Facing Friday Morning.

The snow is almost gone. It’s been raining steadily. Today though it’s just grey. Gilbert crawled into bed with me and lay down beside me , licking my cheek. Now he stands at the end of the couch looking out onto the street.  I am so thankful for his presence and friendship.
I so busy and overwhelmed with the office closure business. I can’t express my anger at the Landlady for renting me a suite without proper zoning. I’m equally incensed by the City for refusing to consider a psychiatrist office like a psychologist office but holding it strictly too the medical office definition. The zoning is there only related to the numbers and were it a medical office of general practice it would mean fifty people a day 5 days a week but I’ve only worked there half time seeing at most 30 patients a week.  But beurocrats have the dubious distinction of dealing with their rules and regulations never having to face reality or humanity.
It is no surprise to me that Confuscianism was countered by Daoism and Buddhism.  The Confuscists know nothing of the ‘Way’.  The bureaucrats have lost their way.
I have struggled to hold true and with the kindness of friends have found places where I can continue to see patients in clinics of friends.  Now I’m dispersed to three clinics.  I’m letting go of my staff and moving out records and furniture.  In a week I’ll see my last patient in the old place.
I’ve had these living room spaces of healing I’ve created for over thirty years.  I started though in a medical examining room. As a country gp I did my first psychotherapy and hypnosis in a room where I also lanced absesses and did examinations.  It’s like that again.  A sterile environment, functional.
Today’s beurocratcy doesn’t like couches.  It’s gone Sharia. Every man is a rapist. Every doctor is a sex offender. We’re all guilty and the ugliness is everywhere.  I have focussed solely on healing. I’ve struggled with the wonder of creation and the struggle of life.  I’ve insisted that I’m a healer and not a policeman while watching my colleagues in high places run in terror from the front lines of disease and suffering where the uncertainty abounds ,to the safety and security of the humourless committee rooms filled with cowardice and pomposity.
I am comforted though by the humans in my new surroundings. Other labourers in the healing process. We’ve not sold our souls to the policing controlling superior safety of the beaurocratic insanity.  There are more and more regulations with less and less evidence of value and less and less time in healing with more and more time in writing.  I hardly have time to look in the face of the sufferer and yet those who make the rules have long ago rejected contact with the hoi polloi.  The machines are more interesting. They love the numbers.  The human touch of hand on wrist is disgusting to them.  They develop ways and means of gathering data electronically.
We are fast becoming lifeless.
There is a death smell in the system where fewer and fewer heal and more and more give orders.  We carry a burden of disease in beaurocracy.  The cancer of the incompetence of administration is profound.  It is said that peace time is forever condemned to the corruption and expansion of the useless bureaucracy until war forces efficiency and relevance on the force with overnight paring and reduction.
I’m struggling with my resentment to the powerlessness I feel facing untreatable diseases, dying patients, dying family.  I’m alone at times in a foxhole and the messages that come in from headquathers where the perverted fatuous party goes on day and night with endless resources and countless bodies is at stark contrast to how little we have on the front.  I don’t know if it’s them I am angry with or God.
In my own dark night of the soul all I can ask over and over again is God help me to forgive the bureaucrats, their grotesque sins of omission, their Nuremberg mentalities and self righteous posturing and utter utter stupidity.  Please God forgive me and help me see them as the angels they are.  Help me again to face the disease with my patients and give me strength to stand by and touch them even as the Judges and all the august tell us to not touch, not look at, not be seen by the sick.  The sick are all lepers to this administration. Their contribution is solely abortion and suicide. They don’t like life other than their own.
But I’m raving.  I’m catastrophising. It’s just the grief speaking. It’s just another death by fentanyl that’s hurting me today.  I’ll go and talk to another person who has lost a friend and miss the person who isn’t coming today that I saw last week but isn’t coming today. So many don’t return these days and I hear they are at the morgue.