick up a cup of coffee, he said. The chronic pain from his back injury had not gone away, either; and on some days, he couldn’t walk because of it.
He received four injections in his back in 2020 — a shot every two weeks for two months. Richards is limited to four shots a year, which meant that for 10 months of the year, prescription drugs were the only treatment for his back.
For three months in 2020, Richards slept on his living room floor. The mattress on his bed didn’t help, even though he and his wife, Teresa, spent over $1,000 on a new mattress.
The floor was hard, but padding made it more bearable than a soft mattress.
By the end of 2020, a physician at the Surgical Center at East Alabama Health told Richards they would try giving him an injection and physical therapy to treat the shoulder. However, the therapy made the pain worse.
“I can’t do it,” Richards told his doctor after two sessions.
“Okay, you’re going to have to have surgery,” the doctor responded.
But to have the surgery, Richards would need to get it approved by the VA. It took the Community Care Program another eight month to do so.
“And in the meantime, I’m on painkillers — in pain,” he said. “There’s just nothing you can do except sit back and wait.”
Because of the pain, he avoided using his right shoulder, which led Richards to get a partial tear in his left one from overuse.
Eighteen months after he first complained about the pain in his right shoulder, Richards finally received the reverse total shoulder replacement surgery he needed on July 12, 2021.
‘It’s kind of a hard life to live’
More than two years after his emergency room visit, Richards has yet to receive effective treatment other than the injections and prescription drugs.
This year, he was referred to a neurosurgeon in Montgomery, but he needed to get approval for an MRI before the physician could see him. It took four months, but he was able to get an appointment scheduled for the MRI at the end of July.
Richards was told that if the neurosurgeon is able to correct his back, he will be able to get off three prescriptions.
Teresa has been his main support system as he’s dealt with health issues not only from his back and shoulder, but also post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in the Army.
“If I’m watching some kind of a show,” he said. “It’ll set something off that happened to me over there. And it’s kind of a hard life to live.”
The new Robert S. Poydasheff VA Clinic in Columbus brings more specialty treatment to the area. Richards hopes the addition of this clinic will decrease both his wait and travel times when accessing his healthcare.
Two of Richards’ sons also joined the military, one in the Army and the other in the Navy. He hopes that by telling his story, veterans like his children will have the health care they need without the extraneous hassle.
“If I’m going through this much pain, the veterans that are worse off than I am… How are they handling it?” Richards asked.
This story was originally published July 28, 2022 at 7:20 AM.
