Tuesday, March 31, Covid 19, Virtual Office, Self Quarantine

Yesterday I woke at 5 am. Today its 4 am. We used to think early morning wakening and disturbed sleep were signs of depression. The world is depressed. Covid 19 lock down and deaths.  Wuhan Virus and politics.  The Wave has hit Vancouver.  We have another week or two to go. Italy has peaked. Spain dominos along side.  The US and UK are following. We are doing well in British Columbia.  A SARS virus inhaled, targeting the alveoli ACE 2 rercerptors. Males 4 x more affected than females. Old more than young.  Heart disease, respiratory disease and medically vulnerable, the immune compromised.  It’s 3 weeks in passing. 8 strains now but new vaccines and treatments in preparation. We’re buying time for medical hospitals and research.  Factories are upping production on n95 masks.  Breweries making hand sanitizers.  We have great leadership in NDP Mr. Horgan and Health Minister Aidin Dix. Dr. Bonnie Henry continues to be a shining light.  I’m out of clinics.I’m at home seeing patietns on virtual office software or speaking on the cellphone. Life goes on.  I have the needed answers sometimes. I know the medication. I reassure.  I remind people to stay inside.I know some are going squirrelly.  Cabin Fever and insaniety go hand in hand. I’m less afraid of the virus alone. Door handles and surfaces scare ,me. I washed the soles of my shoes  The economic crisis is next on the gauntlet.  I have no answers.  I reassuje.
Added to all the other stupid and dangerous behaviours Comrade Trudeau , our Transnational Chinese PM now raises the taxes. He stole the money for respirators and hospitals then gave 16 tons of medical equipment away in Februaryagainst medical advise.  The Chinese distribute masks that leak and thermometers that false negative. A Chinese billionaires closes an Australian private hospital removing a thousand beds. The Communists are at war. Will this evil dictatorship collapse or with the UN will we finally get Sharia Communis rule the culmination of decades of planning.  What people can give a starving child poison.  Sending nurses masks that leak. Lying, lying, lying.  Posturing.
Thank God everyday people are behaving so much better than that.  We are obeying the laws and common sense. We’re staying home. We are being kind each other , watching out for our neighbours.
I miss Laura. I worry about family. I pray. I work.  It’s nice to be home but it’s more intense.

I don’t sleep as well. I can’t relax as well.  I played guitar for a bit. I love walking the dog.  Reading hours of medical journals seemed more relevant than a novel.  I take pictures of Gilbert. I’m blessed with running water, heat, food in the cupboards, a full refridgerator, in door plumbing.  Spring is here.The flowers are blooming. I pray.  All Shall Be Well.This too shall pass.

Sunday, Quarantine, Covid 19

Lovely sunny day.  At home.  I’m working from home now.  I just walked Gilbert along the river.  Social distancing individuals, couples and families. Only out of controls were a few dangerously speeding cyclist.  They need to be fined.  In my day we’d just put a rope across the trail.  Taught us all caution racing on the back woods trails.  Like land mines. If you want to race go on the road.

I read another arts student journalist whose got it wrong. This lock down and quarantine isn’t going to stop you from getting Covid 19.  In Iceland and on Cruise ships and in South Korea and now in area of Britain they are finding everyone is ‘getting it’.  The good news is a whole lot of people aren’t showing symptons ever. They might have a sniffle one day or a little feeling down.  70% of cases are mild. It might be more. The key is understanding as we get older we are more likely to need hospital or ICU to get through .
The disease lastS about 21 days.  Quarantines were for 14 because of a person likelihood of showing symptons within that time. There was one extreme outlier that showed the virus 57 days out.  Exceptions that prove the rule.  You get it and it passes. Only a few end up in hospital. Only a fraction of those need ICU.

For 10 years, maybe more, the government has stolen the money for health care and given it to terrorists and pet projects.  In Canada we have the most administration, the least doctors and longest waitlists.  As doctors and nurses and patients we have been seeing people in corridors because the hospital beds have not kept up with the population increase and aging population.  We are nearly 40 on the number of beds per thousand in the western world. All the talk of how good the Canadian health care system is compared to the US has overlooked the fact that the US has more beds for their population. Japan is the best.  The US made better decisions closing their borders and being absolutely candid about their decisions.

The virus was caused by nature. The pandemic was caused by the politics of the Communist Chinese government lying. It is still lying.  It is totally reasonable to say that Communists, if they didn’t plan the pandemic, capitalized on it. Communist Chinese killed a hundred million of their people in the past. They still enslave Tibet. There is no freedom of speech and no freedom of press. We in the west were only able to react to the pandemic because of a heroic Chinese doctor who was a whistleblower and soon after died a death like Epstein.  It’s only in democracies that individual lives count.   

The statistics of Communist countries and other dictatorships are conservatively estimated at a factor of 10 times deviant from the truth. China’s ally Iran reports a few deaths whereas families described all the doctors dead in a hospital and American satellites reporting mass graves.  These war lord nations always use stats as a weapon of their perpetual war.  The truth that followed the USSR fall was amazing. It only occurred because the only rising infant mortality in the western world, a statistics they forgot to conceal, showed that all their other glowing reports were skewed way off.
China has opened new quarantine centres.  

Black faced shame faced Trudeau called everyone racist for criticizing his policy of accepting thousands of Chinese from Communist china to land unvetted and move into the community without being quarantined.  Singapore and Taiwan are predominantly Chinese and did a magnificent job of vetting travellers and following up on contacts. Trudeau was the most racist, refusing to protect Canadians and lying about vetting as he had done regarding refusal to vet Migrants so that so many ISIS and disturbed diseased individuals continued to come legally and now illegally into Canada.  They want the increasingly rationed health care services.  Trump and the US were earliest to restrict borders saving thousands of lives by slowing down the demand on health care resources.

The Communist Chinese refused to share scientific and medical information until the now dead whistleblower did his wiki leak.  The pseudoscience of the Climate Change Alarmist industry with their hysterical adolescents screaming ‘how dare you’ and declaration the North Pole ice would be gone by decade ago or that we ‘d all be dead unless we gave them world control before 12 years, all was crying Wolf. There is Not and never was a ‘climate emergency’.  The language of terror coming from so called scientists and the communist and dictator dominated UN IPCC delayed the reaction to a real emergency with rising death rate and a need to act.
Thankfully the west did act.  It was estimated that there would be 1.5 million deaths by Covid 19 in the US by this summer.  Italy has 10, 000. Dr. Fauci is now estimating that with the protective measures and social distancing and quarantine the number of dead will be more like 100,000.  Dr. Bonnie Henry, Public Health Officer, British Columbia estimates the matter has halved the speed of spread.

Trudeau gave tens of tons of emergency medical supplies to China against medical advice and against Who advice.  Italy was overwhelmed because they didn’t have proper protective wear.  We needed n95 masks.  We needed respirators. Trudeau gave them away and the most harrowing thing I saw was nurses swabbing coughing patients in the test site wearing inadéquate surgical masks which solely protect patients from them not the other way around. China now is giving the west defective masks and thermometers. Who really is saving Canadians and who is the enemy?

Despite the national mismanagement, politicking, lying and rank obscenity, the Premiers especially NDEP Premier Hogan of BC and his government have been doing sterling work to managed this real ‘emergency’.  Hoarders were fined for reselling. Businesses were closed who wouldn’t follow public health laws.  

All of these measures are to ‘slow down the spread’.  They are working. We have now had time to produce tests and laboratories have ranked up their prodution. Vancouver has now got drive through testing sites and independent testing sites in Burnaby and Chilliwack.  Testing initially overwhelmed at 1000 tests a day, so given to the most needy, are now ramping up to a hundred thousand a day and like South Korea we’re testing more to see that so many are fine despite having the disease. Everyone is likely to get it in time. But that’is the key.
Without hospitals the rate of death in the elderly, the immunosuppressed or those with heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes, is 5 time greater.  This is not going to be the case here.  The College of Physicians and Surgeons has moved doctor resources and streamlined processes to address the problem. UBC Faculty of Medicine and the BC CDC have had time to get into action. These are the great minds that contributed to curing Aids and finding cures for cancer. Trials are already being done on the most likely cures.
 In the US the present administration is moving forward on treatments by removing beurocratic delays that would have meant years but now hospitals will have tools in weeks.  

Mr Trump was right though pilloried as usual. The sun and heat will slow the virus spread. There is a likelihood of a vaccine perhaps by fall.  I said we’d be out of the extreme medical crisis and need to quarantine and lock down by June. Mr. Trump says end of April. I hope he’s right. India just went into a 21 days lock down of 1.5 billion people.  The next crisis which some continue to fear was the Chinese communist plan is the economic crisis.
The world will not go back to normal. Not until we all have a safe vaccine and 70% of us at least get it.  That’s months away simply because of the fixed delay on trial of a vaccine in humans.  It’s not as quick as finding Hydroxychloroquine is an amazing treatment that reduces symptons and may prevent disease. India has recommended it’s frontline health care workers all take hydroxychloroquine. It’s not ‘proved’ by double blind controlled scientific studies but there is strong scientific evidence for it.  Vitamin C, D and zinc are all recommended. Now add sunshine to that.

The problem with our media today is that there is no objective ‘truth’ in this post modern world. Everything is going subjective and partisan. 

We are fortunate here at home. The question is now when to return to work. April, May or June. How and when. Also we must ensure our government doesn’t steal healthcare resources putting us all at risk for personal self aggrandizement. We also must celebrate the courage and great service we have seen from so many.

Thursday March 26 At home with Gilbert

7000 dead in Italy. We are into the third week and three weeks or so behind Italy.  We haven’t the deaths and the number of cases is rising solely because of the extension of testing.  The hospitals are full but not yet overwhelmed. It will be a close call. I think by next week we will see if we are going to have the resources.  The demand is increasing.  The key is in the percentages by age who need hospital and of those what percentage need to go onto intensive care.

In hospital they have IV fluids, O2 and suction as well as IV medication.  Other than that a whole lot of TLC from already overworked nurses and doctors there’s not much more than one can get at home.  811 is the emergency number to call to discuss going for testing and even going to hospital.  Obviously if you can’t breathe call an ambulance or a friend to get you to the emergency. Personally if I get sick I’m going to stay at home as long as I can because I like my space. I have chicken noodle soup. I always prefer my own bed and I won’t be spreading disease.  Gilbert is a good nurse.

