Cancer is that which we can say in no other way.
Cancer is the scream in the night.
Cancer is silent rage.
Cancer is always betrayal;
Always love and hate,
Fear and Forgiveness.
Cancer is pain, fatigue and forgetting.
Incomprehensible demoralization
Bewildering.
Why me?
Cancer is disillusionment for the secular man
Whose religion does not begin with:
ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?
Life is suffering unto death.
This world is but an illusion, Moksha
Death is divine for those whose life is punishment.
Cancer is incarceration.
Cancer is slow suicide
In a world of free will without determinism
Otherwise it’s just an accident or fate.
.
Cancer is life with partial death
Cancer is the drama of one downmanship
In the competition of disease
In the community of denial and apartheid.
Cancer is one way of dying in a world
Anxious and alone
Always In shit and piss,
As we were born.
Death comes to us all.
Cancer is but a gift of premonition.
Spontaneous remissions and miracles, just names
The cure, within and without, but more within within.
And never permanent.
Life is temporary, a rental, at best, a lease.
Laughter is all that is free.
There is no darkness in the light.
There is no hiding place,
Not even in cancer.
Disease is ever metaphor,
It begins in an idea ,
And ends in a period,
Perhaps a comma,
Certainly a question mark,
Always an exclamation point:
Aha!
And I am crying too.
We are not alone.
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Monday, September 26, 2016
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Gratitude, Resentment, Grief and Aging
I am thankful for my fingers, Lord. The knife cut I did to my index finger did not severe a nerve. The joint capsule may have been penetrated but there is no more infection. Daily iodine with hydrogen peroxides and bandaid changes has saved the finger. How come I was not so careful initially when I was washing the knives. But thank you Lord if there was any lesson I was to learn from my injured ‘pointing finger’. I have not had to at least have it removed. I’m grateful for that. Help me always to see more my own faults than the faults of others, or the faults of the world.
Thank you Lord for the health of my dog. I was so devastated when he was paralyzed that day. I was in fear all day as we drove back early from the north. Thank you for X-rays and Oak Animal Hospital and the lovely Indo Canadian veterinarian who did a thorough examination of him and found his nerves had not been injured, that he would walk again with medication. Thank you for his slow recovery. Thank you for science and medication.
Thank you for the end of elections. Help me to recover from all the hatred and shame I experienced again for standing up for what I believe in. For years I have taught people ‘love the person’, don’t accept the behaviour. I have taught that guilt was what we felt when we did something wrong but shame was what we felt when we felt we were wrong fundamentally as a person. I have experienced so much shaming. Throughout the election and even now I am told by so many that I am not a Canadian because I do not believe as the victors do. Always shaming. Always ‘ad hominem’. I have never been ‘good enough’. I have always been ridiculed and condemned. Meanwhile I serve like an untouchable, treating unclean bodies and unclean minds. Men and women get rich off the sales of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, poor lifestyle, unsafe practices, yet I am there serving, healing and helping and I am told I am not worthy to live here. I am unwanted.
I treat many old men like me. Some old ladies too. There is sadness in aging. There is sadness in a whole variety of poverties yet some poverty takes precedence. The single mothers go to the front of the line while us men whose children were aborted are shunned. We stand in lonely groups sometimes touched by the men and women whose children were killed in crime. I huddle next to them. Their sons and daughters murdered or killed in war or by accident Somehow we face dying together in the greatest of loneliness. I have no tie to this world, no illusion of immortality.
And so much I gave in taxes, taken from me, voluntarily though, I had no choice, to pay for education and children and I supported the children of others knowing my own were killed. I am a laughing stock. Worse than a cuckold. The women jeer at us men whose lovers killed our being and say ‘you deserved it’. Man. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
I am shamed for being a man. And I’m not even a very good one. The heterosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a man and the homosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a woman. I’m divorced and divorced men are the scourge of the earth. Divorced women were obviously done wrong by men but divorced men get what they deserve. They’re contemptible. I was punished and condemned in the courts, laughed at by the judge whose eyes did not look at me but instead focused on the loosely covered breasts of the one who had once said she loved me. As I once said I loved her. In the end I paid her all I had financially. She was smug in profit. The courts made their money too. The judge looked like he wanted to have a tryst with her. He ogled her. She looked coy. I was thrust aside. Loser. Fool. Shame and humiliation.
50 shades of grey. The billionaires are worshiped. The women read with lust what girls are willing to do for the monetary winner. Eva Braun ruled all of Germany. Only her man is condemned.
