I’ve been hard on administrators and bureaucrats. It’s obviously not totally fair. There was a time when they were lowly paid and highly honorable. In recent years their union has caused them to be paid the highest in the land. Unfortunately their training and competence have not increased.
My father didn’t respect Unions. He felt they served the workers well and believed in the need for this given the history of management. No one with Scottish Irish roots can trust overlords. I remind people that the English were more than willing to tax the Scots and Irish to death by demanding all their potatoes each harvest without consideration of how the subjugated people would survive. The phrase ‘hide the potatoes’ followed because people who were highly cooperative eventually overthrew their masters because they simply had to have potatoes.
Now in Campbell River there was a terrific hospital administrator. There were wonderful doctors on the north island in general too. The Campbell River Hospital wanted a day hospital for the psychiatric patients in their regions and north of them. The psychiatrist in Comox along with that administration had made Comox the ‘regional psychiatric hospital’ so was intent on getting all the resources. The Comox psychiatrist was in league with the local NDP politician. They had some nefarious arrangement. Lots of backrooms in politics. Lots of glad hands and slippery hands. All about dominance and control and not about what was needed most in the communities. Campbell River was a boom town and simply need psychiatric services the most.
In Campbell River to get a Day Hospital, they needed a psychiatrist. This terrific administrator with a group of dedicated doctors and wonderful townspeople truly caring for the needs of the community askedme , when I made the mistake of not moving there full time, if I would come up a couple of days a week so they get the Day Hospital. I loved meeting with these people and working with this great administrator to bring the resources and people to bear to get the Campbell River Psychiatric Day Hospital. It was such a totally different atmosphere than the Byzantine cloak and dagger administration my colleague had working in Comox. Everyone in Campbell River was transparent and concerned not looking for power or a personal kick back for themselves. It all went well and we got the day hospital with the help of Victoria administrators who acknowledged the need for the psychiatric patients in the day hospital.
I loved Campbell River. I loved the doctors there. I loved the youth and vitality in the town .I loved the fishing and hunting and logging.
I’d be hunting one day in the fall. An older gentleman was sitting on the side of the road. I stopped. He immediately asked me what I was looking for, “a deer of course.”
‘What are you looking for?”
“A doctor.”
“I’m a doctor, “ I said.
“Well I’ve got a deer. I may have had a heart attack trying to pull two out. They must have been twins. One stood up and I shot it. Then it stood up again and I shot it again. When I got to where I shot them I had two identical deer. I pulled the first one out but when I began pulling the second out I had chest pain. If you’d pull them out for me I’d gladly give you one.’
That’s how a friendship of 25 years began. I checked him over and concluded he may well have had a mild MI. He was over it now. I had him rest and went where he pointed. Sure enough there was a two point deer at the base of the hill. I pulled that out to the road and left it with him. Then I climbed up the hill and found an identical two point deer. What was amazing was that both gunshot wounds were indentically placed in the heart. incredible shooting. That’s what I’d learn too. My new friend, Bill Mewhort, was an incredible marksman.
I got the deer down and got his truck round and loaded one deer on his truck and the other on my truck then followed him back to Campbell River where I unloaded his deer and made sure he went to the hospital. I left him there. Sure enough he’d had a minor MI. It wouldn’t bother him again. But it began this great friendship . AFter my father and brother Bill became the man who taught me the most about hunting and fishing. He’d once been a guide and now worked in the mill.
I’d be working 5 to 6 days a week with a 20 bed hospital ward and a full private practice I shared with my colleague. The longer I knew him the more I knew that everything he did was purely self serving. He’d pressured me to stay in Comox over Campbell River because he rented me my office. Always about the money. Always about control and manipulation. He actually ‘gas lighted’ people. I’d learn from the other specialists who I got along with that whenever anyone had a problem with him in town a week later they’d get a call from the College saying there was a report that they’d might be doing cocaine. Several of the specialists concluded that the person making the false allegations was this psychiatrist. None of them were doing cocaine but a person who could manipulate ‘gossip’ in a small town was a powerful person. Meanwhile whenever his wife was out of town there was a loose woman coming to see him late at night in the office after he’d dismissed his secretary. I’d come to pick up files from the office and be surprised that he was always seeing some pretty older woman alone at late hours. There were several of these women. His wife was away a lot. A very cold arrangement. Very peculiar behaviour. Lots of nastiness. I’d quickly learned he was a ‘backstabber’ of the first order. Highly duplicitous, saying one thing to me and another thing to staff and directors.