The percentage of those in hospital who go on to need mechanical assistance with breathing is the key. This is a percentage of all those who are in hospital and where the bottle neck shortage really exists. There’s a finite number of resources and too many cases for the existing number of respirators. If the hospital and ICU resources are overwhelmed then the death rate jumps five times higher.  Considèr death rate of 10 to 15% for the over 80 crowd. Without hospital beds O2 etc or respirators this group’s mortality jumps to 50 to 60%. The same holds true for all the other groups. 

Social distance and isolation reduce the ‘run’ on the limited resources.  It’s just like toilet paper whereas in that case assholes hoarded it but in the case of respirators its not that people are choosing to use them.  The good news is that respirators can be bolted to the floors in hospitals. Otherwise we would have to fear the toilet paper hoarders and the sanitizers resellers would have stolen all the respirators in the city for their own personal greed.  

That’s why I’m thankful for the police and civilization and frankly what I’ve come to know as advanced Canadian culture. Canadians are caring, sharing, generous people who are known the world over as the best of killers too. Our women soldiers and men soldiers constantly get the sniper awards for longest shots.  We just are tolerant too.  As the majority of Canadians were taught the Christian value of tolerance and forgiving, turn your cheek 70 x 70 and judge not lest you be judged, that’s a finite number. Once we have shown forgiveness ‘enough’ we act.  So the police are thankfully arresting and confiscating and fining those people who are trying to take advantage of a bad situation.

I’m in a virtual office at home. It’s tough.  Yesteray 10 hours in front of the computer mostly listening to sorrowful tales and advising. I love telling people about the great leadership by our NDP Premier Horgan and Minister of Health Dix.  I think Dr. Bonny Henry needs the highest award for her calm and smart response to this public health crisis.  I qlove Dr. Oetter head of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and their quick responses and overall brilliant leadership.  UBC Department of Medicine has always been world renown clinically and in research so we’re seeing the Immunology Department, Infectious Disease and Microbiology and Pharmacology all responding letter perfect to an unprecedented crisis. The family physicians of this province have always been lauded across the country and they are showing their mettle. The Doctors of BC are just great.

India just went on lock down  1.5 billion people quarantined for 21 days except most essential services. I am blessed to know East Indians who are sharing what their families elsewheee are experience. Through this personal communication channel too we learned that Iran was lying like China had been but that France and Germany are facing the challenge stoically. Taiwan was as amazing as South Korea. It’s a bit like watching a Science, Politics and Intelligence Olympics. Iran right now is vying for the Darwin Award but Jamaica is doing well so far.

The Coronavirus will infect everyone until we have viable vaccines or herd immunity comes along.  Some very lucky rare individuals for reasons we don’t understand have natural immunity.  We saw this in Africa with these ‘truck stop hookers’. Truthfully I can’t remember what the scientific studies name was but it’s still being investigated because these rare individuals despite constant exposure to the Aids virus somehow didn’t get the disease but then did if they moved.  It remains a mystery.  Spontaneous remission is never something to be sneered at. Miracles happen. Grace exists but as my mother said “God gave you hands and a brain to use, so get up and help.”

Everyone now is helping by washing their hands and staying at home. I”ve loved Facebook. The Guppie Girl Dance routines in quarantine have been so funny and delightful.. I love the dogs nails painted red. I love the songs about quarantine It’s just great to see people coping and carrying on. That’s the same spirit which Britain was famous for in the great Battle of Britain.  We’re in a kind of Seige and our job is to survive and not go out where the enemy is waiting to pick us off.  Of course we have to go out for essentials and that’s the same in any seige.  Soldiers get shot going for water but they must go for water. So when I go out I try not to touch things, keep my social distance of 6 feet, and take off my clothes and shoes at the door when I come in. I put them aside and believe they’re ‘decontaminated in 12 hours’.  The virus stays on surfaces for 12 hours.

Otherwise Gilbert and I enjoy walking in the woods and don’t feel afraid in nature.

I’ve got to get ready for work. I’ve not devolved to staying in a house coat at the virtual office but I can see it might happen.  

Another great day in quarantine.  Singapore is already getting back to normal allowing more businessses to open.  I see Mr. Trump is saying we might be at that place by Easter.  India is hoping 21 days will control the wave and  ‘flatten the curve’.  I think Singapore might have been 6 weeks before they could loosen up. I believe we have at least another three or four weeks of cost to face because nationally we were so slow to react .  Thankfully our province and the Mayor of Vancouver took strict measures and we’re all working together with the help of our very fine and caring police.  

Thanks to everyone. God bless.  It’s great to be sober, clean and free and awake in these dire times.  I feel I’m ready to respond to what comes my way with the help of my faith and family and friends. I do pray for their safety and look forward to getting to the other side.  Hallelujah!

Sunday Morning Thoughts in a Pandemic

I woke this morning, took a deep breath and didn’t cough. I don’t have a fever and my throat isn’t that sore. My rational mind sayS I don’t have Covid 19. I’m a doctor.  This is my 4th epidemic in the front lines. I’ve treated hundreds if not thousands of infectious disease cases.  I’ve touched tens of thousands of strangers. I’ve peered and poked in every orifice. I’m immortal.

In medical school I wrote a poem published nationally called “Ickitis”.  We all got it.  Whatever we thought deep down was the ‘ickkiest’ disease we developed the symptons for it.  I actually thought my mild aches and pains which when focused on became all I could think of was a rare arthritis. I convinced my smiling rheumatologist specialists to do one of the earliest HLA B27 tests.  It came back negative.  Of course I didn’t believe it but somehow miraculous I continued to live.

We learned not to do unnecessary tests because eventually we’d find something positive. The rule of testing was always, would it change the course of therapy.  Today’s Covid 19 testing is being done rationally.  It’s limited value in the individual but at the public health level it has important value.  I know tests so I know that ‘false negatives’ occur. It’s just like pregnancy tests.  Sometimes they’re wrong and the person isn’t pregnant.  

 Even if I had a negative Covid 19 test I’d probably convince myself that the test was a ‘false negative.” I wouldn’t even consider the possibilities of false positive. Paranoid , I love anything that confirms my paranoia.  

Right now the germophobes are more anxious but less angry. ‘See I told you so,’ they say to previous disbelievers.  Freud, when the Nazis were out to get him and he was whisked away to Britain finally said, “Maybe the paranoids are right.”

The trouble with being a doctor is that when the chink in the armour of immortality (sometimes prosaically called ‘denial’) occurs the whole coping defence system breaks down. I’m already dead. I’m going to die. My insaniety let off the tight leash ,I normally hold it on , is off and running.  

I think it’s pretty good if I am getting through the day. I’m socially isolating. I don’t like people much either so it’s not particularly difficult. I like being alone with my dog but I don’t like my mind.  It’s often not helpful.  I have to pray a lot.  I get up each day and meditate as long as I can to lower the blood pressure, reduce the over all anxiety and try and train my mind to come to command. I keep focussing on my breathing. Breathing is good. No don’t think about email and face book and work and tomorrow and yesterday.  Focus on the now.  I repeat the name of Jesus.  Today I was androgynous and going on about Mother Mary. My superstitious mind has me trying out various names for God. I’m asking for help. It’s all bigger than me.  Life and death have always been above my pay grade. I am humbled by my position as a kazoo player in the symphony of life. There’s always been someone faster or slower than me. I’ve always looked up and now I just have to lower the bar. I’m alive. I’m sitting here breathing. It’s okay. All shall be well I say over and over again.  Be Still and Know that I am God I say as a round.  My monkey mind is well leashed after 15 minutes. I then have coffee.

I love my Ethiopian coffee.  I often think of Ethiopia and India, countries I was in last year.  I worry a bit about the people there. I have so much more options here.  I pray for the safety of my family and friends.

(I believe thaet God created the heavens and the earth. Everything is God stuff. I’m imagining in the imagination of God. There wasn’t God and building blocks. One good. Good. God is good. One mind. OM. E=MC2.  Energy = Matter. Matter is just slow energy. Energy is a metaphor of spirit. I am a spiritual being living in a physical world. I believe therefor I am.)

I left surgery and did general practice and community medicine (Public health) then Psychiatry. I was most interested in Immunology then. That and black holes, anti matter, paradigms and paradoxes. I was different back then.  A nerd and geek who danced.  I’ve always known the most beautiful and brilliant impatient women. I have had the most extraordinary friends and the greatest teachers. Straight A’s in Arts and Science at University. 

Psychiatry back then looked at what we today call psychosomatic medicine, how the mind caused and contributed to disease.  I studied hypnosis with the Eriksonian foundation and was doing minor surgery with patients. I’d later go on to do hypnotherapy and marvel in patients ‘curing’ or ‘self curing’ themselves of major physical illnesses.  I became fascinated by the power of placebo.  30% cure was the rule of thumb.  Mind over matter.  Rather often ignored by the mainstream but found in the odd places of research like “spontaneous rmisson ‘. The money though was in the physical. Money is material nad never to be discounted. Even Jesus said ‘Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s due.

Piaget’s studies showed that abstract thinking occured at early teen age development. A later study showed a third to a half of adults never progressed that far.  Surgery works universally but medicine and psychotherapy generally are more successful in the YAFFI.  An acronym for who can best benefit from non invasive techniques.  It’s poo pahed as ‘not serious’, ‘flakey’ paranormal’ but even studies of paranormal show that reductionism, the academic reality is not exclusive of inductive reasoning which is parallel.  It’s both and we do best when we utilize both. I do specific forms of psychotherapy in combination with psychopharmacology to get the highest results.. individually I proved mind over matter and that combined therapy was best and eventually moved along to the most difficult of diseases , addiction, with its entrenched stigma and problems of secondary gain by government, I often feel as silly as a war doctor trying to prevent and heal disease while the war machine just wants fresh bodies. I do like Pink Floyd and often must focus on the individual rather than get lost in the big people. Life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality.

I saw at the community medicine level or in public health that on the Indian Reserves ( for aboriginals) , those  that voted to allow drugs and alcohol, every illness and disease and psychopathic psychiatric morbidity was prevalent. Not so on the ‘dry reserves’ which often had better health and social success than ‘white 

‘ suburbs.  Of course this went against the profitable narratives. 

Alcohol and drugs reduces intellect and emotional development , encourages the monkey mind. It’s banal as opposed to spiritual. All large group studies define these thepopulation as ‘immature’.  In psychotherapy ‘insight’ therapies and ‘conventional counselling’ generally perpetuate the condition or made it worse.  Specifically 12 step facilitation therapy and motivation therapy work.   No YAFFI drunks or addicts.  Addiction is matter over mind.  

I loved the old language , Demon Drink.   In Milton, Satan is seen as turning his back on God and preferring to look at his shadow than be part of the light. Freud said there were two drives, Eros - life wish and Thanatos - death wish.