My mother is dead. She didn’t do drugs or drink. She insisted we go to school. She loved education. She insisted we go to Sunday school and church. She loved the Lord. She insisted we play hockey. She and my father loved hockey. So I fished with Dad and hunted and fixed cars with my brother and my father. I learned cooking from mom and mixing cement from Dad and I helped him build buildings and boats. My parents had lost so many friends in WWII. Dad had served in the RCAF. A spitfire mechanic and a bombardier. My parents met in the war. Dad and Mom weren’t racists. I didn’t know racists till the government began dividing and conquering the people by calling everyone racists. My black doctor didn’t even know he was black in those days like I didn’t know I was white.
Dad didn’t know that being a man and being white was wrong. He didn’t think of himself as coloured. My mother and her sister had black friends. They were Baptist. She didn’t have Catholic friends. Dad had Catholic friends and Jewish friends and Buddhist friends and Hindu friends and secular friends. Our family were as coloured as everyone. Mom joked about us having freckles. My brother and her had red hair.
Dad liked smart people, people who did things, ‘made something of themselves’. Always growing up I heard my parents say, “It doesn’t matter where a person has been it’s where they’re going and are they building things up.” Mom and dad most admired people who were working and taking care of their children. They didn’t like people who were ‘living off of the government because they were too good to do a honest day’s labour’. They didn’t like people who weren’t willing to ‘get their hands dirty’. They especially didn’t like people who stole and criminals.
“I didn’t fight for this country so I had to put a lock on my own doors,” my father told me. The judge who lived a couple of houses over was a rip roaring falling down drunk and my parents didn’t have any time for drunks. They especially didn’t like drugs. “Wasting their lives. Caring for their own pleasures when they should be caring for others. Not caring how much their behaviour hurt others. That’s their problem."
They both said, “You always were too smart for your britches.” “I don’t care if the teacher is wrong, you’ve got to learn to not tell them that because they’re hurt you for it. The more wrong they are the more they hurt people who are right.” My aunt was Indian. My Baptist aunt was the executive assistant (we called her his ’secretary’ back then) to Canada’s ambassador in Washington DC during WWII. My grandfather arrived as a poor immigrant from Scotland and homesteaded northern Canada to become a great rancher and lumber man. My other grandfather arrived from Ireland. Both poor, the “made something of themselves.’ They “didn’t take handouts’.
My aunts and mother told me the history of things. The teachers told me lies. I was strapped by the principal for correcting them. The same occurred in chemistry when the teacher had the equations wrong. But he didn’t have me strapped. He corrected his equation and thanked me. That’s probably why I liked science. We were caned in gym class, our buttocks bared. I got my first ruler in kindergarten. The female teacher undressed me in front of the class and held me across her knees smacking me hard over and over again on my naked bottom.
Much later I was punished for stopping men and women killing people. The people whose job it was to ensure the safety of the children hated and shamed me for stopping the killing. The provincial enquiry years later vindicated me but a half dozen babies more were killed before that occurred. I never received an apology. I was never returned the money and time I lost for doing the right thing. I was suspect then. I didn’t keep quiet and mind my own business when I saw people being killed and raped. I wasn’t a ‘team player’ they said in the government. There is no “truth and reconciliation” for ‘whistleblowers’.
I’m surprised I don’t like S and M. So many boys have come out of school spanked so many times like me that they at least got some pleasure sexually later from their twisted education. I just got this twisted idea I’d stop people being abused. I try mostly to stop people from ‘turning anger inward’. They continue to hurt themselves after being hurt so much by others.
Now the government tells me I can’t touch people. Standing helpless in my office men and women cling to me and their tears run down my suit. I cannot hug them. All over the province men and women physicians are being publicly threatened fines and loss of license if they touch a patient, especially if they hug a patient. I eventually push them away and tell them the government says that doctors can’t touch their patients even when they are grieving. There are so many laws today. I am afraid of everyone and everything.