When I first came on the ward I admitted an anorexic girl. A very pretty teenager. I came back to the ward an hour later and suddenly found a literal party going on. My colleague was to be away for a week and he’d left the ward full of all these apparently healthy young and middle aged men who were suddenly very frisky with the arrival of the girl. I was instantly suspicious about the diagnosis and treatment, reviewed the half dozen men and found they were not ‘depressed’ but rather all malingerers and drunks. I changed the diagnosis from Bipolar II to alcoholism on all of them. I saw no drug and alcohol histories were being taken by my colleagues. The men were at first quite the braggarts about their drinking and drugging. No wonder they were depressed. They were all hung over and had all been on a bender.
Now there was 20 bed alcohol detox and drug treatment in town. I visitted it. It was empty. All the drunks and drug addicts were being admitted to the psychiatry hospital. That changed then. Those 6 guys ended up in the detox. Another fifty followed along with them after I corrected all the diagnosis. Overnight the ward changed from a belligerent entitled hang over ward to a regular psychiatry ward. Simply taking a proper history disclosed the long standing problems. The town had a lot of drunks and addicts working in the mills and logging industry. My colleague had been ‘enabling’.
What was even more interesting is that the “designated addiction gp’ (no official training, just took the job for the money and status) became angry at me because he suddenly had a full unit and it remained that way.
“All I can do now is take care of drunks.”
“That’s what your detox unit is” I said.
“But it’s never had patients before. I had a great thing going here till you came.’’ He actually laughed.
He’d actually be pissed for a while then he really got on board and the detox and treatment unit began to function the way it should.
A number of older women with depression and a group of parents whose children had schizophrenia approached me thanking me for what I’d done.
“I was afraid to be admitted to the psychiatry unit because of all those bad men.....I’d be suicidal at home rather than come to the hospital. “
“We couldn’t see our daughters and sons admitted there because it was always the drunks and the drug dealers living there.’
The head nurse was figuratively in bed with my colleague but a number of other nurses told me how the ward had been functioning at. I couldn’t have been there more than a month or two before the amazing public health nurse approached me and thanked me for sorting out he psychiatric unit because she now had a place to send psychiatry patients.
The joke was always ,”You don’t have an alcohol problem if you’re not drinking more than your doctor.’
The psychiatrist called himself a ‘wine connosieur.’. I was happy to drink and smoke dope but it never changed my diagnostic acumen.
He’d been a social worker before becoming a psychiatrist.
I’d meet other psychiatrists who had worked in Comox and got a whole lot of ‘skinny’ on the man. One psychiatrist, a marvellous old scotch drinking English fellow said, “Couldn’t stand the fool. Loved to read the latest counselling book and talk like an authority but didn’t seem to know any medicine and less psychiatry. Prancing about with his NDP politician friends. Called me a drunk because I liked a scotch but I never saw him without a bottle of wine.” This fellow was a Liberal and had left the community for the city in the south. .
“I left because it was clear he was going to kill someone and try to blame it on me. Always looking over my back when I worked there.” Another fellow told me. “ When I came there , there were a half dozen of us but one after another he ran us out of the town. The worst was the child psychiatrist. Born there. Wanted to work there because his family was there. Top doctor. But smart. Met with us and took the measure of him and came to work in Victoria instead. Truly great psychiatrist. That happened over and over. Watch your back. Greatest area but odd town. Courtenay is like any other rural community. Lots of the farmers and long standing people that lived there for generations. Then there’s that other places with more pubs than churches. Comox meanwhile has been the place where the Ottawa bureaurcrats who did as they were told retire and now suddenly believe they can think for themselves. They can’t but the politics is crazy. The military base is there and those folk often retire. Nothing wrong with them. And lots of leaders in the resource community. But this guy is in with the NDP and frankly they’re mostly communists. I’m a Liberal myself. Part of the reason I left. Too much politics and in breeding and this social worker flunky trying to stir up trouble anyway he could. Watch your back. He’s a liar.”
