Pressure

It’s the weekend. I usually recuperate on the weekend.  I’ve had a little relaxation.  Of all things at the hair dresser. Chatter’s. Good place. Good vibe. “You are beautiful’ on the wall.  My grey turned to platinum blonde so I can avoid stereotypes as ageism strikes.  Is it better to be an old man or an old lady.  Trips to the hair dresser and nail professionals versus hunting and fishing. I’m becoming rather slothful in my future desires.  

This weekend I’ve been faced with taxes.  I’ve collected all I need but this year I’ve been doing it ‘digital’.  The difficulty now is generating  reports for Anil. 

I have further been unable to access the Scotia banking app.  It requires a password but my Pw had been facial recognition.  I have the app on the ipad and it’s working but I’ve not had it working on the new phone. I was afraid to change passwords because the absurd password function requires me to give them information that is really bizarre from within the account I am trying to access.  I had this same problem when I started the app.  It required a phone call.  The problem with the phone calls is that the wait time is a “over 20 minutes’ . I gave up after a half hour or closer to an hour realizing that the bank isn’t watching call need with staff.  If ever there was a time to hate bankers it’s now as the elite make obscene profits off Covid.

Meanwhile I’m struggling with my thoughts and their tendency to drift into that cognitive behavioural mire of ‘self pity’ and ‘anger’.  I’m overwhelmed by this subpoenae to court by the greedy and elite.  I’m dealing daily with life and death and these lawyers in the interest of greed are demanding I leave my practice for a day to be available to discuss a report I wrote a decade ago. The case fell down because the people wanted more money.  I was fired and it was all chaos. My positive report at the time served them and was reasonable but I have no idea where things are today and this 19th century legal lie about ‘memory’ is fundamentally archaic.  The conventions that exist in the law and politics are 19th century and frightening.  I’m having nightmares again nightly faced with the prospect of going to court.I can’t stand the court anymore after a judge in a hissy fit or error and rage and corruption tried to destroy me in his error given he’d chosen the errors of a junior to condemn my patient.  The judge was corrected for his error and I was just doing my job. I was telling the truth and doing the next right thing and this awful human being called me a liar without proof and defended a coke dealing sociopath to the cost of my patient and her family.  Some personal vendetta, some karmic event where the dirty man had dirty money and paid a fortune to spite the little girl who had nothing.  She’d become addicted to coke getting her coke from lawyers and doing coke with lawyers. I saw her and helped her bccome clean and sober. Her coke partner stayed on coke with illegal money and set out to hound her to her death. When she died his judge and lawyer came after me and everyone who had defended the little girl.  It was the greatest evil I’d seen in court.  The courts here are 90% okay but corruption is rife. The marijuana industry was 80 billion a year. The fentanyl and other drug industries are more. The money laundering in the city is 400 billion one estimates.  Gang wars leave bodies dead in the streets.  The Pistons cannibalism and missing girls and pedophilia are all alive and well but obscured by the censorship of the press.  This all doesn’t happen without corrupt judges.  I just think I was lucky that 90% of the judges I came before were really okay.  I wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for my oath to help my patients and the requirement for me to serve them.  I decided that my patients who were head injured and traumatized needed me to know enough about the law and injury so I even attended courses and prepared reports for my patients.  The forensic lawyers are some of the highest paid in the profession. I wasn’t .  I’ve always ended up at the lower end of income because I’ve worked with those most in need or with the highest risk least desirable.  

In the world of AA and NA there’s all this angst but the fact in patients with drug addiction and even in recovery are the least desirable of patients because they’re the most entitled and angry and complicated .  So I’m working with these people every day.  It’s supposed to be because I’m empathic and because I binged drank.  I never drank more than my colleagues who still drink and do drugs. There was a group of us. I sought help because my ex wife had become dangerous in her addiction and at times wholly dysfunctional when she wasn’t doing the most bizarre behaviours.  She refused to go into treatment and refused to stop doing drugs and refused to get help. So I sought help. I accepted that I couldn’t drink and often slipped and said ‘my wife is unmanageable.’  I’d actually said “I could treat a hundred insane people and get paid or spend the day with you alone and not get paid but I couldn’t do both.  She was actively suicidal at the time. And I asked physician help for help.  Their agenda was to separate us and treat me.  I was struggling with my marriage failing after my last marriage failed after I was raped and drugged with my supervisor a famous doctor from a famous doctor family, all above the law.  I’d begun to drink after that or when I was taken hostage or when I was in the plane crash and mercy flight.  It was all trauma but the friend of the psychiatrist who abused me said I was schizophrenic and delusional about those claims ….eventually I’d be seen by other pscyhiatrists who were not part of the sex with student gang and not related to the original psychiatrist and they all said I was okay. No schizophrenia.  