Thank you Lord for these moments of peace. Thank you Lord for bringing me safety this far. Thank you for the light. Thank you for the coffee and the cream and the porridge. Thank you for this computer. Thank you for letters and language. Thank you for the opportunity to learn. Thank you for the chances I’ve been given to make something of myself. I am still walking upright. I’m still able to help others. I am so thankful that my finger still works. I am always in pain, Lord. I am just so thankful that it’s not as bad as it has been. I am so thankful that I can get out of bed and get to work and have some work. I look back and remember the abject poverty of those years of being a student, giving blood for books, not having food because I paid the rent, eating at family and friends because I had no money. We were in love then. We lived so simply. Years and years of hand me down clothing, hand me down furniture. We pooled our resources for a party. I studied from 6 am to 12 pm and saw formulas in my sleep. I lived in hospitals. I went for years without sleep. Plane crash. Polar bear chasing me. Deadly diseases. Old people dying in my arms alone in the night giving me their last words as gifts. I thought I’d never get clean. The lice, the bacteria, the virus, the sickness. I was sick for so many many years. Tuberculosis. I was treated for a year. She condemned me for going where no one else would go. “You’re not a Christian, you’re a fool.” she told me when I wanted her nakedness and she was angry that I flew away to serve the aboriginals because, “no one else would’. Now no one cares. The government regulator sneered at me and said, “It’s just a job.” I’ve never got my back pay. There never was a bonus. Everyone said I had status but ever shopkeeper raised the price and stole from me. All the while the government took in taxes and paid themselves fat salaries and froze my income. Among ourselves we laugh if we make minimum wage. 7 days a week for how many years is it I worked and was on call. No overtime. No on call. No danger pay. I fell asleep in an operation. I wet myself too. An adult man peeing dribbling unable to hold it. all night with an unforgettable bowel after a shot gun wound. I wake with nightmares screaming lost in guts that are perforated seeing faces of suicides. It’s a good week when I don’t remember, when I get a full nights sleep. This morning I woke at 5 am. Now I know it’s just the rain. It’s the darkness and the rain. It’s that season. I remember the rains coming and the palm trees flying over my car, my windows knocked out. The rains and the darkness. I’ll get used to it again.
Thank you Lord for the memories. When I smoked pot and drank wine I forgot. I don’t remember my holidays. Those brief weeks when we’d get away from the ‘front’ and escape to beaches. I drank wine and smoked weed and now don’t much remember those days while the horrors of guns in offices and knives and the angry faces fresh from jail in withdrawal demanding valium and more valium or narcotics and more narcotics threatening shouting.
She said I ’sexually harassed her’ when I asked her to leave because she was stealing and smoking crack. She ‘d been raging and shouting at the Indo canadians in wheelchairs. She hated Indo Canadians. I didn’t know when I hired her. I didn’t even know she was a drug addict. I didn’t know she prostituted. I took others words. She lied. I didn’t know her johns had been her references. I didn’t know that her minister was her bisexual lover. I’ve never known anything when the shit hits the fan. I’ve been so focussed on saving a life that I didn’t know that I was being stolen from. Only when the bank balance didn’t match did I know something was wrong. Only when I saw the receipts from the store did I realize that she was a thief. Everything she said and wrote didn’t match. Lawyers showed that. A hundred lies but it was never about truth. I told the truth and was condemned for it. Government’s don’t want the truth.
The government woman said, “Women don’t lie about sex.”
I learned there was no ‘justice’ and went to work pro bono with my friend who was killed when he said that only the rich could afford justice in Canada. I still think it was a hit.
Thank you Lord for the lifting me up. These moments come and go. The set backs. Reflecting on people saying I’m not a Canadian. People telling me to leave Canada and that I’m not wanted here. It took me back to the time when I was getting death threats, when my windows were shot out by 22’s, when my cars was keyed over and over. I had been diagnosing alcoholism and addiction and saying that people were unfit for work. The management thanked me for halving the accidents on the job. Men and women thanked me for making their workplaces safe but the cost was high. Drug addiction changes a person. The pot heads were just as violent as the alcoholics and cokeheads when it came to wanting revenge. Here there were having this good thing, the doctor before me saying they were depressed and giving them a week or two in hospital to dry out before they went back to work to wreck havoc on management and their fellow workers. He was the loved doctor.
"The other psychiatrist never asked about alcohol and drugs but this knew little shit doctor did and he fucked me up. The fuck cost me my job writing down what I told him I smoked and drank. It was supposed to be confidential. When the insurance company saw it they said that I had to go to treatment. I didn’t want to quit. I just wanted the other psychiatrist to keep writing a note saying I was sick because of my bipolar disorder. I didn’t want this fucking asshole to fuck me up. I talked to everyone about him. I didn’t think it was relevant to tell anyone how much weed I was smoking when I was working. It’s medicine. It’s a herb. It’s not like the pharmaceutical’s that little shit puts people on. The boss is just like him. A fuckking shit. Keeps telling me I’m forgetting and not concentrating on the work. Claimed I caused their multi million dollar machine to break down. All the stress he was giving me made me do coke. I needed it to concentrate at work after I started the day with a few shots and a doozie or two. Then I go to the hospital for my normal break, like we all did with the old doctor and this shit blows the whistle. Of course I hate him. Fucking boy scout. Little do goober. Of course my friends and I made his life miserable. After what he did to us he’s lucky he didn’t have an accident."
