That day radically changed my life, and not just because of the injury itself. As a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, part of my job is to think about the moral quandaries raised by the practice of medicine. Unexpectedly becoming a trauma patient can be a particularly good way to uncover such issues. My own experience exposed a pair of linked challenges for patients like me and for our health care system: how to alleviate severe, debilitating pain while making sure that lives aren’t destroyed by the opioids that remain, for now at least, an irreplaceable remedy.

I had five surgeries over the course of a month, at three different hospitals. There they gave me intravenous morphine, fentanyl and hydromorphone. They sent me home with powerful oxycodone pills. The drugs were a godsend for getting through my ordeal, but I soon faced the results of being on high and escalating dosages for too long. I had formed a profound dependence. When my orthopedic trauma surgeon finally told me, two months after the accident, that it was time to get off the meds, I was caught completely off-guard.