SKIP THE PILLS 💊❌ AND TALK LOUD 🔊🗣️

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On a scale of 10, there are days when Patrick Rader says his chronic pain is as high as eleven. A good day is a pain level of five.
The Eustis native and English instructor at Lake-Sumter State College doesn't know life without pain. He’s never at a 0.

The bicycle accident on June 30, 2002, happened at an intersection in Denver. His bike became airborne, in a hurry to get to a party.

“My own stupidity,” he says. “Then the SUV stops.”
 

He has no recollection of being hit by a truck and flying five feet from the impact. Denver General Hospital records revealed Patrick's neck was broken in five places, and he sustained 86 fractures total throughout his humerus bone, both femurs, and hip socket. His collarbone in half below the shoulder. His shattered tibia was reconnected by bone from toes, and six inches of his right leg were noted as “absent.”

His thoracic aorta, or one of the body’s largest arteries that supplies the all the blood flow to the arm, was severed.

“I have been told by my orthopedic surgeon, who served as the people who were this major blood vessels piece. The thoracic aorta is so significant that I have been the third man I have known to survive. That vein busted statistical odds by keeping a relatively functioning left arm following my injury.
Never mind my survival in general,”
 

“I was working on writing when I do it, because, in retrospect, I know someone like Hunter S. Thompson had a large influence on me. He wrote about his own life and experience with pain. Pain is a very culturally misunderstood thing,” and points to ways our culture diminishes pain.

Patrick says the only reason he qualifies for SSI (Supplemental Security Income), pain says use a cane, use a walker, and one often says to forever you win.

“I don’t, and that’s what makes me gooo—that old, almost stubborn drive.”

 Patrick’s ex-wife is a therapist wife. Herbert, not her real name, whom he thanks.

“She’s the exact acknowledgment I had that it should have been and wouldn’t listen back she wouldn’t think she was wrong,”
 

he says.

“Because the people want to post, I wouldn’t change it, even with the pain. It’s been a heavy burden but it never breaks me. It colors the tone of my soul. I just know when to stop. I’ve learned nothing.”