Now I’m just sad, now , alone. Thinking how many lives I must have ruined drug testing. If I’d just backed off, turned a blind eye like my colleague, these guys might have gone on to be Prime Minister or at very least headed the company. Instead they probably left regular work and went into growing dope full time and becoming part of the multi billion dollar BC industry that now has essentially been pardoned as well as getting to take the money and run.
I’ve never been “pardoned" in my work. I’m just scrutinized, regulated, criticized, shamed and threatened. They call the punishment different names like ‘re-education.’ It’s still punishment. The hitters get paid and the victims get framed. When I was doing so much pro bono work, about 20% of that years income, because the parents didn’t pay their premium they and their kids couldn’t see private doctor and they were told to go to government clinics where they didn’t want to go because everyone their judged them and put them down, I saw them. I didn’t get paid. May e $20,000 loss of income a year. I thought like any business I should be able to declare it as a loss so I did. Revenue Canada sent out three people to audit me. It wasn’t an audit. It was harassment. They went through all my books. At the end of a week, this thug said, “No doctor sees patients for free. We haven’t caught you yet, but we’re watching you and we will.” Every private doctor I know works for free but we’re not allowed to declare our ‘losses’. Even today people miss appointments and I don’t pay but I can’t declare my losses against my earnings like all other businesses can. The reason is that psychopaths think others think like they do. Lizards think other think like lizards. So our government doesn’t do anything for free. And they can’t understand a physician any more than an insect can understand a bird.
It’s not good to stew. It’s better to help someone. I am so thankful. When my mind wasn’t working I used my body to carry folk. When I couldn’t lead I followed. Today I know the people I’ll see are hurting more. I have so many people with cancer and surgeries and all I do is provide relief. The heroin addicts are far gone but here and there one awakes and wants to live. I’m happy to provide solace. I love to see people cured. But now we’re all getting older and the only cure for life is death.
I think of that too much these days. Kierkegaard, “Life is suffering unto death’. I think a lot about my buddhist days. I’m praying and meditating. I miss rejoicing. I miss dancing. I have to have a shower and get to work. Everyone is always angry that I’m late. Some days I’m afraid to leave my office. A day of my life has not gone by that someone hasn’t been angry with me. A year in my life has not gone by that some official hasn’t hated me and tried with all their power to destroy me.
For so many years the friends of the man I stopped killing people haunted my life. They were in so many high places and their loyalty to their drunken dangerous friend was admirable. They were more afraid than me. I saw that but now a couple of them have died and the others are retired. They’re rich and have young wives and their children visit them. They tell war stories like we all do. They’re victors.
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a victor. Maybe if I’d set my eyes higher. As long as I can remember I've just wanted to survive and help others survive. . Thank you God for letting me survive. Thank you for the easing up of my back pain and the healing of my finger and my dog. Thank you that I can type. Please banish my anger, my self pity, my negativity, my comparison, my jealousy and envy and my resentments. Help me rid myself of these character flaws so I can better celebrate this new day and be grateful for all that you have given me.
Thank you Lord for the health of my dog. I was so devastated when he was paralyzed that day. I was in fear all day as we drove back early from the north. Thank you for X-rays and Oak Animal Hospital and the lovely Indo Canadian veterinarian who did a thorough examination of him and found his nerves had not been injured, that he would walk again with medication. Thank you for his slow recovery. Thank you for science and medication.
Thank you for the end of elections. Help me to recover from all the hatred and shame I experienced again for standing up for what I believe in. For years I have taught people ‘love the person’, don’t accept the behaviour. I have taught that guilt was what we felt when we did something wrong but shame was what we felt when we felt we were wrong fundamentally as a person. I have experienced so much shaming. Throughout the election and even now I am told by so many that I am not a Canadian because I do not believe as the victors do. Always shaming. Always ‘ad hominem’. I have never been ‘good enough’. I have always been ridiculed and condemned. Meanwhile I serve like an untouchable, treating unclean bodies and unclean minds. Men and women get rich off the sales of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, poor lifestyle, unsafe practices, yet I am there serving, healing and helping and I am told I am not worthy to live here. I am unwanted.
I treat many old men like me. Some old ladies too. There is sadness in aging. There is sadness in a whole variety of poverties yet some poverty takes precedence. The single mothers go to the front of the line while us men whose children were aborted are shunned. We stand in lonely groups sometimes touched by the men and women whose children were killed in crime. I huddle next to them. Their sons and daughters murdered or killed in war or by accident Somehow we face dying together in the greatest of loneliness. I have no tie to this world, no illusion of immortality.