I’m doing all the things I’m told by my brilliant colleagues in Microbiology and Infectious Disease. If I say I want to live I must act that way. We say if you talk the talk walk , the walk.  So I’m self quartined this weekend. I’m washing my hands counting 20 seconds just like I did in my surgical years.  I’m taking higher dosage of Vitamin C and D and Zinc. I’m gargling a lot with Listerine and also with Apple Cider Vinegar. I’m sleeping 8 and 10 hours.  I’m avoiding being run down.  I’m staying positive.  Depression and negativity increases the risk and worsening of disease by 30%.  Psychosomatic medicine and psychiatry moved increasingly into ‘pills’.  Having entered it as a ‘mind over matter’ move , I found myself increasingly pressured back into ‘matter over mind’ and there is as the book title says ‘Gold in them their pills’.  But I know that in all the psychosomatic studies even with surgery outcome is improved with psychiatric involvement.  Pre surgery education and anxiety reducing therapy resulted in 30% improvement in recovery rates and speeds.  i believe in rituals and have seen first hand the benefits of pills and surgery. I believe in both.

When the Chinese Aetheist Communists materialist invaded Tibet and genocided the greatest spiritual leaders tried to shield the people from the wanton murderous machin gun fire bullets beat love. The Dalai Lama escaped. The Communist Chinese, no different than ISIS, continue to lie and murder, rape and enslave Tibetans. There’s an old saying of faith which says ‘trust in God but tether your camel. ‘ Don’t take a knife to a gun fight. I believe but I do good as well. I have faith and believe all is God but also believe that faith without works are nihilistic.

Be positive. Jesus repeatedly said Do Not Be Afraid.  

 I wash my hands. 

I am thankful that there is now a medication that treats the Covid 19 illnes: , Hydroxy chloroquine.  If you add Azithromycin, there are even better results.  The reduction in spread of the disease as was religiously done in Singapore resulting in no deaths in that country, ensured  hospital and respiratory services were not overwhelmed. The death rate increases 5x if there are no medical services.  All the advances in use of respirators and keeping people at home when sick and quarantine has made it unlikely that we will be overwhelmed here. The next two weeks is critical.  

My mind at times shouts out “We’re going to die!’ and I panic.” I think of John Mayers song where he sings “I want to run through the halls of the school’. That’s on a happy crazy note. I want to run naked through the downtown hugging ,  kissing, fucking everyone to just get this over with.  It’s a fleeting thought. Like suicide thoughts.  Suicide is a total dysfunction of the brain transmission. When the brain is supposed to be helping you go forward it jumps into reverse or gets stuck in reverse. I want to live. My mind short circuits when I panic. I have to breathe, focus, feel my feet on the ground, get grounded , relax. Streaking is not going to help. Prison is not a safe place right now.

I repeat over and over again. All shall be well.

I drink lots and lots of fluids and keep my mouth wet in public.  I’m old and at risk but read about a cluster of millennials who have had the roughest cases short of death needing respirators longer than the old and appearing to have an as yet unexplained susceptibility. I worry most about the immuno compromised, patients with heart disease, lung disease, diabetes.

All are at risk but the good news is that given the undiagnosed cases which are carriers, they also increase the denominator so deaths by this technicality may be less frequent than presupposed but the ubiquity and stress on the health care services may be far worse. It remains that until we have a vaccine or ‘herd immunity’ we are all playing a Chinese Roulette lottery game.  Thankfully 70% are mild cases like the flu.

Contact occurs day 1. Infectiousness day 2 and day 3.  Day 3 and day 4 symptons appear.  Fever is the most common in 85%. Next cough and then short ness of breath.  We have an emergency phone number here 811 for people to call if they are symptomatic. The mild cases pass day 4 to 8 and by day 10 a person is not likely infectious with asymptomatic recovery in 2 weeks from contact.  If one goes out wear a mask after that for a few more days but quarantines have been for 2 to 3 weeks because of the nature of the disease.  So far it appears infection results in future immunity from the SARS -CoV-2. 

All the great sports teams hire a psychotherapist for hundreds of thousands.  His job is purely to psych the team ‘up’. It’s long been known that if you believe you are going to lose you are more likely to.  If you believe you are going to win, even if you are the Toronto Maple Leaf hockey team, you are more likely to win.  You have to open the door to hope to have a miracle come in.  

I hope you do well. I’m rather excited that I’m alive today.  I’m not feeling well because all my internai sensors are focusing on every little blip my active happy self would normally ignore.  i Feel a bit dissociated and a little PTSD given my personal history, The world seems a bit surreal. I’m experiencing moments of derealization an depersonalization. This too will pass.

My blind dog sits at the door since he became blind and barks at noises that never bothered him. That’s the way I am, waiting for sicknesss to strike, watching for death.  I’m being silly. I recognize it as ‘medical student disease’ but know that ‘this too will pass’.  I’m trying to have an ‘attitude of gratitude’  Thank you God. Thank you Jesus. Thank you saints of all religions. 

Now I’m going to shower. I know Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine. I know I have books to write and I could clean my place. I could learn a new language. But I think a shower and more coffee is good enough for me.  Instead of high standards I’m focusing on ‘good enough’.  Doing the next ‘right thing’.  I’m going to get through this.  One day at a time.  

God bless.

Dreams in a Pandemic

Covid 19 continues like fires that raged last summer.  Each day there is new news.  Finally borders closing.  Corrupt politicians insider dealing with the information. Lies coming out of Communist China. Fakes news and rotating narratives.  Each day we feel better.  Only a few weeks of this high alert. The wave will hit us and pass in one to two months. Reminds me sailing solo in the middle of the Pacific waiting for the hurricane to hit.

I was booked for the Transgender medical conference.  It was cancelled.  I was booked for Esprit, the annual May transgender conference. I’d  hoped to be going. Lighter hearted. Less afraid. I’d bought a baby blue spring jacket for the occasion.  I wonder when and where I’ll wear it. These times are more pyjamas at home or cammo in the streets days. Not a time for high heels. Big girl panty times. Where’s the fun in that.   

There’s that fear that something will burst. But there have been no riots.  Order prevails.  Our local government with Mr. Horgan and Mr. Dix are doing admirably.  Nationally the government has been as silly and out of step as funny walks of Monty Python but provincially we’ve been saved by reason and maturity. Even the Vancouver City mayor is hearing the concern of the majority of citizens and reassuring us that there will be order.  Our Vancouver Police are the best.

The tension is palpable. The city is a ghost town. All the seasons tickets to theatres and concerts have been cancelled till June. I have front row seats to the Guess Who in July. I’m so glad. I watched and listened yesterday to Burton Cummings doing a real time on line concert from his home.  “I will sing a rhapsody”, he sang. .  How beautiful and uplifting.

I went by the meat store and bought a week or so of protein provisions for my adopted family.  The man is so hard working.  Each day despite the times he goes out to work construction necessary for the city.  So many workers like him now being recognized as the unsung hero’s.  We must have roads. His beautiful wife is home with the children and the new baby. I loved seeing Gilbert’s little friends. It was sad that they couldn’t play. The little girl wanted to hug him and me but we kept our distance.  I drove away thinking that in these tough times one family will have a feast.  So much extra home costs and runs on stores a concern.  I had my own steaks too.  Barbecues will work even after infrastructure lapses. My freezer is on electricity and propane.

Gilbert and I had the best charbroil steak with potatoes and butter and sour cream. I drank tonic with quinine.

More texting.  Calls to patients.  Refilling prescriptions. I’d done the methadone clinic already that morning keeping the essentially medications to my patients most at risk. Helping pharmacist serve this most debilitated population. 

I’d been to the ophthalmologist and obtained my new RX. I was down to my last pair of glasses. Now thanks the One Time Optical folk I’ll have a couple of new pair next week.  Less squinting. I’m thinking of things like this. If the city closes down or disease quarantines us or there’s shortages for months, what essentials do I need.  Glasses.  I was glad to get my laptop to my friends. I’ve a new one and didn’t need the old one. I have a back up ipad and they had one everyone used. Now they are more secure with more entertainment choices for the children.

Having sailed solo on oceans I’m used to survivalist thinking. I have a hand held Hamm radio in storage. A trip to the locker might be an idea.  I’ve hand held radios.  I tell families that you don’t want members going off without a cell phone or a radio.  We need to keep in touch. Survivalist thinking. The real thing, not the often silly tv drama. 

I keep my gas tank in the car filled.  I have the motorcycle. I’m going to check out the bicycle soon.  Grease it up.  It’s good to think ahead. Get essential repairs done while shops are still open. Certainly the local businesses can use the work and all one has to do is maintain social distancing but only for essentials. I told my friend to phone a garage and drop off the car leaving the keys and walk home paying by credit card and picking it up later.

It’s a slower paced world.  I am walking more and its healthier. I may return to a svelte shape rather than the pear I’ve become.

Last night I dreamed wonderful dreams. They were my recurrent place.  I’ve these places that I go to in my dream world .I believe they exist in the afterlife and the parallel world.  This one is the peninsula where my sailboat is. I’m sailing and at a marina. In this dream I’m actually flying in a balloon looking down at the expanses of ocean where great wooly sheep are running in the hundreds on the water or perhaps in shallows. The feelings I’m having are like the ecstasy I felt trade wind sailing all alone in the middle of the South Pacific. Back at the marina the men all have rifles and scopes and groups are going out hunting moose.  There’s so many moose in the hills. I walk by a female and talk to a fellow who respects my age and maturity and says, “It will be my first moose I’ve shot.. Nothing new for you in this.”  I smile.  A bit like my father smiled at me. The young man learning and the old man teaching.  Sharing knowledge.  The great gifts.  Wisdom not things.  I’m comforted in the dream by the families and mutual care. I’m with a woman I think I know , but she comes and goes in my dreams, probably afraid to stay.  I’m a fairly dangerous dude in all ways. I think I’ll shoot a moose in the afternoon. I hear one in my mind talking to me.  He’s told me where he is.  I don’t have to go yet. The young man hopefully will find him but I’ve oiled my gun and put it in the quad by my sailboat. The snow capped mountains are beautiful in the morning sun .

Last week I was given cherry cake in my dream and it tasted like ambrosia in my dream. I can’t remember tasting in my dreams but this was exquisite. I imagine older with death staring at us all , war and rumors of war, the haunting streets, the anxiety and all the heightened awareness which comes with anxiety, I’m escaping in my dreams. I don’t fear death and am wondering if I’m preparing to come back as a woman in a next life. Maybe this is just self soothing. As a man I’ve always been provider protector always caring for everyone. We only played dress up in good times or safe in side. Outside among strangers it was always suited up, even armed. The men’s suit jacket based on the 19th Century British military jacket. Now old I prefer to live in pyjama bottoms. Not the satin of Hefner, more the red tartan flannel of the scot.