I concluded that with the world so scared I couldn’t afford to drink or smoke a joint because these people in charge who owned the world would do terrible evil to me. I’d go on to work pro bono for a good lawyer righting wrongs in the legal system, helping prisoners falsely accused and terribly wronged and I knew and was afraid of what I saw being done here. The only balance was when I worked for the refugee system and saw how much worse it was in other countries.  The religious dictatorship of Iran and the South American dictatorships and communist dictatorship.

I’ve made some progress, accessing the bank app on the iPhone 13. I’d had it on the iPad but can’t download reports. Have to get tax data to Anil.

I get distracted by Amber and Billy stories and pictures. I want to create a book and self publish as well as the psychiatry book and travels with cockapoo,, I could expand it to dogs including Shinto and Stuart.

I really would like to do a few month trip with camper through southern us, maybe even drive into America. It’s all too dangerous. I don’t think Amber thinks like an old lady or Billy like an old man. These fictions characters of fiction are both at most 40. I’m curious at how I’ll be after this vacation and birthday. Laura seems to be aging well and more anxious about the adventures I plan. I don’t think she is happy at the idea of heading up to Alaska or down to Louisiana. She seems happiest with her sister and they had their adventures young and now are growing old more gracefully. I even thought of riding my motorcycle down to Argentina but now fear accidents. I’d sail my sailboat down to the Caribbean but fear the cost of damage to the boat. I’m mostly thinking of fears of cost or harm to body. I once just jumped in. I miss the bravery. I miss the adventure. I love in a strict routine, working, producing money and paying off the mortgage. 

I love the spring and summer and camping and already am looking forward to it but don’t like the idea of winter next year and would gladly head south and spend three months working virtual out of Arizona. I like Arizona. 

I’d like to get my boat where I could use it. This having it up on land isn’t good, paying thousands for storage isn’t good but if I sell it now I lose in tax, better to sell things when I’m not working. I can’t have RRSP’s next year so more tax. I don’t think I’m working smart and not really enjoying work so much. Covid, lockdown, election, politics make everything difficult and confusing.

Work is taking up too much of my mind with this subpoena and all the Beurocratic and administrative demands and government a predator. I’m afraid to retire given the rank abuse of the elderly. I’d like to write and travel and succède as a writing making money to carry on but fear cases like this 10 years old and me being subpoenaed to appear and play the lawyer game where they act like they know memory and what occurred a year ago is changed by politics and time. Retrospective falsification and fashion all the social court matters.I’ve already had to deal with a judge who argued Moynihan’s Law existed forever when in fact it was created and didn’t take into account the oath a doctor takes to serve his patient. Unbelievable. I am an expert witness and assist the court but my first duty as a doctor is too my patients so here was anew law which attempted to put the judge above the covenant of doctor patient. More Trudeau dictatorship. It would be easy to sell out the patients but the fil political college demands that the doctor perfectly please the patient and popular doctors don’t get complaints. Smart doctors avoids addicts and borderlines because they complain. Because I refused to give drugs to patients they complained the the college whose process cost me $1000 destroying private practice and prejudicing doctors against mentally ill and addicted. 

I want to go somewhere I can treat patients and be judged on the morbidity and mortality not gossip and political correctness. I am afraid of patients too. I faced the guns and knives they brought into the office and threatened me with, but now I know the college will back the criminals and liars and psychopaths. The man threatened to kill me and his dog and his employers and his lawyer and I was faulted by the utterly incompetent cowardly ignorant college for critic ing me for not seeing and bêlaient his lies. I read when they built the walls of Jericho the enemy would attack so they had to half the workers and make them guards. All I have is time and the beurocrats and lawyers have time and are paid forever while I and my patients are without time or resources and I feel time and resources are finite and I’m being punished forced to appear in court, unpaid, bullied, threatened, cancelling a day of work all so everyone else can make a killing. It’s just about their money and I’m punished for proving above and beyond the care and time till I was fired because I wouldn’t lie or and now they want me to face the same old dilemna where I’ll be in court with a judge who has already proved he’s an enemy of physicians and I’ll risk answering truthfully a question that could upset the the family because they are so greedy and will blame me if they don’t get more more more and the family never was mp patient and the family refused to see a psychiatrist and I don’t know but fear my patient will suicide because that’s what happened the last time a judge didn’t care or know about mental health and from his 19th century mind and given he listened to a corrupt ignorant reprehensible junior I’ll trained wrong person created hell. I’m having nightmares and my mind won’t work as it keeps sliding into the past despite all I do to think positively and skip the triggers. I’ve asked for help and the junior person is well intentioned. My fears are catastrophic and each day I go to work I feel because I’m not getting sleep and am so anxious and depressed I can’t be perfect like the college demands of all doctors. Be perfect because we’re not. Their hypocrisy and arrogance are so pathetic but we have a little ignorant elite bully pervert in PM office kowtowing to the murderous corrupt Communist chines.

