There were no other psychiatrists except this splendid fellow from South Africa. Truly brilliant and delightful who had not as yet got his Canadian exams or license. I was actually necessary to ‘legitimize’ him. I thought him more than my equal as a clinician. But the beurocracy loved me more. Somewhere a little box could be ticked and the whole paper machine could carry on. There were a couple of general practitioners there as well. They were quite odd.
The unusual thing I first noticed about the nursing residence was a notice that said ‘No rapelling out the windows”. It turned out a former occupant had come and gone down the walls. There were a list of other behaviours not approved of by the matron. I realized all these taboos had been added simply because someone had actually done them and some one later had disapproved. Quite the list. My favourite remained ‘No Rapelling”. I would have liked to have known that nurse.
My first day on the ward was truly memorable. I was going to administration but took the right turn rather than the left. This caused me to arrive on the movement disorder and psychotic ward. I heard the loud bang of the heavy door closing and locking behind me. I’d really felt I’d arrived. Men windmilling around me.. Other’s like birds pecking and sniffing at my clothes. Others staring at walls. It truly was bedlam.
“Hello, I’m doctor Hay. I’m looking for X”
“Oh you’ve taken a wrong turn. That’s across the way and down the hall. We hope to see you sometime later once you’ve got acquainted. “ said the very pleasant nurse.
I had been holding myself together quite anxious that I might be in the right place. I was a bit paranoid. Such places induce it. Doctors who work in asylums take great comfort in the feel and sound of the keys. The nurse was really wonderful. Asylum nurses as a rule are terrific. They’re either swallowed by the obvious misery in the place or rise above it and develop balanced dispositions. The latter is the experience I’ve most encountered. They’re collectively a bit like the nurses on “MASH’. They tolerate administration but are wise enough not to trust administration and frankly aren’t so beaten down by the stupidity that prevails in institutions. A rather appealing resilience. Great senses of humor.
I walked through the normal acute ward and was warmly welcomed by the administration which chronically had difficulty attracting and keeping staff.
This would be where I worked for several months. It was quite an amazing hospital with interesting patients. I loved the locked dangerously insane ward. There were violent patients, men and women, here under the governor general’s warrant for heinous crimes. I had their records going back decades and spent countless nights literally reading the history of psychiatry in the individual charts that spanned decades. Here and later at another asylum I worked I found that the old gentleman’s charitable custom of asking the visitting grand psychiatrists to see the most difficult patients had prevailed until recent years. Hence I’d find that some man whose text books I’d read had visitted the asylum and given his opinion on what should be done with this most difficult patients. Here I’d find a plethora of diagnosis and the treatments. Each new medication would have been tried, sometimes a new psychotherapy but more often Electroshock experiments and occasionally neurosurgeries.
These were feral folk. I’d look at and be with people that the horror movies are fashioned on. From ‘nobody’ home to son of satan eyes I’d see it all. I had nothing to do at nights so for the next months considered this my challenge. Thousands upon thousands of pages of reading. The one thing I quickly learned was that psychiatric charts most commonly record the experience of the doctors and nurses more than the patients. Lots of counter transference material.
I read all manner of jargon on this fellow with all manner of thoughts about the effects of a wide variety of treatmeents. Yet in the nursing records in contrast to all the jargon there was this almost lost record that he said ‘save the stars, the milk is toast, red ballons’ daily for 40 years. Nothing touched his psychosis. Nothing changed the man. I learned that what I could ‘trust’ in records was actual ‘real footage’ and made a point thereafter to record what the patient actually said and did rather than using ‘fancy interpretative language’. I might put down ‘hebehrenic’ but I now always coupled it with the ‘evidence’ .I further found that what was lacking was ‘frequencies’. Patient complains of headache was rather different than what I’’d encountered on a medical ward where a ‘symptom or sign’ would be ‘quantified’. This had been done in the distant past but with recent years in the asylum I saw a certain vagueness and frankly sloppiness intrude.