I’d become the Vice President of Psychiatrists of the British Columbia Medical Association on the Island and really enjoyed meeting with my colleagues once a month in Victoria. I’d take the time to drive down for my sanity. They were truly an amazing group of the finest psychiatrists. They had a monthly dinner but the real treat was talking with them after the meetings and just getting together with some of the wisest and finest physicians and psychiatrists I’d ever know. Many of them had worked the north Isldand before coming south. There was a nother great group of psychiatrists working in Nanaimo who I came to really admire and enjoy.
I was staying in the Anglican Church manse which I rents. . A few months later I’d have my windows shot out. 22 rifle. Someone plunking at the windows from across the street. Beer bottles would routinely be smashed at my door.
My gorgeous nurse girlfriend came up to visit and she was stunning. She still was considering joining me yet her car window was broken and beer cans piled inside. She was afraid and didn’t like what I told her. Of course she wanted me to come back to Vancouver.
I had bought a Ford Broncho II and began my love affair with hiking and camping in the woods Emily Carr made famous. Every weekend off I was out in the woods. I got a dog too. Life was good. Work was scarey. I kept diagnosing alcoholism and kept having threats. Guys would phone me at night and threatened to kill me, say how they’d had me in their sights and tell me where I’d been camping.
I had a Browning 30:06 and a 22 rifle and added a smooth Bore Defender shot gun. I slept with that. I’d also begun to collect poisonous plants and dry them and keep them in jars in the basement. I loved botany.
I met an old farmer and he had a freezer full of marijauna. He gave me a couple of pounds of his throw away. I began smoking pot and drinking red wine at night, writing. I had cats too. I lived behind a grave yard and walked the dog there at night. It was a peculiar existence.
The first girl I went out was a a cowgirl country western singer. I’d been asked to speak on the television doing a half hour on eating disorders and then on fashion and women and how fashion hurts women. I’d been asked to be the speaker at a dinner for the ecumenical churches function and enjoyed the people. I was going to each different church rotating through them. I made a great alliance with a nun who also did counseling. The cowgirl would turn out to be a story I wrote about because it was so country strange.
I’d refer patients to the local counsellors and this worked well except a few of them were crazier than the patients I referred. One man came back to me for his antidepressant medication and asked if he had to continues to see the counsellors. I asked him what was the problem.
“I don’t like stripped naked with him and the two of flailing each other with whips. It makes me more depressed.”
I contacted this local powerful famous counsellors and discretely asked him about his ‘techniques’. He alluded to this therapy and confirmed for me that my patient wasn’t psychotic though the counsellor might be. I didn’t refer any more patients to him.
The other bizarre seriously deranged counsellor was a friend of the psychiatrist and claimed every child she saw had been sexually abused. I’d end in court repeatedly over turning these weird diagnosis because her basis of this conclusion was always esxtraordinary . The one that sticks out was the report. “The child played with the slinky toy in such a way as to be certain she’d been sexually abused by her father.”
I’d learn there was a dirty industry going on in the town. Victim’s compensation would pay for counsellors to see women and children but only if they had been sexually abused. So this major conflict of interest drove this incompetent ladies diagnosis. Unfortunately being pretty and a friend of my colleagues it had worked well I came along and ruined the busiensss by repeatedless saying I found no evidence for sexual abuse. By property examining the children and parents I’d changed a least a hundred of this diagnosis and make a arch enemy of this counsellor.
My friend Marion, an actual PHD psychologist was delighted because she’d seen these politically and financially motivated diagnosis occurring to the detriment of children and families. Further my friend Anne was the social worker and truly delighted that someone finally stopped this particular counsellor whose family unfortunately had money and were prominent in the local NDP.
Anne , a regular Anne Margaret/ Audrey Hepburn social worker and Marion , the local Joni Mitchel. Judy Collins psychologist were working in mental health north island, had invited me out for lunch shortly after my arrival. I was blessed to meet two of the brightest most extraordinary women and therapists who’d become my life long friends.
