What do I do? This N.B. woman lives in severe pain and is losing her family doctor [Video]

A patient who risks having difficulty accessing critical medications due to a doctor shortage in New Brunswick says the weeks ahead are going to be ‘very difficult.’

Without a family doctor, she and many others face significant difficulties renewing prescriptions for opioid painkillers.

Parish, who lives in Victoria Corner just outside the town Woodstock, has been in constant pain since a car accident in 2014 led to a total hip replacement.

“They diagnosed me with CRPS, which is complex regional pain syndrome, which means my body had a traumatic incident where my sympathetic nervous system doesn’t know how to shut down because there’s so much pain in the leg,” she said.

For the past eight years, she has relied on daily doses of oxycodone and oxycocet — opioids classified as controlled substances — to manage her pain. But now, her family doctor is leaving at the end of the month, and she hasn’t …