I cross country skied on the great grounds about the asylum when we had snow. It was wonderful to do circles about this vast place and pray for the souls of the rccipients because it was equally apparent that some malign force existed there. I ‘d have asked spiritual leaders to exorcise the place and burn sweet grass if I’d stayed. The vast circles in the snow and prayer and daily meditation on goodness seemed to help. I met truly evil ‘feeling’ sorts who had done horrid things and were quite certain that their god had wanted this. One fellow was in the belief he was working directly for satan and no one could doubt it after a few months in his presence. Others’ seemed possessed more by aliens than nefarious angels.
The only ugly thing I recall there was that a patient of mine who suffered melancholic depression, likely bipolar by today’s standards was admitted to the hospital. While he was there his very pretty wife who was equally naughty had an affair with the leading psychologist and the two of them divorced the man and took his house . The marriage breaker was a despicable miscreant and I loved that my South African colleague saw him as a dirty little man who was using his position to steal a sick man’s wife and access his property.
This would be the first of my encounters with the failed marriage laws of Canada where ‘sickness and health’ were ignored by judges. Eventually I’d realize there were three brands of marriage, religious, state or secular and prenuptial. As the last was the costly edition being sold by the conflict of interest courts that was the only brand the judges could be relied on to recognize. I believe this was my first case and I couldn’t get the man’s mind together to face the real attack which till then he’d been quite right to be paranoid about. There really was a nasty little fox in his chicken coup and not even I could help him. I’ve watched now as many women as men are taken advantage of by the the courts and the psychiatric hospitals. Horrible things are done to people when they are indisposed by mental illness.
My temporary contract of three months was up and I was actually happy to extend it for another year but was told that while they wanted me they’d spent the years’ budget for doctors on potted plants. They’d have a new budget in a couple of months and if I’d wait they could continue my employment. I said I didn’t think so and left. Two months later I was sent an official letter asking me to return with an official offer for a job.
By then I was back on the West Coast.
The World Exposition was occurring in Vancouver , Expo 1986. I was interested in Holograms. I was fascinated as they were the best physical representation of God to date. If you cut a corner out of a regular picture all you got was a corner of a picture. But with a hologram if you took a sliver of the hologram you had a represention of the whole picture.
Learning about holograms was like learning about fractuals and DNA. With DNA, you could generally get the ‘code’ for everything with enough of the stuff and most stuff was a subset of the longer stretch. I had the earliest Epsom portable computer with the micro cassette tape and word processing capacity of about 8 pages. I was beginning to read program and just generally interested in this ‘stuff’.
Later that year I’d have PC and begin ‘hacking’ in to a wide range of government computers. The government simply opened it’s doors in those early years without any firewalls and surprisingly little to no security. Once I got a phone number I could access the whole provincial diaries, all the Human Resources files, all the ‘secrets’ of the police, and various other agencies. I did get a quiet word from a friend in the CIA as my interest in their computer system had been noted by my friend.
My friend was military intelligence. I’d lose $100 to him because his thing was using the various satellites to hide where he was coming from. The bet was he could get into the best computers, he thought the Canadian federal and provincial archives a joke but did take the challenge of accessing the Human Resources at IBM. My friend was working there and we got into his file and found he’d had another child. I’d not known this was occurring so congratulated him the next day and telling him how I’d learned .I also passed on that his president and Vice President had a fire wall on their personal data but that the rest of the staff didn’t. He was a mathematician working on programs and quite annoyed to hear this quite typical ‘management’ ploy.
When I’d flown back to San Francisco I’d found no payment for psychiatric services but was thankful that my Volkswagen Baja Bug was packed with my personal items. There it was in the parking space packed full of clothing and personal effects. I had a Blood PRessure Cuff and a stethescope, a copy of Gray’s anatomy, and various other medial textbooks and clothing. I had my medical license and other diplomas rolled or folds up. I had to unpack the car and throw some stuff out so I could make room to sit in the car and drive it. Then I had to get the tires inflated as all were flat. Getting the thing going was another challenge.I’d daily had to adjust the points and routinely fix the timing and more than once replace the starter. It was not a reliable machine like modern vehicles but it was a delightful friend with daily maintenance and care.