I believe early Christians believed in reincarnation. I’m living in a multi verse now.  My mind is not reality.  Reality is this present. The dreams may just be escapism. I’m so exhausted after the days of tension that I love my bed and falling asleep.

Today I’ve woken without cough or sore throat or fever or tight lungs. I love that I don’t have to be with the sick and can go about my day like I normally do on the weekend, avoiding people. During the week I’m too much with people so this is not new.

More cures announced. The science is amazing. The speed of research light years ahead of my youth experiences of previous epidemics. . Advances in technology. So much fun watching Moore’s law real time.  

Good leadership from Mr. Trump. Singapore and Taiwan so brilliant.  I love their hand held temperature scanner. A patient told me they have them in construction work.  Dr. Bonnie  Henry doing really well.  Great BC CDC site.  I think there’s more that Mr. Trump and the western world know about this Communist China created virus.  There’s war within war.  I wouldn’t put it past the communists to try to collapse the economy to get “One World Order’ with the greedy power hungry UN dictators in control.  

I joked yesterday when I heard that China might have the first vaccine.

  “Sorry,” I said.  “They probably made this virus. I woudn trust a vaccine they made. I’ll wait for one MADE IN AMERICA”.  

The truth be told I’d love the one being made in Saskatchewan.  But the Israelis and Aussie New Zealanders have them. In the meantime the treatments just keep rolling out of the research labs. Anti virals and hydroxy chloroquine. 

Covid 19 Beginning of the wave

The city is surreal.  So few cars and people a bout.  Social isolation. Social distancing.  The SARS virus variation we called the Wuhan Flu and now Covid 19.  It’s made it to our shores from China, arriving mostly on jet. Some more carriers came from Iran and Italy.  Iran and China allies. 

The question is whether the release of the virus from the Wuhan labs was intentional or unintentional.  It’s never been seen before. The same argument used for Aids is being used for this virus. Animal human spread. That was a monkey. This was a bat.  The alternative is a bio weapon experiment gone bad or good. It remains to be seen.

The hellish lies of the pseudoscience of Climate Change has everyone skeptical.  Lawlessness and pipeline blockades with homeless tent cities had so many so utterly disappointed in the self serving government.  Now we’ve watched as PM Justin Trudeau has done most everything wrong imaginable. His not vetting migrants now continues with his lying about closing borders. By contrast Singapore has no deaths and using a hand held temperature scan checked all arrivals for fever the most common sympton of the respiratory disease.  

The Communist Chinese lost control of virus early and lied.  Fortunately for thousands a lead research doctor was a whistle blower and was severely punished and ultimately died like Jeffry Epstein.  Not a suicide but supposedly the disease he told the world about.  Thousands died in China.

The virus spreads. It’s novel. There is no natural immunity. Within a year perhaps 50% of the population will have contracted it.  Though mild comparatively for the young in 70% of cases ,those over 80 face a 15 % death rate. Without medical resources like IV’ and respirators the death rate jumps 5 fold.  

The Iranian Islam  religious police called everyone to the mosque.  This was the worst thing they could do. The stupidity of religion over science was no better shown in that sad gesture of dominance control and obedience.  A population culled by constant reign of terror gathered in the mosques and spread the disease. When the government was saying there were only 70 dead , families of friends were telling them everyone was dying. Sites of mass graves were seen from satellites.  The Iranian Islam dictatorship continued to lie.

Italy was caught off guard.  They’d been all but destroyed by the migrant crisis and now Iranians escaped there.  Tourists and businessmen returning and spread the disease. Though they have more health care resources than Canada, they have the oldest population.  They self quarantined.  Theystood in unity on balconies singing opera arias.  

Social distancing saved thousands but the health care resources were overwhelmed.  The old died. The immuno compromised, those with pre existing lung disease or heart disease or diabetes. Those on immunosuppressive drugs.  But most recovered.  70,000 recovered was the score at one point. Hundreds of thousands contracting it.  Thousands dying but tens of thousands recovering.

President Trump closed the border. He was condemned by the Democrats for closing the border to Europe and China.  PM Trudeau by contrast dithered.  Perhaps he smoked a bong. He probably changed his socks. His wife had been partying with the elite in London while Rome burned and she returned to Ottawa.  She went into isolation.  So did he. He takes any excuse to take a holiday.  Nachos call.  

Meanwhile Mr. Trump was at the helm and Boris in England and locally our NDP leader Mr. Horgan was doing an amazing job.  The Health Minister Mr. Dix and the Public Health officer Dr. Bonnie Heng all were doing everything they could despite the loose cannon in Ottawa. Their enlightened leadership has saved thousands of lives. Rapid sports and theatre closings, school clothings, excellent media and online communication. The National Post publishing excellent summaries. After a decade of propaganda even the CBC was back to true journalism and not creative writing.

The streets emptied. The exponential spread was slowed.  The wave of cases has begun. But the health care system is geared up and ready to respond.  The Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta has kept everyone informed.  John Hopkins, Stanford and Harvard have all risen to the occasion with amazing research, inter departmental and international collaboration.  The Genome was quick learned. Vaccines were rapidly in development.  San Diego which had lead the way with Ebola vaccine research was again at the forefront.  Seattle human trials of vaccine have already begun.  New Zealand and Australia are also in line. Israel is ready to test a vaccine. Saskatchewan in Canada is actually a leader in research.  In the US Gilead Pharmaceuticals that developed the Aids anti viral and prophylactic drugs has developed an anti viral now in human tests that has cleared the virus. In India 4 medications have worked.  Anti malarials  chloroquine have passed the control group human trials and can be used now to treat the worst cases. 

Spring is in the air. Daffodils blooming.  Crocuses. Even cherry blossoms.  We just need to get through the next few weeks of the WAVE without our health care resources being overwhelmed and we’ll make it collectively to summer. 

The virus doesn’t like heat. Global warming is the cure.  The plants are happy. They like CO2.  

I’m working in a clinic with a Covid 19 test lab there. The staff are amazing.  The human spirit shines.  In these dark times there’s so much to celebrate.  The economic downturn is to come.  There was a glych with evil hearts hoarding toilet paper and cleanser. But overall it’s amazing. Billions around the globe have responded to the cry for quarantine and not spread the disease to the sick and old. 

Humans rocks.  This too shall pass. As Mr. Trump declares , “we are going to win.”  

We will prevail.  

Trans Scripts, Part 1: The Women

I almost didn’t share this because I felt guilty for going to the Firehall Arts Centre when so many venues were closing. We’d had tickets to the Pacific Theatre but they’d cancelled their run because of the Carona Virus.  The notice had come out encouraging all venues over 200 to close. The Firehall had only 150 and reduced seats to 70%. 

Our friends were women in the show.  We were so looking forward to this intimate evening.  Playwright Paul Lucas had interviewed over 75 trans people around the world to develop this amazing show.  It was co directed by Cameron Mackenzie and Fay Nas. Josie Boyce, Carolyn Dimmer, Amy Fox, Quanah Style, Morgane Oger, Sabrina Symington and Julie Vas were featured. All of them are highly accomplished women who acted their parts superbly. We actually thought they were telling their own stories, the sharing was so intimate.  

The show reminded me of Quilters a play in which several women discuss their lives at turn of the century Canada as they quilt, the stories taken from letters to family in there former homes in England.

This real and present expression of each of the contributions was so dynamic we were transfixed. Stories of suicide attempts, physical attacks, addiction and recovery,  shame and cross dressing, coming to the realization of the meaning of their difference then the process of transformation. It was such a moving story of relationship and the growing sense of safety and meaning from originating as outsiders and objects so often of bullying to finding their tribe.. Having made a pilgrimage in New York I loved the references to Stonewall.  The reminder of the very recent legal gains in Canada against discrimination against transsexuals was a stark reminder of majority power.  I have known a hundred such individuals and felt that the play captured the essence of their experience.  Sex and spirituality were both addressed openly.  

Zee Theatre and Frank Theatre in association with Firehall Theatre presented the evening.  I love the venue each time I go and do hope that this show will be done again after the present viral ‘love in the time of cholera’ passes.

Having cross dressed over the years, my first main stage role in acting as a teen ager being a woman, I have some personal appreciation of the stigma and shame associated with being queer ,especially as a Christian, where I’ve know the greatest support ,as well as having to face the hardest challenges.  My closest friend Laura and I so enjoyed the presentation which captured and expressed so well the experience,  of mixture curse and blessing.

