I'm so sorry you went through that. You must have felt abandoned and frustrated, in addition to the pain.

My experience after lengthy spinal surgery to remove a tumour was the opposite — opioids didn't agree with me, and I insisted on going off them as soon as I could (within a couple of days post-op).

Still they kept trying to push them on me from time to time over the next few months while I was recovering in a hospital bed, and it was always a case of "Is it an opioid? ... Then no thank you, I'll just deal with it." I even had visits from the pain-management specialists, who were concerned that I wasn't taking opioids when most of my roommates (especially the first month in an orthopaedic unit) kept asking for more.

We tried a CBD, but that didn't work either. They eventually sent me home with Pregabalin (Lyrica), a non-opioidal nerve-pain medication that was fairly effective once we found the right dose.