I don’t know. I’m enjoying sun and walks with the dog around the neighbourhood. I burnt my meal last night and ate it.

Im enkyoying tv.

This new massage mat has helped my psychosomatic back pain. I was cane and strapped in school and  raped at university and always I was blamed. I love God and sometimes just want it to end but know that’s just crazy because my life is great and only my mind is the problem. I have to get it into the present. 

My dog has his paw on my side and the sun is shining.

Get your head in the same room as your ass.

Horse Lake, Thursday, Gilbert is better

Gilbert is better. Better night. Less coughing. Better breathing. Happier. More energy.  Dr. Biernacki of North Road Vet phoned to see how he was doing. I was out fishing and Laura took the call.  He told her it was the elevation.  With heart disease he’s best by the sea. 100 mile house is 3000 feet. I remembered the IDAA conference with some of the old guys on oxygen because of the elevation of our meeting in Keystone Ski Resort. That was 9000 feet and I noticed the ‘thin air’.   I certainly don’t notice the elevation here. The air is so fresh and alive but it’s been tough for the little guy especially on muggy days.  He seems fine in the sunshine.

I felt stupid. Never thought of it. We  had booked this vacation back in February before Covid and before Gilbert’s condition became worse.  Dr. Biernacki further recommended a slight increase in his furosemide, the diruretic that reduces the fluid in the lung. Sure enough his coughing and spitting up has reduced.

I’m really getting positively lazy here. I spent yesterday morning sleeping in. Then I had coffee and read my western.  The good girl, the good guy, the bad girl and the bad guys.  Lots of gunfire.  

I actually did some work , responding to phone calls and need for prescription renewals. Since it was raining in the morning I was glad to.  It’s good to feel useful and also to have some money coming in.  I work for myself so don’t have benefits, no paid holidays, no pension, no sick leave. . I have some funding from the Doctors of BC for conferences. That pays for the plane flight but then I pay for registration and hotels but also usually tack on a week of vacation and sightseeing then.  

Some days I miss the high paid government, university and institutional jobs with the light work loads, month paid holidays, maximum 40 hour work weeks, more like 30 given the lunches and coffee breaks, 2 weeks paid study leaves, benefits, sick leave and pension..  The fattest fat cat doctors are in Quebec. Then I remember the soul destroying, bore you to death, ego driven, team meetings, all talk and nothing getting done, so appealing to the Chatty Cathy types and the posturing male suits, I appreciate my simple lowly low paid work. 

Mostly I’m just thankful to have work.  I’ve worked since I was 12 yo, part time jobs, then my SIN at 16 and working as a dishwasher.  With saving and budgeting I own what I have but think I’d be wiser to have rented and leased. My doctor friend George after his divorce argued that renting and leasing were the way for men to go now given the way,  the government and the  system increasingly preyed on home owners and people with property, while encouraging the criminals and people who simply don’t care that much to work, despite their claims to the contrary.  Parasites thrive as the hosts deteriorate. 

These camping vacations are just expense, no money coming in, and money going out. But necessary. It’s out here that I find peace and renew my spirit.  Each day I feel lighter.  Listening to others pain, fears, anxiety, depression I feel like I’m left with it. It builds like soot in a chimney. All the angst that’s burnt up in each session,  unloaded for me to incinerate. .  There are many ways people burnt out deal with distancing and protecting themselves.  I was trained to walk a mile in a persons’ shoes and to be with them. I actually will go down the rabbit hole of insanity, find them and bring them back to the light. That’s all you can truly do with the psychotic and the addict. Otherwise you’re just throwing bandaids at the problem That’s the empath challenge. Lending ego. Joining. Healing.  Easier to remain in one’s head and prescribe meds from a far.  The challenge is to remain feeling.  I thank my incredible teachers for their sharing and insights.   Still there’s that pesky  Caregiver’s burden.  They’ve finally listed the PTSD in DSM5 that folks like me experience hearing day in day out the terrible trauma which soldiers, police and prisoners experience.  Nothing better than camping and the woods to restore me. Sailing works too.  Wilderness. The outdoors. Time in prayer. Meditation. I find all those here. 