Saturday March 14, 2020

I began this blog with several aims:
1. It was to be a journal. I’ve kept journals since I was a teen. I have cardboard boxes of years of life, all the woes and Suffering of Poor Werther, the jobs and work and enlightenment, the friends and wives and family  Even I find it boring and repetitive.  Yet I didn’t like it when my ex wife at a moment of evil spite stole these very personal accounts.  She by contrast didn’t care for history and destroyed history of various kinds.  She didn’t like the truth and preferred a marketed image reality.  I never knew how deeply disturbed some folk were until I saw how she could twist the truth and thoroughly believe her lies and reject the evidence directly in front of her. She was called a borderline personality disorder what was once called a female sociopath.  I was gaslighted.  Her narcissism learned in the drama and trauma of her childhood long before I encountered the fall out was a defence terribly constructed.  I actually had the arrogance to believe I could ‘rescue’ her from her self loathing and conniving and her perspective of rank paranoia.  I truly believed and still do that I am a child of God and a channel of that love when I am not myself afraid or twisted.  The experiment failed and I was quite thankful to get out alive .  The women in the family had a history of attempted murder and mayhem.  I am thankful that I come from similar stock and we both found ourselves channelling our ancestors who lived by tooth and nail.  I left when her physical violence and drug addiction became too much.  She was right , I didn’t love her enough. I was afraid. I fell back to my first life saving course where I learned that to be of any use I must not die in the process of rescuing another.  I’ve probably never forgiven myself that weakness.  What kind of male praying mantis am I not to offer my head Saint John like to the queen’s whim. So the journal is a personal account of skewed reality seen through the eyes of subjectivity and self pity.
2. I wanted to keep a record of my writing of my profession and the ideas and observations I had in psychiatry and addiction. I’m a specialist in medicine and I have always planned to write some books about the good in my fields of endeavour, hopefully sharing insights and experiences.  I put together a books based on these writing and musings using a cut and paste and edit method which was partly successful.  When I published my first book of poetry I was interested in learning the ‘art form publishing’ but wasn’t that interested in it.  I live everything to do with writing and once had a total fascination with fountain pens,  inks and paper. .  Now I love my word processor and keyboard.  I’m presently working on a cut and paste book about the life of my dog taking the pictures and writing of our journeys together from my blog.  I have the outline for a book on psychiatry and a book on recovery and will incorporate cut and paste items from the blog when I get down to actually producing this greater work, the book
3.  I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences of God and spirituality. I’ve been on about God since I was a child and praying by my bedside with my mother, going to church, becoming the president of the amalgamated baptist youth groups, teaching sunday school, studying theological at University of Winnipeg, becoming a yogi disciple in the 70’s, studying comparative religions, doing courses in Christian Spirituality at St. Mark’s Catholic College, Regent College, Vancouver School of Theology, and taking on line courses in Hebrew as well as attending Bible Study with the Baptist, United Church of Canada, Anglicans and Pentecostal all the while learning more about Buddhism and Taoism and Suffism, meditating for decades formally, with monks and religious leaders, attending ashram and eventually getting a master degree in theological studies of spiritulaity on line from the University of California. I thought it marvellous that the original school I’d done ‘experience diploma’ with got bought by Pakistan and was eventually shamed by the mainstream. What irony.  Shocking.  I continue to play hide and seek with God, am a Christian and pray all the time, meditating daily and enjoy best talking about God in the presence of others, considering that Jesus said, where two or more are gathered in my name there too am I.  So at least Gilbert and I are gathering in Jesus’s name daily.  Jesus means ‘god within’ and Christ means ‘god will come again’.
4. I was once a ‘yuppie’ very upper middle class, in the midst of the leaders and shakers of the world and hob nabbed with the greats.  I loved the phrase ‘lives of quiet desperation’.  I had trained as a psychiatric psychotherapist and loved Jung’s terms “persona and shadow’.  I was interested in the ‘self’ and the finding of the ‘core self’ and the freeing of patients ‘creativity’.  I was trained to confront and challenge and very much enjoyed releasing people from their demons. My first interest was personality disorder especially borderlines.  I came to see how borderline personality disorder was untreated post traumatic stress disorder until proven otherwise. I was able to watch patient after patient in therapy with me become free and move along on their developmental course.  Mental health is the ability to love, work and play.  So I used the external qualifiers as evidence of successful therapy.  Men and women alone went on to marry.  Women had children.  Workers were promoted. Students went from failing to getting A’s.  Loners connected with their communities.  Suicidals stopped trying to kill themselveds.  Paranoids learned to trust again.  Phobics overcame their phobias.  It was clearly ‘evident’ subjectively and objectively that I was doing excellent work. At one point I had a 2 years waitlist and mostly had word of mouth referral for therapy from successful patients.   I was always praying and felt touched by grace.
Psychotherapy was a process very akin to the surgery I’d begun doing.  It wasn’t ‘counselling’.  It wasn’t massage. If you didn’t encounter or address the negative transference you were merely flashing your tit and feeding the infant and keeping the infant dependent. The difficulty was in the developmental adolescent phrase and leaving home phrase of therapy.  If the patient continued to ‘need’ you then you were like a surgical patient who never was discharged from hospital.  Meanwhile I have seen people off and on over decades much like any other medical condition where the persons’ condition waxes and wanes and further brief therapy is needed. My work with trauma got me into emergency departments  and jails and asylums and working with military, police and refugees.
During this time I was still associated with the university and the hospitals and institutions and the dominant authoritative structures. I was increasingly aware that Owen Barfield was right about ‘saving the appearances’ and that Scott Peck was right on with his book “People of the Lie’.  I became increasingly aware of what is best called evil but has a variety of politically correct equivilants like sociopaths and toxic work places and psychopaths and takers and soul suckers. The list goes on.
 I began to see that patients who did not get better were often limited by others who were invested in their misery and poverty.  I found myself increasingly in the realm of the social aspects of patient care fighting the good fight and seeing that husbands wives parents, bosses and elected officials and judges and beurocrats were often corrupt greedy and dangerous emotionally physically and morally.  I began to see that they lived for the darkness. I met the shadow people and in my personal journal, a little bout with alcohol and marijuania and the illegal industries associated with the production, I was surprised that I became addicted to tobacco and that I couldn’t quit smoking until I quit marijuana and alcohol and a year later I didn’t start them up again but concluded that the alcohol was the personal gateway drug. Certainly trauma was the gateway drug and I was diagnosed with PTSD after repeated betrayal,  sexual abuse,  and countless near death experiences.
 It’s hard to say because I really was addicted to smoke.  It was only much later that I regularly drank but I saw how I was impaired though not ‘that impaired’ and that my ‘culture’ was commonly people just like me though most further along the rabbit hole. They all ‘looked good on the outside.’  I remember offending a  leading government power broker who subsequently tried to ‘ruin’ me in every way possible for ‘my sake’.  I’d told her that the acronym for FINE was ‘fucked in side and nice exterior’.  This was the street version of Jung’s Persona and Shadow.  I didn’t know at the time that people who were most upset at the word ‘fucked’ were themselves usually perverted. I was seeing these very insane personality disorders in suits in my office their sexual proclivities were bizarre but they presented as ‘good people’ by ‘the lady protests too much’.
I saw that transparency and openess were positives but dangerous. I wanted to share in recovery which began 20 plus years ago that the ‘inner experience’ was diverse.  The critical matter was the behaviour.  I was seeing more and more invasion of the individual on behalf of the State just like the Catholic church and Islam invaded the ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ of their servants. It was one thing to ‘confess’ and ‘share’ in private but it was another to be interrogated and threatened such that people lived lives of quiet desperation behind self inflicted walls. We have two forms of coercion which are clearly good and bad depending.  They’re called asylums and jails. I worked on both.
I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings, as crazy as they are as evidence that ‘courage ‘ is not ‘absence of fear’ but rather doing good despite fear. I had seen so many people, especially in the halls of recovery,, who were ashamed of their thoughts and feelings and literally frozen. I wanted to show that I as a leader and a relative success by so many societal standards wasn’t ‘particularly sane in my thinking.’  I wanted people to consider their thoughts as we do the free for all in the meeting before we edit the group and go on to decide behaviour .  This is indeed the creative process.  In my office I’d seen leaders of the country, world champions, multi millionaires and leading military brass, priests, chiefs, scientists, bishops, and whatever world acclaimed individual one could think of.  Their inner lives were mostly more mixed up and confused and troubled but they did what I did, they sought help and shared.  Their behaviour was mostly admirable and superior to those who isolated. I’d spent years in ;psychotherapy training to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist only to said to be insane based on the ‘proof that I’d seen a psychiatrist’ by one of the local sociopaths psyhiatrists who had never seen anyone since he graduated psychiatry and saw his success in dollar signs. He was so poor that all he had was money. All he sought was power. An inferiority complex with egomania.  So common in addiction.
I saw that the personality disorders I was treating which didn’t get better principally  had drug and alcohol problems. The course in therapy then was as dramatic as it is today.  Drugs and alcohol really interfered with learning and coping.  As I moved through my own recovery seeing that it was as much a matter of association and what the bible calls ‘principalities’ I really did have to consider tribal association and effect of tribe.  This is a better word than ‘culture’ which has been skewed from it’s origins to describe ‘cultures of addiction’ and ‘cultures of pedophiles’.  I prefer to say ’tribes of addicts’.  The tribe is our history  Culture once referred to the highest and we spoke of ‘cultured people’ but today we are faced with ‘reductionism’ and various forces which affect individuals mightily.

So I wanted to share my journal, something that for years sat in brown card board boxes .  I have as a result had wonderful discussions and made great friends and found like minded people through this process. It was an experiment. A stream of consciousness experiment which was useful in a time when the world was safer.

The attack on freedom of speech in Canada and the outright war on the west and especially the war on Christianity which held truth and love highest is making this idea of Canadianism a bit more treacherous.  I consider this trend to openess a peculiar Canadian trait and all the friends I know from other countries are astonished at my openness because in their ‘country , culture and religion’ they could not do what I do.  They sometimes call me demonic because it is so alien for them to encounter a psychiatrist who speaks openly.  This is just what Canada was a bout.

Most people live lives of fear and die of internalized tension and stress. My interest in ’psychosomatic illness’ began with a wish to see the effects of psychotherapy in the physical world. Over the years I’ve ‘cured’ but mostly prolonged the lives of individuals by addressing their shame, anger, and fear, and helping them  work through this ‘anger turned inward’ which presents as pain, physical disability, fatigue.  I am limitted in what I can do because of the industry which exists to perpetuate this but it’s tied to my work with addiction.  I don’t take credit for anything I do When I did surgery I had  pride but only because of the illusions of action.  Philosophically and spiritually I’ve known that I’m just part of a vast process but I have done the right thing. I’ve been a member of a team and directed the team.  The team humility is to give credit to a pill or what I’ve called the ‘jelly bean’ but the pill is the magic of years of silence and countless doctors and caregivers .

I’m just the kazoo in that symphony and yet I know the kazoo is critical. The kettle drums are out of control these days and often the string section is whining on and on when the brass are constantly contained.  I’ve never had a solo kazoo performance in my life except in my mind , that place of mental masturation and folly.  In the world we are as the natives say ‘all my relations’ .  We’re all interconnected.

I was taught by Dr. Carl Ridd that we were made in the image of God and that’s god’s imagination and I’ve always been part of God.  I am star stuff.  As my sponsor Scotty used to say “God doesn’t make junk’.

So those are reasons for this blog.

I”ve also loved photography combined with words, those coffee table books. The blog lets me do that.  A combined platform.
So far God is happy with me.  Not that I am but I know that God is.  I worry I’m not ready for death and am more addicted to life the older I get.  I am struggling with concepts of ‘letting go’ and ’surrender’.  Thy will be done not my will.

Thank you Jesus.

Thursday in March

I’ve woken to a new day and am thankful. I’ve said prayers. I’ve said hello to Gilbert and given him pets. Last night he crawled up on the bed when the heat went out and joined me. Somewhere around 5 am despite the electric heating blanket and him beside me I realized it was colder than normal. Turning on the gas stove I saw that the flame was very low. Throwing on a low coat over the black silk pyjamas I went out side and changed the propane tanks. The moon was beautiful.  

The heat came on and by the time I awoke the place was cozy and warm for meditation and morning exercise.  I made coffee then, the Ethiopian, best in the world, I roasted myself this weekend.  It was delicious with a dab of cream and a dab of honey. I love morning coffee.   