Driving north to visit the hologram exhibit at the World Exposition I was rather comforted to know I had all my world possessions in this one car and that I was setting off on a new adventure. I planned to stop in Vancouver, drive onto Winnipeg and then take the job I had been offered in Virginia.
It was a frightening ordeal driving a Baha Bug with it’s ass end open to the elements north. I had daily challenges with the electrical systems and once went in a ditch and had to get a tow truck to pull me out. I did arrive in Vancouver where my friend Frank lived and invited me to stay with him. He had a wonderful home and kids and was the truly amazing brilliant man I’d always known him to be.
He and his wife took me up the Chief with skis strapped to my back. We spent a couple of days and night skiing up there, telemarking, then we strapped the skis on our backs and climbed down to the balmy weather where folks were actually swmming in the lake. I was enchanted by three seasons in a day. My snoring was an issue in the cabin and the first signs of the damage my pipe smoking was causing to my respiratory system. It also almost got me killed by others sharing the cabin.
Frank encouraged me to stay. I was truly concerned about my car being able to go through the mountain passes. I thought I could use a year off and decided I’d check out what work was available. I was really enjoying the holograms and studying them and learning computer languages and ideas. I’d also got some Musrooms in He valle and ate that at the top of a mountain, first time doing Hallucinogens in decades. It was a spiritual experience as these things can be. The natives doing their peyote trips never more than annually. Aldous Huxley recommended something similiar. I was reading all that at the time and returning to esoteric practices. I was also wearing women’s clothing. It was only months since I’d been fucked and I was finding dressing as a woman at night and walking the streets comforting. Nothing made sense but I just carried on. I had this weird idea I was baiting rapists and was going to kick the shit out of them. I says sleep with a Bowie knife now. I trusted God and hoped that more would be revealed. I was on a journey and for now was going to settle down for a year.
The housing, due to Expo 86 was completely full and overpriced.
I was offered a job and a drink one morning at the local psychiatric emergency. I’d been fascinated by psychiatric emergencies at the end of my studies, the first one being developed in the US only that year and this the only one in CAnada at the time. I thought it would be a good way to use my time waiting for the passes to clear no year. Th was a wealth of learning in psychiatry. The head interviewed me the morning, knew of my writing in various journals, wanted me to help him with his writing and publishing and offered me a drink at 11 am in the morning.
I like to say, hey didn’t off me a drink at Stanford. I’d like this immensely and only later know that this was his way of weeding out the non drinkers and hiring others like himself. He was much further along the road but it was probably apparent to an outside observer with some training that I might potentially develop a problem. Now I had “lower companions”. I was still in the relative ‘main stream’ and my use of marijuana and alcohol was not that abnormal for the academic set. Indeed I’d buy my pot thereafter from other doctors and academics. One in particular would leave medicine, develop a plantation and go onto be a multimillionaire. Only later would we learn that marijuana had become a many billion dollar a year underground economy. There were a lot of people smoking marijuana and a whole lot of people lying about it.
In general people grossly minimize their alcohol and drugs use with at least 10% of the populations, millions, doing a whole lot. Meanwhile 30% of the population don’t do drugs or alcohol. The middle group generally are considered ‘social users’ and are ‘occasional’. I was still a ‘binge’ user when I bega to work in Vancouver but I joined a department of hard core alcoholics who might well be described as ‘functional’ and a whole lot of people who were doing a whole lot of things. I really felt elite and in heaven. I loved the place. There really were a lot of good people there. We did a whole lot of good work too.
It was the AIDS epidemic. I was single without family so volunteee for the AIDS dementia, and the violent HIV patients.
I also got this skid row apartment down the street that I expected to have for a few months till expo finished and rentals increased. That apartment became the basis of a whole lot of stories , a regular movie set. I would work at the hospital and come home and write. The neighbourhood as a circus.
I’d arrived in Vancouver. My Baha Bug still ran. I’d bought some slacks and a sports jacket. I was dressed for work.
Its years later and yachts and mansions since and I still sometimes think I’ll move on when the mountain passes clear. I still love holograms but I’ve not had a drink or a drug in 22 years. That’s a story that would come later.
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