My friend from university who’d married a biker drug dealer and paid lawyers hundreds of thousands to keep him out of jail when he was caught was also working on the island in the south. I told her husband about my windows being shot out and how great the hunting was . This lead to a half dozen guys arriving one night on Harley’s engine rumbling, driving around the town, each carrying a rifle either in a scabbard or across the Bars. Another guy brought up a truck. We’d use my Broncho II and the truck to head out into the woods the next morning. The guys got a couple of deer.
More importantly I slept fitfully for the first time in months. Surrounded by friends with guns, thankful they’d made a circle of the town and now I had a half dozen Harley’s in front of the church manse, I felt ‘safe’. Never again would there be beer bottles smashed on my doorsteps and no longer would people plunk at my windows with a 22 rifle.
Thanks to Bill I had a deer to share. I’d butchered it my self and began my life long love of cooking wild meat. The guys loved the barbecued steaks.
I was really enjoying northern and rural medicine.
My nurse broke it off and I continued to love the country. I loved my time in Campbell River and enjoyed my private practice but the hospital was just politics and trouble. Whenever I went away I found my colleague changed my orders. He was a classic ‘passive aggressive’ little shit and was constantly politicking. Constantly smiling to your face.
Meanwhile I was playing a lot of guitar.My budgies were killed by the cat. My first dog, a rescue dog, a runner, escaped and was hit by a car running across the busy highway. HE died in my arms.
Shinto came into my life after that. Shinto. Oh now I remember. I was told there was a puppy and I went out to Quadra Island to meet him. Cross Irish Setter and Springer Spaniel. My secretary was a dog trainer and when I told her I was looking for a dog she was kind enough to put out feelers. My dad’s dogs had been springers and my brother’s setters. Shinto was adorable. I named him Shinto for the spiritual essence that Japanese believe pervades life. I miss him this day. What a wonderful dog he was. The best companion and a great hunting dog. He went with me everywhere though he stayed at home when I went to work. Life is great when a guy has a dog for a companion.
The doctors in Comox and Campbell River just continued to show themselves as really good clinicians and fine people. I had the best referrals from them but my popularity made my colleague even more jealous. A husband and wife team of GP’s were the best. There was a brilliant Intensive Care internist. I’d shoot skeet with the specialists at the local gun club I’d join. I was kayaking too so all my activities put me in contact with other doctors and showed that I was a real part of the rural northern community. By constraint my colleague did nothing in the community but drink wine and conspire with his NDP friend and see pretty single women patients late at night in his office.
When winter came I’d begin down hill skiing at the near by slope. A great lodge and great fun. Comox Campbell River is truly one of the most beautiful places in the world. I’d date these amazing women there too. One nurse will forever remain in my heart. I just wasn’t mature enough to be the husband she deserved. I loved the local pharmacist, an elegant lady of a girl with exquisite sophisticated tastes. Much too good for me. I was a bad boy and did’t see any real future. I wasn’t sure if I’d settle down.
I liked that the heads of the logging companies of Vancouver Island independently and collectively approached me and thanked me for what I’d done with getting the alcoholics in treatment.
“As along as your colleague called them Bipolar and refused to diagnose them as alcoholic , neither the union or management could do anything. There were a dozen of the worst and they caused us all a whole lot of grief. After you came the accident free days in North Vancouver Island sky rocketed. Never underestimate what you’re doing. You’re really appreciated.” That kind of praise certainly made me feel good.
The word had really got around and my colleague felt threatened and hated me . Repeatedly men and women I’d meet in church or at the hunting club would tell me “Thank you for what you did. I worried every day my husband went to work. It’s a dangerous enough job but with drunks running cranes and driving the big trucks it was a nightmare. Now he says the place is sane and the bad boys have all gone off for drug and alcohol treatment.”
Nobody worried much about marijuana. It was a principle industry and it didn’t cause the problems that alcohol and cocaine caused in the workplace.
“I was terrified working but you got the crane operator in treatment. I thought those guys were going to kill you. They all talked about killing you.”
My friend in the mill told me I’d been targeted.
Yet 6 months later all these guy were either sober and attending AA or had been fired and left the community. Since my biker friends had driven through the town with guns no one had bothered me again.