Last night I ate the last of the Wild Game Pepperoni I was gifted by Kayla thanks to her husbands prowess as a hunter.  It tasted so good I thought it was moose but I believe it’s venison. Best Pepperoni I’ve had in years. I must find out who their butcher is and pay more attention to hunting this year. I tend to play with my motorcycles and quads, shooting targets and sleeping in the sun out in the woods rather than seriously hunting. I used to get moose, deer or bear every year and last year I just got grouse and the year before rabbits. I had a great time in the camper though.  I read a lot and told people I was hunting. Walked gilbert and barbecued and lounged and told people I was hunting. We did hike about with a rifle some but really I was just glad to be out in the woods alone with Gilbert.

This morning I’ve enjoyed the yogurt and granola.  Other’s take pictures of their meals. I write about mine. It’s a devolution to the gustatory realms. No wonder I always think about breasts.  There’s a low testosterone epidemic in Canada. I think of a sex change in old age.  Men are hated and loathed today in Canada so it seems a good time to try the other team.  I don’t know what to do when I grow up. What to do when I retire. More of this providing and protecting and being condemned and humiliated for doing a good job doesn’t look like much fun. My father went fishing. I’m considering that. Most of my friends get into garages.  I like skirts and think I’d like to have breasts I took with me. It’s a bit late to be a homosexual porn star so the whole sexual world has less appeal or interest.  It all seems like work.  I feel tired and weary and don’t really have the zest of youth anymore.  I laugh a lot though. I do appreciate the absurd.  I do my work and pay attention. I’m present. There’s a spiritual presence I’m closer too but I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do for more than a day or weeks or months at a time. 

The world doesn’t seem much different. There’s been this constant shreik and demands from the Sharia Communist lobby to give them more money for the UN manufacturered we’re all going to die because the ice caps will boil and melt away. Industry has moved forward and many of the ills of the modern age have been and continue to be addressed without the self important chorus of doom saying or need for loss of freedom and central control.  All this is constant background noise since the lies and doom prophecy of ‘Silent Spring’.  Then there was rich old Al Gore. And now we have teen doom star Greta and a fifth of children having nightmares.  As a teen I feared the Vietnam War would propel the Cold War to a Nuclear Holocaust. We survived that.  

Today the Corona Virus is front and centre.  I’ve been in the Aids epidemic seeing the daily death and living in terror I’d be the next health care provider to contract the deadly disease.  Then there was Ebola and SARS and they were real.  I’m a doctor so health care is my bailiwick.  I see the death by Fentanyl and the mismanagement of that but I chose not to have unprotected anal sex during the Aids epidemic or to use needles and I’m not having fentanyl by needle or smoke so I’ve been able to come through these crisis. Yet Coronavirus is just the flu and it’s contagious. Anyone can catch it. I’m germphobic as it. Ptsd trauma , seeing all the people die of infection. I know Pneumonia is an old man’s friend. Death is next door. I’m already at the twilight of my life. I’m over 60. This is the last quarter of my life.

I dont feel prepared to die. I’ve not prayed enough. I’ve not loved enough. I’ve not had enough fun. I’ve been too worried. I’ve feared too much. I’ve worked too hard. I’ve devoted myself to saving lives and done endless hours of study and countless hours and days of overtime and sheer focus. I’ve given my patients what a mother gives her children. I’ve done my very best and been criticized not for errors of morbidity and mortality or stopping suicide or homicide or convincing people to carry on, but for saying ‘fuck’ and offending uncultured ignorant people from culture where women are killed and their are slaves and yet I’m the terrible one because I say ‘fuck this...it’s bullshit’.  The fact is I’ve interfered with criminals making money by psychopathic malingering and lying to get drugs. The boss is in league with criminals.  I’ve devoted my life to health care and helping good people to do well and now the government is an extension of a crime family devoted to abortion and euthanasia and the destruction of the health care industry of Canada.

Meanwhile I’m probably going to have to use the health care system and watching my father and mother’s final years and visitting hospitals I’m not concerned about doctors and nurses but I can see the massive mismanagement and corruption. Focus on whether or not a doctor says fuck or which bathrooms can be used by who means we don’t have MRI”s and and we don’t have bed side nursing.  We have all this political correctness. I saw the management up close. They spoke to me and they didn’t care that I saved lives They didn’t care that I had showed up every day and worked in the toughest most dangerous assignments and done my duty and was there always on the front line where they in the wisdom or cowardice had long agor retreated into posh offices on the Mars station removed from reality talking with the insaniety of my schizophrenic patients drunk on their own arrogance and pride. 

I’m down on the street and I still can’t seem to stop saying this is ‘fucked’.  I don’t know a better word. I talked to a woman about her cause for drinking to oblivion and learned that the basis was her body dysmorphia and feeling that she was sexually unattractive. Doctors are taught in Canada to conform to sharia. I was supposed to refer her back to the women doctors who she’d not disclosed this fear too. I was supposed to do a whole group of things that are politically correct but she might not live to do. I referred her to a surgeon and I’ll get the solution she needs and her children will have a mother but it’s not the way the management would have done it.  Management is responsible for the massive deaths and street people and the sins of omission and the greed.  

I’m washing my hands. I’m taking zinc.  I feel old and vulnerable.

I’m unprepared for my own death.

I’m thinking about silly things like politics and stoner TRudeau. I’m renting spaces in my thoughts for free to old resentments. I’m not trusting God.  Jesus said Do not be afraid. I’m money in the bank and I could just leave today and sail my boat on the high seas again. The management says it’s ‘Just a job!!!!”.  They have shown they only care for pensions and money. I’ve lost my money repeatedly by going to the place of need. I’ve chosen love instead of money. I’ve lost so much money. I’ve been a fool not to be a lawyer or banker.  As a doctor I could have stayed in government and lived the fat cat life but I thought family men deserved those places because they had such challenges at home. I was single and free to move into the areas of greatest risk. Today I look back on going through the ice and walking freezing being followed by a polar bear to save that kid.  I remember looking into the scared eyes of the guy pointing a gun at me. I think of the blood and contagion and the crazy guy with the machete who’d just chopped up the neighbour. I laugh when i watch on the tv and they say ‘wait for back up’ and all these times the shit just hits the fan and I walk into a situation where a person is psychotic or bleeding or coughing up and having diarrhea. Guts on the floor.  The screaming. God I hated the keening. Trying to focus on work and bystanders not knowing that they’re supposed to stop trying to drama queen. The car accidents and motor cycle accidents. Limbs pointing in the wrong way. Brains coming out of ears.

Oh well it was a good life.

I believed that it was a ‘calling’ and a ‘profession’. I never thought of it as a ‘job’ and when she diminished me and the god and service and cursed her own profession and cursed me and my work and the work of all the people I so enjoyed but she was crazy and she was given the highest position in my world, a place where she was a token , a truly stupid person who never deserved her role. But now we have stoned skateboarders at the top.

I’m afraid of dying.

I’m not ready to die.

I’ve got to somehow be prepared to let go of breathing. I’d addicted to breath. I know that. I’ve stopped my heart in meditation. I’ve slowed my breathing so I could fast on breath. I’ve fasted without food for weeks on end.

But I’m still afraid.

I’ve seen spirits rising from the dead. I’ve seen the light. God’s face has appeared. I’ve been blessed by countless fey experiences of reassurance. I’ve lived in the flow, known the 4th dimension.

But I’m not ready for death. I’m clinging to breathing. I’m afraid of gasping for air. I couldn’t breathe on the plane coming back from India. I panicked in the confines without medical staff or equipment or a stream to escape too, without Gilbert at my side. I couldn’t get my breath. I had to to use all my powers of concentration to slow my heart and till  the cough had dislodged the plug and air entered.

I’ve incubated and bagged so many people. I’d addicted to that silly O2 CO2 and NO mix.  I like the breathing and I like my heart beating.

I loved my mother telling me she was tired and ready to go.

I watched dad in fear those years and then knowing that Jesus was there.

I know Jesus is here. I know Jesus means God Within and Christ, God will come again. We’ve played hide and seek my whole life. I’ve know the Hound of Heaven yet I worry like my loving aunt. I’m too afraid. Will God be there at the time. How long will I wait.

My God My God why hast thou forsaken me.

I know now why the Hail Mary prayer has that inscrutable line for a young person but one that makes such sense now, “Hail Mary full fo grace the lord is with be , blessed art thou, ............be with me now and in hour of my death. “ I want you with me in the nano seconds of my death. Fuck the hour.  I’m like Monty Python’s sketch of the men on the cross.  

I know the story of the two sets of prints in the sand.

I know this but I feel afraid. I’m always so afraid. I was so afraid in the nights with the Aids patients. I was so afraid in the nights with the babies with meningitis.  I was always so afraid.  I’m a coward.  I’m a sissy slut too if the truth be known.  I’ve had all the macho manly sex stuff in my day but now I just want to cuddle beside her in the fetal position with my dog beside me and I’m like the Billy Hay in the movie in Morocco. I was afraid in Morocco with those arabs swinging th short swords at my head chasing me through the Kazbah angry and screaming infidel.  Trying to kill me because I believe in Christ.  

That group of ten attacked me and punched me and stole my cross screaming ‘infidel’ in Athens.

Then the day I walked on Davie street in high heels and that lovely lose night dress those four men who were later caught for beating up transgendered followed me but I got away, going to the light.

Now I look back and I’ve a good life. I’ve cared. I’ve done my duty. I’ve sacrificed and served. I’ve no guilt. I’ve confessed.  I liked the pain even. I liked it all this life of sorrow tears and laughter.

Now I’m not ready to die.  I’m addicted to life. I’m holding on and life is to worn like a lose robe.  Pants are too tight. I miss the sarong in the south. Mostly I miss my khaki sailing shorts and the weeks alone at sea with trade winds and the dog and the cat.

