[annapurna]

First, philosophy. Please keep reading, useful information follows.

No one is entitled to life without pain. For those who remember The Princess Bride, "Life is pain." That being said, the second mistake was blindly accepting pills and doctor's advice (presumably someone had to write the prescription for you). As it's your body and your pain, you need to be in control of your treatment making sure that the best techniques are being ussed to drive your pain down to the lowest possible for you.

In the future, be very careful with your pain medication. Addiction isn't fun, but tolerancing and having it fail to work for you in the future would be even worse.

For the kind of money you were talkiing about, you could get ADR from Drs. Zeegers or Bertagnoli in Germany. Lots of the people here have had excellent result with them. I don't know what SA is so I don't know if you are uncomfortable with the facilities, surgeons or the high cost. If you're interested in Germany, you're welcome to email or PM but numerous people have posted stories on the website. If you wish to think about the facilites or surgeons in SA, you're also welcome to ask what convinced us or others that a facility or surgeon met our "minimum standard" whe we were deciding where to go.