The beauty of industry is once there’s a diagnosis they really work with the union to keep you working but sober not drunk. Apparently my little ‘community medicine’ intervention had it’s pay off. The public health nurse assured me I’d made a lot of difference in a very short period of time. “But that’s because you care about medicine and the town. I guess you know your colleague is a different sort.” It would later come out that his family had some criminal tendencies with his lying and the family lying issues actually getting front page. I thought it explained his friendship with the snake politicians. But then that was a problem with the community all these eastern bureaucrats wheeling and dealing.
The drug abuse and adolescent crime were an issue so I tried to get a skate board area for the kids. I was working with the police and public health and damned if the town council wasn’t a group of these recycled Ottawa sorts. Painful to talk with them. Every excuse and fear mongering and underhanded tactic known to a politician. Meanwhile the kids literally had nothing to do and nowhere to hang out.
It’s amazing what I remember. Every day I ‘m seeing dozens of patients and doing all this regular medicine. Highlights are just that. Things that stick out. They’re unusual. We simply remember the greats and the ugly.
I’d been having these fabulous visits with Marion in Parksville, her family, young kids and noise and dogs and just all round country living a blessing. I’d be driving through the most beautiful forest in the world to do out reach psychiatry with a great old English doctor with an amazing moustache. I’d see these unusual cases only found in the wilderness and at the end of the earth. Vancouver Island was just that sort of place. People moved all across CAnada and crazy smacked up against the ocean, having no place further to escape so stayed on the west coast.
There was a town of in bred folk left over from a commune at the turn of the century.I spotted the too close eyes and low slung ears, something twigged me in my pattern recognition so I asked around and explored the history. Sure enough fifty years previously this bit of today’s paradise had be the place of Deliverance. A crazy American had come north with his flock. His commune died but some of the incest survivors stayed to live in this area. Another hippy commune continued to function.
We had a lot of hermits and villages that worked on barter and lived off the grid. I’d meet the finest people from the islands.
I’d love this genius who lived on an island I won’t name. I’d got in with a group of ‘survivalists’ and met this truly extraordinary guy and his lovely wife one night. A folksinger or poet introduced us. He was in a cabin on the island raising small kids but had a computer and communications array that NASA would envy. Did a couple of PHD”s in engineering and computers before heading off the grid. Whenever I had problems with my computer I’d call him up, only a couple of times, he was not someone I’d want to lose as a friend. He’d take the whole thing over through the phone before this was being done and solve my ‘glych’ and go off the grid again. He knew my friend in CSIS. They are a really tight circle.
I was having increasing problems on the ward. I’d had a violent young borderline admitted and left specific orders that no one was to go into her room alone and that security should always be on hand with her for her sake. . She was a tiny waif of a thing but totally paranoid and incredibly sneaky. Turn your back and she hit you. You had to count all the cutlery and not even leave plastic with her. She responded well to medication but it took time. It was awful. There were some nurses who were less than stirling and they used this poor thing to get time off. She was so weak she couldn’t hurt anyone but within a week a half dozen of the less that stirling nurses, drinking friends of the other pscyhiatrist and the head nurse were off on extended leave for being ‘hurt’ in the workplace. They ‘milked’ weeks. The tragedy is this little girl then had to be moved to the ‘state asylum’. She’d be there a year. She got the reputation of being violent. I’d meet up with the poor thing year later, a not atypical story of the abuse that schizophrenic encounter. .
I hated those nurses.
There was one bully past her shelf life, quite the dog in her 40’s and I admitted this hermit farmer from up island.He was depressed and suicidal but came with a million dollars in big denominations in paper bags. He’d been storing them under his bed and knew he needed to come to hospital and was afraid it would be stolen.I admitted this guy with these shopping bags full of hundred dollar bills. Apparently this was his ‘cash’ and that he had much more in land and banks.
He was almost melancholic. That night this ugly cunt climbed into his bed. Days later he was better. A week later he was married. I objected vociferously when I heard he’d been literally sexually assaulted by a nurse in the hospital. The nurses coulnd’t understand or accept my reaction to this obvious gold digger. Apparently a couple of the nurses were upset that the bitch had beat them to it.
