Inquiring minds want to know.
Is it possible that since Rush became addicted to the pain meds, that there's no way for him to really know if he would experience pain the way he did before the surgeries, since any baseline would have been diminished/lost long ago. Maybe him saying that the surgeries didn't work and that he continued to experience pain was really his way of justifying/covering up his addiction to the pain killers (and not wanting or not being able to give up the "fix" it gave him). Also, he could have under the care of his doctors, worked through a monitored/controlled "pain management" plan that may have been of great benefit to him, one that may have prevented his addiction.
One thought I've had also is it seems to me that one or some of his doctors would have known about this just from routine physical exams, blood tests, the surgeries for his hearing, etc.
Absolutely. Self-medicating with narcotic analgesics is a dead end street. Tolerance builds and eventually you can only take enough to kill yourself.
Richard W.