Laura’s experiencing the same relief.  Her work as a doctors assistant is a myriad of demands and activities so here she’s relaxing. As a mother she had years of children talking at her and now it’s sick adults. Out here she’s happy that Gilbert is so grateful and I’m with him. We are all wounded and it’s good to be here.  

Yesterday I rode the motorcycle over to Lone Butte Sporting Goods, my favourite outdoor shop around here. A young guy owns it. The Exeter Sporting Goods store in 100 mile House is another favourite.  I bought the Chiappa Double Badger there but the fellow at Lone Butte put a red dot siting mechanism on the rifle to help me hit the heads of grouse. Usually I have a scope. With open sites I can hit the grouse but couldn’t get head shots consistently.  I also was able to get another butane cartridge for our Thermocell.  My nephew Graeme sang their praises at warding off the demon mosquitoes so I bought one only to find I had a Thermocell Lantern in the camper. Now I’ve two and they do work well keeping mosquitos 20 feet away.

I actually fished. I took the boat out yesterday for the whole afternoon coming back in the evening.  I’d charged the battery so had a couple of hours of electric outboard trolling. I rowed. I’m getting lots of exercise. I cast. I tried every hook I’ve got. Not a bite. Fish were jumping.  The sun was shining.  A few fluffy beautiful clouds in the sky.  Perfection.  

I’m looking forward to fishing again.  Right now coffee and toast. It rained through the night. I was up once to walk Gilbert at 2 am then walked him again first thing this morning.  His breathing is better after walking.  

We’ve another couple of days here and we’ll stay if he continues well. He’s so much better today, playing ball, smiling.  We’ll head south to lower elevation by the coast then or even home.  I love the freedom. I’m so thankful to be off schedule.  Each day a blank slate.  It’s bear hunting season still here.  I’ve  even thought I might get a bear though frankly it’s a lot of work. My friends in the Urban Aboriginal Ministry always appreciate when I share wild game.   I’d rather sit around in the pontoon boat in the sun hoping to catch a fish.   

Molar Root Abscess and the Toxic Workplace

It’s not easy to admit to being a whimp.  I had an appointment to have a crown put on by Dr. Douglas Lovely, my amazing dentist New Westminster.  I admit I’ve loved going to him for 20 years because he’s literally painless. As a child our dentist didn’t believe children felt pain. It left as lasting aversion to dentists.  Doug’s work is the best.  It helps he’s a sailor and that all my doctor friends see him too.

The day before the crown my face flared up. A horrible night of sleeplessness and pain.  I was so glad to have the appointment.  My face was slowed and Doug did the xray showing the tooth was cracked and a “pea size“ abscess at the base of the second root.  The crown wasn’t anything but it was on a cracked tooth as well.  My gnashing my teeth in my sleep at night was catching up on me.  Doug gave me antibiotics and recommended high dose ibuprofen.  He had to bring the swelling down to extract the tooth.  Extraction was set for a week later.  

Tha night was awful. I don‘t do sleepless nights well anymore. Too many years of call.  First surgery and deliveries and later suicidal calls and drunken calls.  It’s been years though that I’ve had to go to a hospital. Still it’s hard to get back to sleep.  And a tooth ache didn’t help.  Doug warned me it might get worse before it would get better.  But I’m a whimp.  My face swelled out like a chipmunk with nuts.

I had to take the afternoon off work because I was just simply too fatigue. Fortunately the last morning of work was slow.  Doug had contacted me when I sent a picture of my lopsided face and expressed my abject misery. ‘It’s almost as bad as a man flu’ summed it out.  A lot of cowering and shaking by men all round.  Drum roll in the back ground. Images of the grim reaper. Women thoroughly insensitive.  ‘Tooth ache. ‘. ‘Man flu’.  Really? 

No one God has them deliver babies. I’d never do it.  I also concluded yet again I’d never make a spy. The first mention of torture and I’d give up anything to stop the pain. I was beyond Motrin and Alleve and ASA. I was on a cocktail of all three at three times the recommended dose.  I was a toxic waste dump of NSAD’s.  I understand and always have why people who aren’t treated sufficintly for pain by doctors turn to the street vigilantes services for pain defence.  Pain is thoroughly underestimated by bureaucrats and anyone who has not known it’s bite.  

I couldn’t bite either. Soft foods and soups and embarrassing drool out the side of my face.