When I raised the issue with the head of the hospital she being catholic thought there was no problem. Marriage made everything right. The nurse was catholic. My dirty minded colleague thought I was being ridiculous and that a wife would either cure him or give him something to be depressed about. He was obvious depressed with his marriage and simply lacked ethics and morality. A difficult man to work with.
A very blizarre psychiatry unit.
I’ve always regretted I didn’t go to Campbell River where I’d have come under the influence of the great doctor in AA but then I’d not have had the equally joyful time of meeting the incredible nurses, pharmacists, gps, specialists, and psychologists and other people I had the joy to work with. Always the good people outnumbered the bad 10 to one but evil flourishes because no one dares confront it. Never my problem always my curse.
The head of the local mental health was said by his staff to be sleeping with young women. There were several police and politicians involved in the drug trade and all manner of nefarious real estate and construction being done for cash. British Columbia did billions of dollars in the illegal marijuania industry and I was near it’s epicentre.
I was really out of my depth. I even befriended a hell’s angel that year becuse the courts were denying him access to his son. Angel Acres , the major Hell’s angel gathering place was in Parksille an hour south of Comox. My patient was a criminal but a good dad and a good guy. We fished and hunted together one weekend when a non patch wearing mutual friend introduced us. He had more ethical and moral development on a personal level than my colleague. He was a part of a wolf pack though and his wife an ex prostitute heroin addicted was ruining his son. So there I was in court defending him as a father. I’d do a lot of that. But I’d also liked the local judge who was amazingly apolitical and a great man. We’d have coffee together and get to know each other and talk about the town. I have been truly blessed to meet the finest judges with rare exception. This guy rode a Harley too which enamoured him to me.
He told me
“The problem with the child custody in the north was all the guys were away in camps. The women didn’t have anything to do.They longed to be in the big city. So they’d dump the guy and take their kids to the city. The guy would have to pay child support but could never make the same amount of money in the south that he madein the north. He was literally stuck here and she was being a party girl down in the city. When ever these cases came before me 200 women from the community would be mustered to sit in the court intimidating me and the guys were always stuck in the camps because her lawyers always knew how to play the systems. The women have a better family law school among themselves than any offered by a university. It’s awful but I can’t really do anything. When you give me a report saying the guys sane it helps but the system is flawed. Eventually it will change. The law gets it right but there’s always a delay and right now the children and family are suffering.”
I loved North Vancouver Island. I am pleased today that there are a half dozen or more psychiatrists up there. The people were great and deserved good medical care and not to have a little shit making a fiefdom for himself. I am thankful to say that while I didn’t stay, though I’d return, his ‘monopoly’ was broken and his lies exposed. I’d learn later that the College Registrar was thankful for what he called ‘Dr. Hay’s reconnaissance.” It didn’t help me. I returned to the city probably even more paranoid. But I had a collection of great memories, great friends and would be blessed for life by the experience and friends I made.
Last I heard the other psychiatrist was dead. The NDP was replaced by either the Liberals or Green. Life moved on.
I really loved the nun chaplain and did great grief work with her. A military major introduced me to the amazing knife maker on Quadra Island. I still have the knife he made for me and have butchered many moose and deer with that superb blade. The natives introduced me to the extraordinary native museum there. While I’d studied anthropology of the aboriginals and continued to read, it was here that I’d begin to learn a lot about the Kwakiutl and Haida. All the time I’d be visiting with Bill and his family. His son was a great boy who became a great man.His daughter was a beautiful school teacher who’d I’d gladly of dated but I knew by then her father was the most amazing long distance rifle shooter.
A martial artist had come to the mill and Bill told me he was bothering the other men always bragging about how he could kill people with his hands or a kick, Bill said he his black belt. Bill said “because it was ruining the lunch room atmosphere I had to lean over and tell the guy, “you’d better tone it down. I can hit a silver dollar at a mile with my rifle but there’s several other younger guys here who are better shots than me and they can hit a dime at a mile. So I’d quiet down about what you can do with your martial arts up close. You’d never reach these other guys who aren’t as old and civilized as I am.”
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