Sunday in March

Coronavirus - 19 is all in the news. My germophobia has kicked in .Normally I’m in denial, immortal, surrounded by disease, praying to God, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.” But I do fear.  I have had a couple of flu this year, coming back from India and again this spring. I know the stats for Covid 19 aren’t terribly frightening given that the actual flu and lots of other diseases are more deadly. Yet I’m in that age category and am weary with coughing and disturbed sleep. I also think by the world response to this virus that there’s something we’re not being told.  That it was a weaponized virus escape from a Wuhan military complex seems reasonable or why else the massive response.  But then the fake news makes everything so dubious.
I didn’t make it to church again. Laura’s flu followed mine by a week and she’s still struggling much like I did a week ago. Now I’ve just a little sore throat and post nasal drip with fatigue.  I work with people and have indeed minimized my contacts with crowds. We went to the mall and were surprised at the empty shelves in Costco. There’s survival in the air.  I’m a survivalist so that much ahead of the game.  It will all blow over. A few weeks and then the next ‘skies falling, let me tax you more’ will begin.  The Trudeau government is spending the cupboards bare and literally raping the economy. Warren Buffet the Democrat has pulled away from Trudeau because of the insecurity. Business doesn’t want to invest. The billions of dollars of loss due to the government mismanagement of the blockades.  What’s next?
I’m praying.  I feel tired and have a sense that my life is ending. I’m past retirement age and for the first time in my life since I worked in a restaurant I’m going to work for a pay cheque. The College of Physicians and Surgeons shouted at me when I said ‘medicine was a calling and profession’ for me. “It’s just a job, Dr. Hay.”  They’re calling me a ‘health care worker’ and I find it hard not to just work at the lowest common denominator which is represented by the government.  The joke was always if you worked for the government you were ruined for real work because everyone works to rule and does the least except in times of real emergency.  The government jobs in medicine now are 2 and 3 times the value of clinical work.  I’m at the end of my career and really enjoyed the patients and the learning and the doing the very best I could. I loved taking the Hippocratic Oath and treating every patient as a challenge and child of God. I was moved by the missionary spirit but now I am told it’s a communist country and I’m just a ‘health care worker’ and I see that the laziest ‘health care workers’ are promoted. I think of Venezuela.  I loved medicine for the ‘meritocracy’.  I loved saving lives and helping get people well. I loved being on the A team. But now it’s all mediocrity and we’re rewarded for doing the least.  The specialists are literally told to see the patients no more than every 6 months even if seeing them more would be better health care. The bullying is both overt and subtle. I go to work afraid of the College police akin to the religious police of Iran or any other police organization intent on dominance, micromanagement and control.  Jack boot mentality. All the while trying to be seen as PC caring. It’s so facetious.  They hate doctors and don’t care for patients except in the ‘idea’. They live in a space station.  Then added to that is I’ve chosen to work with the most dangerous patients and least back up. So many unpredictable people in the world of drugs and alcohol. So many people want letters not to work and they simply aren’t sick in the traditional sense and some have other jobs, under the table, and new migrants seem to know the ropes the best.  Meanwhile I have no time for medicine and am coopted by the beurocratic mismanagement system to rubber stamp the money games.  Creating delays with paper and winning the gambles.  I’ve a certain jaded perspective and see the small number as the whole. The majority of people I know are overwhelmed by the stress of government waste and pressure. No one can afford housing. It’s so desperately sad. All these people with disability and on fixed income suicidal with rent evictions. At least the NDP brought in some rent increase restrictions but too late for the old people.  I see aging now as a medieval things. Doctors and engineers are going back to work.  My colleagues don’t even think of retiring because they’re paying exorbitant education costs for children at home in university.
Added to all this steady state ‘stuff’ is the fear of ‘contagion’.  It’s the plagues.  I didn’t get caught with the ‘climate change cargo religion lie’ we’re all going to die in 12 years because of the 97% consensus lies of the Communist IPCC but this latest collective fear mongering got me. I look at BREXIT and see them rejecting the invasion of violent young Islam migrants.  My patients tell me their families are afraid to leave home in France because of migrant muslim gangs attacks the old and the young boys and girls.  They live like prisoners in their country. Here we see less and less law and order, terrorists getting paid millions and no consequence for criminals blockading roads or destroying public property.  It’s mob rule.
I’m actually feeling fear shaking hands and touching people.  Jesus said, “Do not be afraid’.  Years of sickness catching up on me. The scabies in the north, all the pneumonias, catching TB from my patients, barely surviving the AIDS crisis with the demented aids biters like zombies chomping at my face and hands, now this latest.
It was good to hold Laura this weekend.  Hugging her. So what if she’s contagious as hell.  Then there’s Gilbert who rolls in dead fish and licks everyone and cuddles everyone. All this germ free behaviour is insane.
I was reminded of the WWI vet I treated my first year in country general practice. He’d been gassed on Vimy Ridge.  “The bullet had to have your name on it,’ he said.  The soldiers I know in my practice are much tougher stuff and have seen it all.  Like us doctors.  I’ve touched tens of thousands of sick men women and children.
I’m coming to terms with aging.  I am really looking forward to camping.  We contacted a campground we were at yesterday to see if we could reserve the spot we were at last year.  I loved the tranquility.  Just Laura and me and the dog.
I’m afraid of planes now too. I’ve no desire to fly. I look at friends in distant places and want to go to Ireland and Scotland but I don’t want to fly right now.  I’m weary of planes. I love my camper. I miss sailing.I’d love to be out on the ocean in the fair winds and following seas.  I’d love to be at anchor in the evening drinking coffee in the cockpit, scratching Gilbert’s back.
I really am blessed. I’ve walked Gilbert this morning.  The sun was shining. Spring is coming. Not fast enough. The virus doesn’t like the sun. I would love to be in Arizona . We looked at the distance to drive to Reno. We could drive there with the camper next winter taking Gilbert and getting a winter drying out experience. I fear like I just survive the wet cold of Canadian winter with the flues and pneumonia and the fatigue.  That will teach me for smoking. But I never thought I’d live this long. Plane crasses, bullets whizzing by my head.  I’m not supposed to be here waiting for my breath to be taken.  Pneumonia, the friend of the old man.  I keep believing I’m supposed to get some relief after years of services. That’s the psychological expectation that steals my joy today. I have a wonderful life. I’m blessed beyond my wildest dreams. I’m getting over this flu. I was swimming yesterday,. I walked Gilbert a couple of long walks this weekend. I hugged the beautiful Laura and enjoyed looking at her beauty.  We watched Vera and I barbecued fabulous steaks. We are blessed. We’re alive.  We’ve great family and friends. I need to get more into the gratitude. I’ve been napping. I enjoy sleeping.  Day light saving finally. I love the light.
Thank you Jesus.  God before me, god beside me, god behind me, god above and below me , inside and outside.  Protect me Lord. Keep me safe, Let me know you more dearly be with you more and let me serve you more.  Thank you Lord Jesus Christ.

First Friday Morning in March

My wake up song is the beautiful Christian song. “I believe”.  I can gauge m motivation for the day by the number of times I hit the snooze bar.  This morning I hit it once. Gilbert, the cockapoo, sleeps under the bed in his little dog cave, with toys and rubber bones. 

As the song came round for the second try at calling me to enjoy the day, I hit the snooze button and Gilbert pounced on my head. He’d climbed up on the bed. He’s my wet alarm clock.  He licked my face and squirmed all over me till I got up.

I just have to make the bathroom.  I like the expression “relieve myself.’  My bladder is always a participant in my morning ritual. It’s vote is always to get up and when I do it wants to have the first say.  Next I simply sit and meditate.  That whole getting out of bed, going to the washroom, greeting Gilbert is a whole lot of drama. 

 Now I pray, just a fancy word for talking with God and meditation is listening. My prayer and meditation usually begin with, ‘here I am, God. Thank you for getting me through the night and waking me this morning. Is there anything special you want from me.  I’m here to serve. You are my Lord. I’m ready.  Take all of me.”

Then I try listening to my breathing. It’s that simple.  I don’t last long. When I was young I meditated with monks from dawn to dusk but now I’m stretching it if I can get 15 minutes in.  

I love coffee. The coffee sings to me.  I end the meditation with stretching.  Stretching is the key to not having back pain. Dr. Stan Jung the chiropracter and rehab medicine PhD taught me some simple stretches, those bending at the waist and toe touching kind. Then I do sit ups.The great rheumatologists, Dr. Klingkoff,  Dr. Gillies and Dr. Chalmers before them always preached the importance of maintaining ‘core strength’.  Certainly Dr. Hamilton Hall taught this too. It speaks about the necessary exercise for a relatively pain free existence.  In his Back Doctor book., Dr. Hall had many great insights to managing back pain. The Canadian Back Institute teaches this too.

A day doesn’t go by at the office without someone complaining of back pain or some other soft tissue pain but are unwilling to do the exercises I simply had to do and continue to do because the pain is so great.  I’m thankful for the insights of these great doctors. My friend, Laura works with rheumatologists and shares their secrets with me whenever I moan.  

As a ‘psychiatrist’ I know it’s all in my head. I probably laid down some early memories and these ‘rituals’ address the need for self soothing and anxiety reduction.

Jesus said, Do not be afraid. 

I’ve a tendency to worry. Worrying is the basis of half the pain.  

Nothing is better for moving along in the morning than Ethiopian coffee. I get the green beans from an East African shop in Burnaby then roast them myself. I started with a frying pan but have moved up to an electric roaster. I grind the beans and so enjoy watching that little Italian expresso machine dripping pure black gold.  I add honey and just a touch of cream to that then sit down.

I have to check my mail each morning simply because I regularly get important mail that needs to be looked at. I get a lot of spam and am repeatedly getting rid of the spam mail. Then I grab a yoghurt and today a blue berry scone from Cobbs and read Facebook. 

 I really like the humor and I like seeing the regular Face Book friends, many of whom I’ve come to admire because they’re irrepressible.  I had a study group in Medical School and these guys and girls, a bout half dozen were bright and unusual people with sacrilegious ideas and spiritual insights, brilliant senses of truly off the wall humor and the latest insights into the world news. It was before everyone was offended and the level of academic an personal achievements had taught us not to play social sheriff. Canada was a free country then a new ideas and discussion was always welcome.The left wing emphasis on ‘ad hominem’ , the greatest evidence of low brow wit was meted out only in humorous amounts. Sarcasm certainly was present and even ridicule but never in the bullying thug life way that shows up today. 

 I’ve a group of folk on FbI’ve come to know who are like like and remind me of those heady heartfelt passionate and witty days.  Deborah, Sandra, Virginia, Reg, Nick, Virginia and of course Laura.  My friend Laura is forever posting ‘sweet stuff’.  Randy, an amazing man and nurse has interesting iconic humor and is presently posting a collection of the celebrities from childhood. I have a wider selection of recovery friends and enjoy seeing the recovery news and inspiration. I love the Hope Dealer. I like Shaila the FB outlaw. I love the Rob is ever creating in the welders cave. The Recovery jail comedian  has  humor that truly not what my mother would approve of but I can’t help but think what a miracle recovery is for this gentleman to be no longer drinking or doing drugs but out of jail and making people laugh instead. I love seeing guys I know from my home group years ago. They post of pictures of beautiful wives and children, like Darren and Cait, and it just makes me feel good.  Steve and George inspire me and Marty makes me laugh. I love seeing the photography of Kevin and the astronomical photography of my nephew Graeme. I love the painting of Ragina. I love the pictures of Children, Shannon’s limo shot and Anna sweethearts. I love the people from high school and youth. We’d is always a joy to see and hear. I love the great fishing buddy pictures, Bill and Doug and Duthie. They always make me want to get out. In the fall I love the deer and big  bird game shots and almost salivate seeing my friends success.