And so much I gave in taxes, taken from me, voluntarily though, I had no choice, to pay for education and children and I supported the children of others knowing my own were killed. I am a laughing stock. Worse than a cuckold. The women jeer at us men whose lovers killed our being and say ‘you deserved it’. Man. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
I am shamed for being a man. And I’m not even a very good one. The heterosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a man and the homosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a woman. I’m divorced and divorced men are the scourge of the earth. Divorced women were obviously done wrong by men but divorced men get what they deserve. They’re contemptible. I was punished and condemned in the courts, laughed at by the judge whose eyes did not look at me but instead focused on the loosely covered breasts of the one who had once said she loved me. As I once said I loved her. In the end I paid her all I had financially. She was smug in profit. The courts made their money too. The judge looked like he wanted to have a tryst with her. He ogled her. She looked coy. I was thrust aside. Loser. Fool. Shame and humiliation.
50 shades of grey. The billionaires are worshiped. The women read with lust what girls are willing to do for the monetary winner. Eva Braun ruled all of Germany. Only her man is condemned.
My mother is dead. She didn’t do drugs or drink. She insisted we go to school. She loved education. She insisted we go to Sunday school and church. She loved the Lord. She insisted we play hockey. She and my father loved hockey. So I fished with Dad and hunted and fixed cars with my brother and my father. I learned cooking from mom and mixing cement from Dad and I helped him build buildings and boats. My parents had lost so many friends in WWII. Dad had served in the RCAF. A spitfire mechanic and a bombardier. My parents met in the war. Dad and Mom weren’t racists. I didn’t know racists till the government began dividing and conquering the people by calling everyone racists. My black doctor didn’t even know he was black in those days like I didn’t know I was white.
Dad didn’t know that being a man and being white was wrong. He didn’t think of himself as coloured. My mother and her sister had black friends. They were Baptist. She didn’t have Catholic friends. Dad had Catholic friends and Jewish friends and Buddhist friends and Hindu friends and secular friends. Our family were as coloured as everyone. Mom joked about us having freckles. My brother and her had red hair.
Dad liked smart people, people who did things, ‘made something of themselves’. Always growing up I heard my parents say, “It doesn’t matter where a person has been it’s where they’re going and are they building things up.” Mom and dad most admired people who were working and taking care of their children. They didn’t like people who were ‘living off of the government because they were too good to do a honest day’s labour’. They didn’t like people who weren’t willing to ‘get their hands dirty’. They especially didn’t like people who stole and criminals.
“I didn’t fight for this country so I had to put a lock on my own doors,” my father told me. The judge who lived a couple of houses over was a rip roaring falling down drunk and my parents didn’t have any time for drunks. They especially didn’t like drugs. “Wasting their lives. Caring for their own pleasures when they should be caring for others. Not caring how much their behaviour hurt others. That’s their problem."
They both said, “You always were too smart for your britches.” “I don’t care if the teacher is wrong, you’ve got to learn to not tell them that because they’re hurt you for it. The more wrong they are the more they hurt people who are right.” My aunt was Indian. My Baptist aunt was the executive assistant (we called her his ’secretary’ back then) to Canada’s ambassador in Washington DC during WWII. My grandfather arrived as a poor immigrant from Scotland and homesteaded northern Canada to become a great rancher and lumber man. My other grandfather arrived from Ireland. Both poor, the “made something of themselves.’ They “didn’t take handouts’.
My aunts and mother told me the history of things. The teachers told me lies. I was strapped by the principal for correcting them. The same occurred in chemistry when the teacher had the equations wrong. But he didn’t have me strapped. He corrected his equation and thanked me. That’s probably why I liked science. We were caned in gym class, our buttocks bared. I got my first ruler in kindergarten. The female teacher undressed me in front of the class and held me across her knees smacking me hard over and over again on my naked bottom.
Much later I was punished for stopping men and women killing people. The people whose job it was to ensure the safety of the children hated and shamed me for stopping the killing. The provincial enquiry years later vindicated me but a half dozen babies more were killed before that occurred. I never received an apology. I was never returned the money and time I lost for doing the right thing. I was suspect then. I didn’t keep quiet and mind my own business when I saw people being killed and raped. I wasn’t a ‘team player’ they said in the government. There is no “truth and reconciliation” for ‘whistleblowers’.
I’m surprised I don’t like S and M. So many boys have come out of school spanked so many times like me that they at least got some pleasure sexually later from their twisted education. I just got this twisted idea I’d stop people being abused. I try mostly to stop people from ‘turning anger inward’. They continue to hurt themselves after being hurt so much by others.
