Moving Files

The file storage depot is moving so suddenly I’ve a month to move my storage locker. It’s been good. I’ve given a lot of ‘stuff’  I’ve no more use for to the church. I’ve also had a chance to go through my old business and clinic files. The storage locker that needs to be cleared contains a lot from the 80’s and 90’s.  I have filing boxes full of accounts for a decade or more I have absolutely no more need for.  I’ve sorted out my clinical files from the business files and cleared out the articles and lab work saving consults and notes. $200 a box to digitalize and $7 a box to shred. I really don’t need a couple of storage boxes of articles relating to patients I had in the 80’s ripped out from journals as old.  I’ve been paying for storage for years on old ‘stuff’. Now I’ve spent the last few weekends spending whole days looking to see what I actually have.  Unbelievable.  

Tens of thousands of patient files.  Some I just saw as a consult in a hospital others I still see today. I was amazed to know a half dozen people I see today I began seeing in the 80’s. My particular form of practice is ‘burst’.  Much like general practice. I may find those files today.

One poor fellow was psychotic in hospital so I saw him back in the early 90’s for a year. He did well.  Five years went by. He was successful in work and married. He saw me for a few sessions around that decision.  Five years pass, I see him again around the time a child is sick.  Then a couple of decades passed and I saw his children when they were leaving home. Now I ‘m seeing him about retirement.  Altogether I’ve seen him for a bout thirty or forty sessions.  I”m pleased with the outcome.  I have so many single consults where the family physician, insurance company, WCB or lawyers wanted to know the diagnosis and recommendations.  Then there’s a whole slew of brief therapy consults.  The average depression gets better in 5 to 10 sessions with medications.  I hardly remember any of these but here and there is someone I saw during a major life crisis and we met weekly or monthly over a year ago. I wonder what happened. Those are the people I remember fondly. I saw them when they were hopeless and in despair and they left back on their feet. A lot of my cases were trauma and addiction. I was surprised to see how many vets I saw and thankful that Dr. Wilson and Wendy chose to consult me those many years. I was equally pleased to see the names of colleagues who liked to consult me so that there’s dozens of doctors I saw so many patients from.  When I was a GP I had three surgeons I preferred and it was delightful to see that I was that for these men and women.  Decades of referrals from the same doctors is reassurance.  I liked that one sailed and another one loved the north.  Several became leaders in the fields, heads of our organizations and I expect knowing them had a lot to do with my surviving some of the bottom feeding politics that makes the life of a doctor so unpleasant because the profession has allowed these parasites to grow in our midst.  I m not looking through charts, just looking in boxes and like the proverbial attic or basement experience getting waylaid by a name or such.  I’ve worked in Manitoba, the US, BC, in several cities and a whole range of towns so in some cases it’s just trying to get the alphabet straight. I’ve also had to relive having a partner going psychotic and destructive and having a couple of psychopathic staff over the years who stole and destroyed.  Seeing the destruction caused by people who had alcoholism or cocaine addiction in my office I really should attend more Al Anon meetings.  It took me a couple of months to realize one staff had relapsed and the charts are a mess during that period.  

I see my OCD with charts over 40 years, the consult , at the front and the notes at the back and the labs work in it’s place but here are these times when I look at the chart and it’s chaos. I have to take the time to reorganize the chart because staff were taking money and doing a shoddy job, not even filing properly in the simplest ways.  Three months here and three months there. I now know why but at the time I just didn’t see.  Yet here it comes back to haunt me as I try to sort and file myself.  That said, I’ve got all those years of good staff and I’ve been blessed.  Despite working in several provinces and states I’ve been so fortunate to have worked with the finest people who simply cared as I did for patients who were at a time in their lives needing help. Still it’s an amazing job.  This is all 20 years ago.  The last 20 years are mostly in another storage locker and there are electronic files too. Now I just use Oscar clinic filing system and am thankful to be away from paper despite some of it’s advantages.  It’s easy at this late date to realize I don’t need rotary indexes and telephone messages and books of appointments and names and phone numbers. I’ve had to realize too that so many of my patients I saw in their sixties or older twenty years ago might be dead now. I hope in heaven I can find out what happened to some.  They were all amazing people. Humans are. Even the patients I saw in the jails had so much potential.  So this tedious boring mostly filing work is interrupted regularly by wistful thoughts, ennui, and wonder.  I can’t help though think of that magnificent scene in What about Schmidt with Nicholson and his insurance files and the personal relationship he had while the new young guy just saw the people as number  and money. I feel that today in my work.  There’s so much emphasis on boundaries and distancing. No surprise it’s come to social distancing.  I just read about the latest euthanasia pods.  Our government crooks are no doubt already looking up Solyent Green recipes to make the future more palatable given their criminals waste and corruption.  Yet if I have learned anything that’s always balanced by a whole lot of good that keeps the ship steering true. I call that Jesus personally but at the Jungian collective unconscious level the idea of God or good just prevails. It prevailed in my practice, so many people recovering from what only years or decades ago would have been a deadly disease or uniformly negative outcome.  I’ve seen the advances in therapy and psychopharmacology just glancing through my notes.  It’s a time of wonder. Yes we did put men on the moon. And yes we cured a lot of disease.  We are living longer and the majority of us , there are billions now, have a good life compared to a generation or two back.  

Now I’m half way through the boxes and movers are coming so I really must be off.  Another day in the storage locker. I’ve a stero system that took cassettes for an office I had 20 years ago.  Another blast from the past.  The way we were.  Aging sure has some great memories , especially the music. 

Thank you Jesus. God bless to all.