Bleak.  Suicidal. Rethinking euthanasia.  Paranoid moments. Wondering who might have caused the toothache. Was it the Russians. Was it radioactive.Did Trudeau do this. All else evil in Canada today can be placed at his stupid feet. Why not my tooth ache.  3 and 4 am arre ripe times for vivid imagination.  Was the chip some government lab had placed in my tooth finally needing a battery change. I’ve heard all the best ideas from schizophrenic patients. Even Freud concluded they might be right.  Doug would tell me if I had a chip in my tooth and the battery needed replacement. He said he’d take it out and then do an implant.   I don’t have dental care.  Only illegal immigrants get that in Canada.  Who cares what the cost is when your eyes are bulging out. I even thought of going to the hospital emergency for morphine but remembered this was Canada and I’d wait for 10 or 20 hours in the waitroom for a shot of morphine exposed to all the latest virus bacteria and the hell of Canadian ER’s.   Light would come soon.

Doug was in Whistler but called my pharmacist who gave me Dexamethasone and Flagyl to add to the Clindamycin.  Dougs voice is reassuring.  He calls after all his work.  He still cares. Doctors are punished today for caring.  The administration is swaggering and arrogant, the worst in the civilized world, 20 times what is needed, doctors hated by government here, the fewest in the civilized world, longest wait lists.  







 I watch a video of the Ontario doctors speaking out against the Liberal government there. I think of all the patients who are so desperate and angry and how little we have to give them anymore now that all our health care resources are devoted to government administration and doctors are condemned for unprofessionalism because they won’t kill themselves fast enough. The paper work and the endless rules and committee ivory tower bullshit destroying us as the patients cry and come in angrier and more and more in despair. Everyone has gone without to pay the outrageous taxes and all the money goes to debt and administration. It’s so depressing on the frontlines.

I’m thankful that dentists are still free of the scourge of Space Station administration arrogant in their ignorance of the death they cause from distance and negligence.  

I’m unhappy.  A Christian biker died.  He was a friend as much as anything.  He loved his gal. He loved Jesus.  I’ve not adjusted to the dying these last couple of years.  Family, friends and the epidemic of fentanyl. It was bad enough working front lines through the AIDS epidemic. This is worse.

The government blamed the doctors for the opiate crisis.  I read last week they were totally off. Their calculations all wrong. Their false accusations like all the other fake news right out there.  It turns out that the fentanyl is just another Chinese attack and part of the drug wars. ‘Whatever minor factor ‘overprescribing’ is ,is the least concern. But there goes our government demonizing doctors and our dying patients .  They’re in the business of marijuana and euthanasia now.  

My pain had dropped with the sleep and hope the added anti biotic brought.  I had homework to do.  I just lay in bed.  I had all this stuff that was to be done but another weekend devoted to getting ready to go back to the wars.  Any female patient can lie and falsely accuse a male doctor if he doesn’t agree with breaking the law and lying for her and a committee will destroy the doctor because that’s their agenda.  It’s not paranoia. They do the same to female doctors.  All the doctors realize now that any patient , especially the psychopaths,  have the power of complaints, any of which cause the doctor to lose $10,000 with no cost to the patient.  There’s a totally skewed power dynamic and it’s all a lie.  There’s no cost in Canada for perjury.   

Indeed multiculturalism denies the value of truth or knowledge.  It’s no longer about anything but feelings and power and men are all wrong and white men are all racists.  Every doctor I know, male and female, in the front lines tries to do the least now. No one wants to take on an unknown patient.  We’re working like our administration which is collectively destroying the practice of medicine. I’m entering an age when I may need medical care. I’m afraid of hospitals because the workplace is utterly toxic because of the administration and the anti doctor government. The nurses are being reduced too so we can have more politically correct administration.

I don’t have the reserve for a tooth ache.  I don’t have the reserve for sleepless nights.  My friends are all struggling with normal life and the workplace is killing them. The demands on doctors have skyrocketted while the fat cat administration is swaggering with self praise, making the rules for their dream jobs and constant vacations and giving themselves raises upon raises but never visiting the front lines. It’s WWI all over again and we’re the machine gun fodder.

The patients get less. We’re all condemned by a cruel and perfect government judgmental to the core Everyone is ‘offended’ all the time and the standards of perfections and political correctness are beyond the pale. You can kill with negligence but don’t dare swear or raise your voice or object to lacks of beds or deadly wait lists.  And then you hear they’re going to give more ‘free health care’ to immigrant families as more doctors suicide under the strain and in response to the cruelty and insensitivity of the administration.

Another night of sleep. More ibuprofen, more antibiotics.  The swelling’sdown. I can eat. I think of my colleagues working after having babies and having surgery.  I know so many stoics. I admire so many I know facing the deluge of demands one on one face to face in the front lines and those far from the front are shooting them in the back and fearing that they might ever have to go back out there .  They ‘ve played it smart, got the cushion jobs, moved to the back, played politics, not kept up with medicine, medicine just a stepping stone to power and control.  They never really cared for patients. They’ve seen so few and risen so fast. 