Now the government tells me I can’t touch people. Standing helpless in my office men and women cling to me and their tears run down my suit. I cannot hug them. All over the province men and women physicians are being publicly threatened fines and loss of license if they touch a patient, especially if they hug a patient. I eventually push them away and tell them the government says that doctors can’t touch their patients even when they are grieving. There are so many laws today. I am afraid of everyone and everything.
Thank you Lord for these moments of peace. Thank you Lord for bringing me safety this far. Thank you for the light. Thank you for the coffee and the cream and the porridge. Thank you for this computer. Thank you for letters and language. Thank you for the opportunity to learn. Thank you for the chances I’ve been given to make something of myself. I am still walking upright. I’m still able to help others. I am so thankful that my finger still works. I am always in pain, Lord. I am just so thankful that it’s not as bad as it has been. I am so thankful that I can get out of bed and get to work and have some work. I look back and remember the abject poverty of those years of being a student, giving blood for books, not having food because I paid the rent, eating at family and friends because I had no money. We were in love then. We lived so simply. Years and years of hand me down clothing, hand me down furniture. We pooled our resources for a party. I studied from 6 am to 12 pm and saw formulas in my sleep. I lived in hospitals. I went for years without sleep. Plane crash. Polar bear chasing me. Deadly diseases. Old people dying in my arms alone in the night giving me their last words as gifts. I thought I’d never get clean. The lice, the bacteria, the virus, the sickness. I was sick for so many many years. Tuberculosis. I was treated for a year. She condemned me for going where no one else would go. “You’re not a Christian, you’re a fool.” she told me when I wanted her nakedness and she was angry that I flew away to serve the aboriginals because, “no one else would’. Now no one cares. The government regulator sneered at me and said, “It’s just a job.” I’ve never got my back pay. There never was a bonus. Everyone said I had status but ever shopkeeper raised the price and stole from me. All the while the government took in taxes and paid themselves fat salaries and froze my income. Among ourselves we laugh if we make minimum wage. 7 days a week for how many years is it I worked and was on call. No overtime. No on call. No danger pay. I fell asleep in an operation. I wet myself too. An adult man peeing dribbling unable to hold it. all night with an unforgettable bowel after a shot gun wound. I wake with nightmares screaming lost in guts that are perforated seeing faces of suicides. It’s a good week when I don’t remember, when I get a full nights sleep. This morning I woke at 5 am. Now I know it’s just the rain. It’s the darkness and the rain. It’s that season. I remember the rains coming and the palm trees flying over my car, my windows knocked out. The rains and the darkness. I’ll get used to it again.
Thank you Lord for the memories. When I smoked pot and drank wine I forgot. I don’t remember my holidays. Those brief weeks when we’d get away from the ‘front’ and escape to beaches. I drank wine and smoked weed and now don’t much remember those days while the horrors of guns in offices and knives and the angry faces fresh from jail in withdrawal demanding valium and more valium or narcotics and more narcotics threatening shouting.
She said I ’sexually harassed her’ when I asked her to leave because she was stealing and smoking crack. She ‘d been raging and shouting at the Indo canadians in wheelchairs. She hated Indo Canadians. I didn’t know when I hired her. I didn’t even know she was a drug addict. I didn’t know she prostituted. I took others words. She lied. I didn’t know her johns had been her references. I didn’t know that her minister was her bisexual lover. I’ve never known anything when the shit hits the fan. I’ve been so focussed on saving a life that I didn’t know that I was being stolen from. Only when the bank balance didn’t match did I know something was wrong. Only when I saw the receipts from the store did I realize that she was a thief. Everything she said and wrote didn’t match. Lawyers showed that. A hundred lies but it was never about truth. I told the truth and was condemned for it. Government’s don’t want the truth.
The government woman said, “Women don’t lie about sex.”
I learned there was no ‘justice’ and went to work pro bono with my friend who was killed when he said that only the rich could afford justice in Canada. I still think it was a hit.
Thank you Lord for the lifting me up. These moments come and go. The set backs. Reflecting on people saying I’m not a Canadian. People telling me to leave Canada and that I’m not wanted here. It took me back to the time when I was getting death threats, when my windows were shot out by 22’s, when my cars was keyed over and over. I had been diagnosing alcoholism and addiction and saying that people were unfit for work. The management thanked me for halving the accidents on the job. Men and women thanked me for making their workplaces safe but the cost was high. Drug addiction changes a person. The pot heads were just as violent as the alcoholics and cokeheads when it came to wanting revenge. Here there were having this good thing, the doctor before me saying they were depressed and giving them a week or two in hospital to dry out before they went back to work to wreck havoc on management and their fellow workers. He was the loved doctor.