The nurses I know and the girls in recovery are the funniest with their zany off colour humor.  These are like the bad sisters I never had.  They’re also so reminiscent of the dancers I shared a coffee room with back in the early days when I was a dancer and taught dancing.  They’re funny but not in a church way.  I love that about doctors and nurses and am so thankful that I live and work in a real world.  So many people in academic and office worlds are living ‘lives of quiet desperation’ and are somehow immensely phoney like the marketting and politician sorts. They’re struggling to have power and money and prestige and I’m in this group of nurses and doctors where we see haemorrhoids brings down the best of the best and the death of a child ruin the greatest.  I have no time for the pompous and politically correct and those who worry about their socks and clean underwear.

I like the humanity of sexuality to. I know that our government and the courts and the masses of ignorant and filthy minded perverts are “offended’ and seeking to bully with sex, either aggression or lying.  The church left the the bedrooms of the nation only to have parliament crowd in and when they left the dirty judges got their porn fixes on thevoyeurism and discussion of what in a cultured society would be a source of humor and/or silence. I loved reading Malcolm Gladwell in “Talking to Strangers’ discussing all the difficulties in understanding any sexual interaction and how impossible it is if alcohol or different cultures and families are involved and mostly how arrogant and stupid judges are to even comment on this matter which is purely speculative and truly ecclesiastical. The hypocricy is that judges notoriously have been the sickest of society with regard to their own sex lives. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  I actually gave testimony in a court house named for one of the worst wealthy pedophiles of the day. It’s not much different from the all the télé evangelist preacher caught in orgies after years of smug superiority. Pride goest before the fall. 

I loved talking to an old admired Anglican lawyer who’d first practiced in England.  “I was immensely proud to be a lawyer as a young man when the law was about facts and contracts and actual laws that could be agreed on but every since Pierre Trudeau introduced the ‘social laws’ I’ve felt rather dirty as a lawyer and don’t blame people for considering our group to be little different than the communist police or clerical police of the old inquisition.”

I usually get triggered by some arcane political or legal event that a friend has posted to remind me that our government is no longer a friend of the people but some kind of nazi communist almalgam that no one voted for.  I’m of an age where I’d like to relax and feel safe about my future but I’ve watched these last years of government corruption and bankruptcy and fear for my future, reasonably. The sad part is that those who vote for ‘free stuff’ don’t realize that there’s no Santa and that budgets that aren’t balanced lead to bankruptcy.  I notice that there’s little about Venezuela or the politics of the countries that the migrants are fleeing from. The countries that have millions leaving are ruled by the likes of Justin Trudeau and I am so upset at the stupidity of Canadians who claim that the spiralling cost of living is not simply grossest mismanagement.

I liken the world to a hockey game. The team has the best players but we have a coach who keeps saying we’re losing because the ice is too warm but he won’t let the players have hockey sticks but instead says we all should have golf clubs.  The man is a narcissist, ignorant bully who is mad with power and acts like he’s always smoking massive amounts of marijuana.  

So my friends are kind enough to point out the latest evidence on Face Book of this Stasi Brown Shirt little Hitler Maoist nightmare.  

Were it not for them doing this I’d retire. Survivalists are growing cocky. 

I’m of the age where I’m constantly wondering what I should do.

I like my work. I’ve never been more capable and knowledgeable in my field. I’ve experience up the ying yang.  I know the answers and can advise people of what they need to know but mostly the management model of the health care is like the management model of the country, divide and conquer and ‘lick and kick’. 

So I go to work. I like that I’m making money. It’s a routine. I’ve been in office jobs leading hospitals, starting programs, working for courts, running all manner of things with greater status but instead I see one person after another in the front lines doing old fashioned medicine.  I feel like a little Dutch boy. The damn is leaking. We have massive incompetent administration and few frontline workers. 

What I do is ‘right’.  It’s so often not popular.  I tell people I think their problem is alcohol or drugs and not their wife or mother and they get angry but never as angry and lethal as the ladies who insist they need to drink, a couple of bottles of wine , because they work for the government.  I feel I’m in the minefield because we don’t have any resources. I’m seeing people at monthly and yearly intervals while the model is weekly follow up or as need be but there are no doctors.  The waitlists have everyone sicker and more tired and mostly now insurance companies have co-opted  care and want patietns and doctors to be filling out their beurocratic accounting forms rather than focusing on medicine.

I make a second cup of coffee. I usually can get to the shower and do the get ready for work and out the door because Gilbert needs a walk.  So I walk to the car. I love vehicles, motorcycles , cars , trucks.  Right now I’m so enjoying my Mini with the iPhone pro II interfacing with the sound system so when I turn on the car I’m also hearing the voice of John Cleese reading his humorous autobiography. I have exorcised CBC communist broadcasting corporation from my world and am immensly less homicidal and suicidal as a result of not listening to that disgusting propaganda news channel full of lies and sickness.

I drive to work. I go there because I get my third cup of coffee there.  Since I’m having a coffee I might as well see people and soon it’s lunch time. I really do enjoy seeing the people though there are always those ones who refuse to do anything for themselves, demand a ‘magic pill’ , blame everyone and are hoping that they can upset me enough that they can have an excuse for having a temper tantrum and breaking something including me in the  office. The women are just mine fields waiting for something to record to use against me.  So many more psychopaths and sociopaths seeing doctors. In the old days they would see me once and not come back because I told the truth. Now they come back and prey on me hoping they can attack me, waiting for me to screw up. I tell them I don’t want to see them and they keep coming back. I told this woman three times this year I have nothing more to offer and she keeps coming in angry. I know I have no back up from the government or police and I’m terrified by these individual psychopaths whose lies and blatant sexual and physical aggression have made them fortunes and given them all manner of power.  I have diagnosed them as having an addiction and they invariably want me to write down that they are the victim and that the problem is ‘depression ‘ and not the crack cocaine or fentanyl.  

If I don’t have one of those come in the office I have a lovely day doing a job without having my life and livelihood threatened.   Then I go home.  Gilbert has been with me and he gets me out for walks and reminds me that I’ll enjoy a nap.

That’s what the day is.  I see so many strangers. Every week I’m seeing a half dozen people at least I’ve never seen before and they’re always loaded for bear. I’ve doing my best to help and have had a life time of helping people but know that I am going to see someone who says “nobody helps me’. They’re have had a million dollars of investigations and medical care and they now blame me for their back pain and they refused to do sit ups.  They want magic.  

I keep asking myself what I’m going to do when I grow up.

1. I’d like a space ship. I’m on the wrong planet

2. I’d die but Gilbert needs me. Everyone else would do just as well without me. I’m not important.

3. I like camping and riding my motorcycle. I look for forward to fishing

4. I’m looking forward to being in a boat again. I love vehicles.

5. I’m looking forward to hiking and walking in the woods as spring comes

6. I think I’ll get a sex change. I would like to have my own breasts. I hate bothering Laura to touch hers. Touching breasts is a marvellous activity. just looking at them is a calming uplifting experience.

I like scratching my ass. I can’t imagine losing my balls because I like scratching my balls too. I don’’t feel I’m like my transsexual patietns who feel they were the wrong sex. I know I’m on the wrong planet. I’m not meant to be in this human experience. I was meant to be in some other place where I’d ‘fit’ better as the odd ball adventurer I am. I’ve enjoyed decades of great masculine joy but in Canada men are hated and there’s a low testosterone epidemic. I don’t feel safe as an aging white man. I’ve been attacked so many times in my life and don’t feel capable of defending myself against men or women and their lies or lying psychopathic women and their stupid evil champions. 

 I like the idea of having breasts and dressing in women’s clothes not as a permanent matter but rather like the book Black Like Me.  It’s an adventure. My transsexual patient described the difference between a transvestite and transsexual as the transsexual can’t wait to get home and take off the bra whereas the transvestite want to get home and put on the bra. 

I’m a transvestite or perhaps a failed actor. I feel after 40 years of medicine that they authorities want me to ‘act’ like a doctor. They say medicine is merely ‘entertainment’ and want me to act like them. I had this now outdated idea that my job was to reduce morbidity and mortality. I foolishly wanted to cure disease and save lives. I was so wrong in thinking that would be wanted and rewarded. The individual mostly liked it and I had great success keeping people alive and getting them back on track but so many of my patients were so near death and they didn’t know it. When they lived and got better they just assumed they would.They take it for granted but I’ve actually fought countless people wanted me do what would have killed them.

As a psychiatrist I’ve tried to encourage life and presence and yet now all the money is in euthanasia. Suicidal people are offered MAid instead. There’s always more money in killing. Abortion is so much easier and more lucrative than delivering babies. I found abortions I did technically easily. The UN is a killing machine. I see my government destroying the country and I fear for my life  and retirement. I don’t’ know what to do.  

I don’t want to be an old man and perhaps I could hide out as an old lady.  Become irrelevant and not feel the anxiety of watching the brown shirts and Stasi take over the government.

I miss the dance and acting days.  It was more ‘feminine’ compared to the aggressive authoritarian police regime that has taken over medicine and healt care.  With all the never satisfied angry lying women about screaming ‘how dare you! I just feel like ‘identification with the aggressor’ might be the answer. I certainly haven’t seen many women in my life accepting responsibility. All women leaders have taken their countries to war and more men have died. I thought it takes two to tango.

7.  I imagine I could sail the Atlantic. I’m ready to do that. Another adventure.  i miss my boat and being alone at sea nearly dying. 

I lack reason to live. I see my role solely as living to care for my dog because that’s clearly what I do best. My friend Laura lives for her children. My mother and father lived for us.  

So I work from morning to night and weekend to weekend living in daily fear that the authorities and their brown shirts will crash in the door and hurt me again.  I find myself having flashbacks to the times of terror in my life when people with power abused that power. It helps me understand and help those I see who too were traumatized by dictatorships and psychopaths and sociopaths in power.  I pray for these people and know that soon they will die and that they will go to hell. I struggle to forgive them.  I try to understand rapists and psychopaths in power but all it does is make me turn to God and pray.

I don’t know.

Please God guide me. Show me the way. Help me today.  Thank you for the good days. Help me to forgive and forget. Help me to survive and find what it is that you would have me do today. Thy will be done.  Free me from the nightmares and the fears of incompetent crazy people with power and greed and fear.  Save me from the Banality of Evil.