I’m feeling better. I get to church.  I’m humbled by Jesus.  Laura and I watched Monty Python reruns. Laughter therapy.  Communion was good.  The god kids were like herding cats.No one can afford to live in Vancouver.  The criminals and government have turned the city into an unliveable place except for jet setters.  I’m just the ‘Help’’.  Laura laughed to read the book about the ‘help’ and what the help said about the masters.  The destruction of the middle class is taking place. Only the elite are well here. The Mayor actually said something like it being reasonable to pay $3500 rent a month while a miserable shack costs a million anywhere.  The television constantly shows pictures of the rest of the world and the refugees are so happy as scab labour but given the benefits don’t seem to want to work.    

Those of us native Canadians who worked all our lives are leaving major gaps in services as we retire and no one is foolish enough to work in Canada. The whole work ethic is a farce when you see the leadership off on vacation and never working seriously before getting the best leadership job on who his name is.  Work doesn’t pay is the Canadian idea. Entitlement and social justic warriors and activists are all the rage. No one wants to do physics and chemistry or cut lumber or take risky jobs with axes and such.  It’s a talk world.

I type more today than I did as a secretary.  But I get paid for all that I know of biochemistry and psychopharmacology and diagnostics though naming things is quickly going out of fashion. Everything is fashion

I am comforted by the words of the priest. I’m thankful for the sweet sounds of Barry’s music.  I am thankful for all the friendliness of the people we meet here. Downstairs having coffee in the church I remember my mother and father. Dad helped put a new roof on the old church.  Mom always helped make meals and coffee.  We all did the dishes.  The coffee is fine. I’m thankful I don’t drool out of the side of my mouth.  I’m looking forward to camping.  

After everyone is gone. I walk Gilbert along the river and watch a green headed mallard land on the stream.  The  trees are all budding. There a bunting today.  A robin is in a bush with fresh green buds.  Lots of tulips and daffodils. I must focus on the good things. I’ve been depressed with sleepleness and death and a toothache.  I’m a whimp.  I think I once was more.  I sailed solo across an ocean. Faced charging bear.  White water canoed. Walked frozen across tundra after our skidoo went through the ice.  I saved a few children. A woman thanked me for saving her eye.  A few people told me that I convinced them not to kill themselves.  Thousands are sober. Thousands didn’t kill themselves on my watch.  I’ve done a bit of good in my time but it’s all unfashionable today.

I talked to my female colleague and she’s being punished like me for working with the people Jesus used to hang with.  We’re silly not to have been the doctors for the wealthiest. I turned down the job and so did she. We’re working with the really sick, the end of the road, and the feral.  It’s a single party insurance scheme and we’re not supposed to keep these people alive. More and more we’re co opted by insurance companies to write reports to courts and to keep people out of their toxic workplaces and to give them a chance at the legal lottery.  ICBC , our auto insurance plan thanks to government mismanagement is on the brink of bankruptcy. Wherever government gets involved there is horrendous waste and mismanagement in Canada. Rapidly a third world country. Not the meritocracy it once was.  But you know you’re getting old when you talk about the good old days.

I’m insignificantly significant and significantly insignificant.  75% of my colleagues wouldn’t recommend medicine in Canada.  It’s still a beautiful spring.  Today’s sunshine was miraculous.  My face no longer hurts.  I laughed to watch Monty Python’s absurdity, « Always look on the Bright Side of life.’  

It really is funny.  You must stop taking yourself seriously.  It was just a tooth ache. Not nearly as bad as a man flu.