"The other psychiatrist never asked about alcohol and drugs but this knew little shit doctor did and he fucked me up. The fuck cost me my job writing down what I told him I smoked and drank. It was supposed to be confidential. When the insurance company saw it they said that I had to go to treatment. I didn’t want to quit. I just wanted the other psychiatrist to keep writing a note saying I was sick because of my bipolar disorder. I didn’t want this fucking asshole to fuck me up. I talked to everyone about him. I didn’t think it was relevant to tell anyone how much weed I was smoking when I was working. It’s medicine. It’s a herb. It’s not like the pharmaceutical’s that little shit puts people on. The boss is just like him. A fuckking shit. Keeps telling me I’m forgetting and not concentrating on the work. Claimed I caused their multi million dollar machine to break down. All the stress he was giving me made me do coke. I needed it to concentrate at work after I started the day with a few shots and a doozie or two. Then I go to the hospital for my normal break, like we all did with the old doctor and this shit blows the whistle. Of course I hate him. Fucking boy scout. Little do goober. Of course my friends and I made his life miserable. After what he did to us he’s lucky he didn’t have an accident."
Now I’m just sad, now , alone. Thinking how many lives I must have ruined drug testing. If I’d just backed off, turned a blind eye like my colleague, these guys might have gone on to be Prime Minister or at very least headed the company. Instead they probably left regular work and went into growing dope full time and becoming part of the multi billion dollar BC industry that now has essentially been pardoned as well as getting to take the money and run.
I’ve never been “pardoned" in my work. I’m just scrutinized, regulated, criticized, shamed and threatened. They call the punishment different names like ‘re-education.’ It’s still punishment. The hitters get paid and the victims get framed. When I was doing so much pro bono work, about 20% of that years income, because the parents didn’t pay their premium they and their kids couldn’t see private doctor and they were told to go to government clinics where they didn’t want to go because everyone their judged them and put them down, I saw them. I didn’t get paid. May e $20,000 loss of income a year. I thought like any business I should be able to declare it as a loss so I did. Revenue Canada sent out three people to audit me. It wasn’t an audit. It was harassment. They went through all my books. At the end of a week, this thug said, “No doctor sees patients for free. We haven’t caught you yet, but we’re watching you and we will.” Every private doctor I know works for free but we’re not allowed to declare our ‘losses’. Even today people miss appointments and I don’t pay but I can’t declare my losses against my earnings like all other businesses can. The reason is that psychopaths think others think like they do. Lizards think other think like lizards. So our government doesn’t do anything for free. And they can’t understand a physician any more than an insect can understand a bird.
It’s not good to stew. It’s better to help someone. I am so thankful. When my mind wasn’t working I used my body to carry folk. When I couldn’t lead I followed. Today I know the people I’ll see are hurting more. I have so many people with cancer and surgeries and all I do is provide relief. The heroin addicts are far gone but here and there one awakes and wants to live. I’m happy to provide solace. I love to see people cured. But now we’re all getting older and the only cure for life is death.
I think of that too much these days. Kierkegaard, “Life is suffering unto death’. I think a lot about my buddhist days. I’m praying and meditating. I miss rejoicing. I miss dancing. I have to have a shower and get to work. Everyone is always angry that I’m late. Some days I’m afraid to leave my office. A day of my life has not gone by that someone hasn’t been angry with me. A year in my life has not gone by that some official hasn’t hated me and tried with all their power to destroy me.
For so many years the friends of the man I stopped killing people haunted my life. They were in so many high places and their loyalty to their drunken dangerous friend was admirable. They were more afraid than me. I saw that but now a couple of them have died and the others are retired. They’re rich and have young wives and their children visit them. They tell war stories like we all do. They’re victors.
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a victor. Maybe if I’d set my eyes higher. As long as I can remember I've just wanted to survive and help others survive. . Thank you God for letting me survive. Thank you for the easing up of my back pain and the healing of my finger and my dog. Thank you that I can type. Please banish my anger, my self pity, my negativity, my comparison, my jealousy and envy and my resentments. Help me rid myself of these character flaws so I can better celebrate this new day and be grateful for all that you have given me.
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Early Morning Wakening
At least it wasn’t a nightmare. I don’t think I needed even to pee. I just woke from a dream of Kubrick’s puzzles and IQ tests, swirling swirling shapes. And I thought the computer in my mind had failed somehow. Pixelations on the screen of thought. Perhaps I had insight into early dementia. A glimpse of the destruction and healing. Wondering now what memory was lost or what future capability is gone. Not that it matters. There are billions of cray available. I could piggy back a thought on another yet it’s 3 30 am and I can’t fall back to sleep. In my self pity I worry. I’ve been worrying about backing up RV’s. The crash and subsequent cost and time consuming disruption of a minor rainy cold tired night’s event wakes me now a year later. Like the face of a baby that did not live to be born came back over and over again till today I hardly recall the image. It no longer frightens me. I’m still recovering from the man who proudly talked of multiple murders but wanted his day in the sun too. Entitlement is what it is. I smoke a joint and forget the rules or past but want the ice cream as much if not more than the next guy. And it’s hard to kill.
