It was like the scene from the movie "Awakenings" in which a neurologist gives an experimental drug to patients frozen for years by sleeping sickness, bringing them back to consciousness within hours.

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In this case, it was a 33-year-old former nanny from Sharpsburg who had existed in a drugged stupor for two years to block out the resistant pain from metastatic cancer.

Two days after Diane Sacco received an implanted morphine pain pump, she was a different person.

"It made an unbelievable difference," says her mother, Alana. "She was lying in bed, all drugged up. Now she's up and has a life."

While the turnaround has thrilled her pain specialist Dr. Edward K. Heres at the UPMC pain medicine center, he lamented that oncologists often see the pump as a last-ditch effort for pain control, to the detriment of patients who are suffering needlessly.

"The referrals often come late in a patient's course when pain is so difficult to control," he said. "If it was considered more prospectively, the quality of life of many cancer patients would be improved."

That's backed up by a study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in October 2002 that showed that use of implanted pain delivery systems was more effective than oral painkillers and other traditional methods of treating resistant cancer pain, resulting in fewer side effects and prolonged life. Two of the most common side effects that prevent enjoyment in life -- fatigue and depressed level of consciousness -- were significantly reduced with the pain pump.

"They eat better, sleep better, their life is improved," he said.

Sacco, who was diagnosed with a rare sarcoma in one arm in 1999, had been prescribed higher and higher doses of painkillers and opioids to combat the pain of surgery to her chest after the cancer had spread. "I was out of it," she says.

Although she's still undergoing chemotherapy, she's back driving, going shopping and has been baby-sitting nephews and nieces.

"I don't feel any effects of the morphine. I don't feel high," she said. "I feel more in control of my body.

"Just to be pain free is unbelievable."