Resilience and Easter

I feel sometimes when I’m actively being punished by barbaric antiquated pre modern science systems of control and abuse that I become too ‘heavy’.  I teach that in life we should learn from motorcyclists. Driving down the freeway at high speed on my Harley Electroglide I learned that if I look at a pile of dog shit or maneur or radical leftist Canadian liberal policy I will indeed collide with the shit and get shit on my shiny motorcycle and leather armour.  Yet if I don’t keep my eyes open and my head out of the sand I won’t know who kicked me. So to navigate as motorcyclists we note the government obstacles, the ignorance and outrageously expensive counter productive policies but avoid them personally.  We see the shit and go to either side of the obstacle.  It’s been said that I personally persist in driving right down the centre of the road proverbially, politically and poetically.  In this far left country of Canada with our radically left government I feel as emotionally and mentally homeless as the increasing numbers of physically homeless.
Psychiatry Grand Rounds, Neuroscience of Resilience, 3.14.18, Psychiatry Grand Rounds by Noshene Ranjibar MD and Justin Otis, MD said the first and best response to trauma was relational, community and sharing and parasympathetic.  In contrast to the local medical administrative disdain for AA NA and Church the presenters celebrated the community and rituals that helped people deal with trauma in the healthiest way, utilizing the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system.  The second line defence most known was the sympathetic fight or flight response, the characteristic response elicited by the British Columbia and Canadian administration policies which are legalistic, paranoid, and 17th century pre scientific era, control and power based.   The third response was the basal ganglia, reptilian, ancient ’freeze’ response .
They were discussing ‘burn out’ and how they had addressed their problems with physician burn out. It was uplifting to hear all the advances in psychiatry being brought to the department and administration level.  Locally I’d been exposed to the junior low brow approaches to systemic problems best described as blame, shame and CYA administration. This is classic communist and totalitarian fear based ‘negotiation by intimidation’ also seen commonly with people drunk and stoned. The rise in marijuana use in government is certainly a contributing factor. Marijuana may removed the empathic capacity of the higher brain function.
 British Columbia is the epicentre of crime, drug trafficking and money laundering of Canada. It’s competitor is Montreal made famous by   Chabonneau Corruption Commission which showed the Mafia and Biker Gang influence on French Canadian governments. The Canadian Health Care System is descending as Canadian debt sky rockets.
Well in the midst of this I thought I’d just add a blog with the positive images of ’spring’. Because I work in a highly toxic environment in a divided country with failing health care system and roaring corruption and dishonesty, I am forever doing everything to cope.  My patients are desperate and maligned and ignored. They’re terrified and the future is very bleak for the elderly.  They’ve all been promised everything by the political system and the lies of media ,only to find that they are old and homeless and that third world people feel greater happiness.
 I sometimes want a holiday because all my time off  is “recovering’ from the George III insanity of governement dictates.  Every day colleagues take early retirement complaining of the administration and the government. 75% of doctors would not recommend medicine.
Internationally Canada is known now as the most offended nation in the universe.
Everyone collectively and individually is guilty of a social offence as laws and bureaucracy exponentially increase.
I prayer daily, meditate, write gratitudes, look on the bright side, celebrate crusaders like Jordan Peterson, JJ MacCullough,Diana Davison. I pray for willingness to forgive because I don’t seem to be forgiving as the bolts of negative energy and punishment just keep coming, I shut out thoughts of suicide knowing these creepy callous fat cat elites want this in their secret hearts and I refuse to identify with the aggressor. Too many good people have been killed by these cretans. I pray. I talk to other doctors but everyone I most admire, the greatest of the great are disgusted like I am . The evidence is overwhelming that the problem is systemic yet they continue to personalize it. I walk the dog, my little blind therap dog. I am writing gratitude lists daily while moving through the daily malaise, constant threats hanging over me, I look for ways to escape, hear all the thanks and appreciation of family and friends, feel empathy for the many who are subjected to the ptsd of unfeeling workplace of superiority and rabid arrogance. I resist the strokes and hear aches such covert evil induces. I stop and breathe and look at the spring. These people are sick I say. Pray for them. Thought block. They sold their soul to the company store long ago. Shut their contempt for those who are still at the front out of your mind. Go to church. Go to meetings. Share hugs. Focus on the good. Avoid the shit. There’s a wide open road. Head out on the highway.
Christ is crucified. Get down off the cross we can use the wood. Soon it will be Easter morning. The metaphor is there. This too will pass. Sun always rises. Christ is risen. We’ve seen worse. We will survive . We will thrive. There’s always the resilience.Holy Spirit Come. Lord Jesus Christ. Forgive them for they know not what they do. Be like Jesus. Let the light heal. Invite the Lord into your heart. Let go and let God. Wear life like a loose wrap. Smile and the world smiles with you. Hallelujah Christ is risen.

Journal Entry Thursday

It was a hard start this week.  Monday was a rough Monday.  I thought Sunday was saturday.  I’d been a way the week before and this confused me.  I returned to 2-3 times the work I left and the week I left I had 2-3 x the work to leave.  It’s always been that way.
I remember talking to doctors who simply gave up taking holidays because the work was overwhelming to get away. So many of my rural colleagues can’t get locums.
Some of it too is that I go away for a week and I'm out of the mines, out of the routine, out of the flow.  I have to think about things again that were almost done on autopilot. I made a mistake with a medication yesterday that was just 'stupid', writing a totally different medication down that vaguely 'looked' like another. The pharmacist phoned to ask for clarification and I made the correction but it was essentially like a produce manager giving you a cucumber when you asked for tomato.  I was just renewing the script so it was obvious given the previous record, still. That's the sort of thing that happens and worries me so much with the homungus multiplication of details and paperwork.  In the community I get this more and more with 'parts' errors so common that I'm actually surprised when a store gives me the right one first time.  I remember my friend getting the 'wrong' part on a vacuum cleaner bag 6x.  I remember every single error I've made with medications and prescriptions and I've noted a couple a year more caught by staff, pharmacist or patient. None life threatening but all unnerving. I went years without a single error and now the 'system' holds these errors within the process of prescription renewal and the multiplicity of drugs, pharmacies, specialists.  I miss the days when I saw young patients principally and they were not seeing a dozens specialists and on only the medication I was prescribing and only one pharmacist was involved and I knew him or her as the case was.  I have to accept the stress is overwhelming at times and change whether good or bad increases stress.  A half dozen of my favourite colleagues and referral folk have retired. I didn't realize that most were 70ish. I thought of them as younger but they've closed their practices and no one is there to take their patients over.  I 'm taking a few simply because I admired one colleague and we worked in a similar vein.  Patients constantly tells me everywhere they go the system is functioning like a factory. "I'm only allowed one complaint."  "She only has 5 minutes to see me." "The psychiatrist only saw me the first time and since then it's a nurse or a group.'  The complaints are systemic. I live in fear of the hoards of regulators and police watching the police watching the police and the media watching everyone and no one doing the front line work anymore or those who do so often have no skills or experience.  It's all troubling but surprisingly things go along and most work out.  There is a sense of foreboding in the air. That general sense that something is about to burst.  All the debts and struggles to pay the rent.  Several of my patients are not eating more than one meal. They're on pensions, spent their lives working and now have to go without eating to pay their rent.  Always there's anger.
Then there were the suicides. Early in my career every time I took a month vacation with the university or hospital I’d return to some patient having been turned away by the ER or someone not taking them seriously so they hung themselves or overdosed.  I was devastated because they all sought help elsewhere but it was ‘my fault’ because I ‘abandoned’ them.  I was doing psychoanalytic psychotherapy extensively in those days with borderline personality disorders who’d had multiple suicide attempts and were always suicidal.  Relationship therapy was the basis of there getting better. They’d see me weekly and to their astonishment I’d not beat them up or have sex with them.  All their care givers before me, mother, father, uncles aunts, boyfriends, girlfriends, siblings and even some health care workers had done that. So they just assumed that I would.  They were full of rage.  So when I would be away they’d go to the ER and tell the doctor they were suicidal and really and he/she’d send them home with some ativan, (‘brush them off’), there were ‘no beds’.  This is a real reason , a real medical reason, for an admission.  I can still feel my anger at those days.  It happened each year and I was afraid while I was away, wondering if my patients would get care. The dynamics of these suicides were mixed in hate/fear and full of ‘transference’ but in the end my ‘counter transference’ was simply that I chose to take 2 week vacations at most. Nobody killed themselves when I was away only for 10 days or 2 weeks.  There have been exceptions. I was sailing for a month back from Hawaii with a 3 week window planned only to have the mast break but by then I wasn’t doing mostly psychoanalytic therapy and patients were a really mixed bag with mostly drugs and alcohol, ptsd, somatic issues and head injuries.  Most services were ‘enabling’ borderlines or having passive aggressively written them off so I wasn’t doing in depth therapy. I liked that the borderlines I treated back then went on to be rich famous leaders and success stories.  I always felt that craziness was just going in the wrong direction and if you could turn it around the person would be going as fast in the right direction.
Now I’m working with a lot of other doctors and less alone but still there are no back up resources.  The advantage now is that there’s coverage at the gp level or walk in clinic level.  Then the cell phone has made all the difference. I’ve had calls most days while I’ve been away and that seems to be enough for my chronically suicidal patients.  No one has killed themselves in years while I’ve been away for years. Thank you  Jesus.
All weeks been a little sluggish but that’s mostly been the weather. I’ve had a whole lot of work and been exhausted at the end of the day. I suspect that’s aging. I ordered a pizza and simply watched TV I felt so drained. Went for a walk with Gilbert and a friend.
Was really thankful Thursday had arrived. Wednesday the ‘hump’.
I’m looking forward to the weekend.
Hate being inside with the sunshine, now that it’s returned. Fear that I need to get every ray to bolster me for the dark and grim Vancouver rainy season.
All’s well.
I’m thankful for Thursday and that no one is killing themselves.  Suicide is such lonely social terrorism.  Like a bomb going off and everyone around hurt by the blast.
I do like the sunshine today.  Thank you Jesus