I feel so far from suburbia.
I feel so far from the comfort of ignorance and security.
Each day I meet the face of reptilian rage and the anger of wolves in packs. I remember the coyote female who tried to lure my little dog back to the pack for the ritual of canine cannibalism. I saw her face in passing today.
Eyes are haunting me. So much to read. So much horror.
People have even stopped shaking hands. Bumping knuckles.
I’m overwhelmed. Finances, health, family, friends, work, demands. Each day, the alarm rings, I drink coffee, wash, do a day in the life, feel the tunnel of work like a garbage shute. I slide down it and pop out the end in some dumpster. Pick myself up and drive home to enter the aloneness of books and tv, Netflix, wifi, Facebook and comments. Bit pieces. I love my fridge. I love the running water. I sometimes sit outside and love the air. The dog is happy for our walk by the river. It cleared some of the garbage smell away. Unclean bodies. Streets washed by water but needing soap. Too many needles. Old tents. Bits of cardboard. I could have sworn I saw a van dump an old sofa and garbage in a lane for someone else to clean away. So many people don’t know to use the toilet.
Yet it’s all getting better. It’s all moving forward. Only in my mind is their revolution and death. The big bang was yesterday. Today is actually pleasant. If I slip into the present, wear the day a little, then it’s not so heavy. Winter clothing changing to spring and summer. A frock here. Colours there. Buds and flowers. I carry too many parcels on my shoulders. My hands are weighted down with things. I’ve a storage locker I’ve not dug through in a year or two. What are mementos when they hold us back. I’m on the verge of purging.
Dreaming of the freedom and fear of the Pacific. Prayer in the daily uncertainty of ship and sea. I said I’d only come ashore to outfit. That was years ago. I’ve more than enough to escape. Yet I stay knowing I can cut a line but never could trust in bricks and mortar again. Abortions take place where there are such wall. She kills babies and blames it on him. He’s always at fault. It was ever thus. Despite stories of apples they can’t come together to get to Mars. NASA is already asking for colonists and we can’t even making babies anymore. The courts are insane with suicide solutions and a few rich men.
I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
I have helped as best I can. Been a healer. Saved so many lives. Held so many hands in nightmares. Calmed so many hearts. Even today I cured a body part threatening to leave an unkind human. There’s need for maintenance. And I was looking for the oil. My bicycle sits un used. I’ve got to find the tarp. In the meantime I have WD40 in another place. It’s not here. There’s a guitar too and I planned to sing. But the Bible in the other room. I miss the cockpit. I miss the easy reachability of critical things. Like the dog on the bed when I wake in the night. Where is he now. I reach out to him for comfort and he’s lying on the floor. We snuggled before bed. He came to me for assurance. The end of the day belly scratch.
I sometimes miss the cat. Her uncanny appearances. She moved between dimensions.
And did I meditate as I promised myself. Sitting cross legged chanting for hours as I did in an earlier day when there seemed more time in the day and less phone calls and less demands. So many people want a piece of me. And yet I’d feel worse unwanted. Popularity has it’s merits. I’m blessed beyond belief and yet I am never satisfied.
I call to God and he or she or it, the god program, sends me people, and I want a holy space man rocket ship pilot with wizard powers and magical capabilities. I want the devil really with his promises of earthly experience yet believe I want what Jesus wanted, solitude and silence. He shouted away the devil. Materialism and life are so much more immediate and sensual than the spiritual.
I would have sex and chocolate and my heaven would be a place where I could smoke and drink like in youth when forgetfulness was desired not now when its inevitable.
I want to know what I want to do. I want to have a purpose beyond myself. I am more than a consumer and yet I am just that. A consumer. To the consumer everything is consumption even God.
I ate God this weekend and drank his blood. The sacrifice is ever there before me. So when does one suicide. Physician assisted suicide is to be legalized and encouraged and yet I resisted suicide after the abortion when she wanted me dead and would not believe in life. She hid so deep in her fear and hatred of her parents and her own life that she would not give birth to tomorrow. Now there is Kate and the royal new born. Somewhere my future is dead in a drain and I am celebrating the children of those who believed when all I ever meet are those who wish to die and I am somehow entrusted in keeping them alive.
I’ve had my thumb in the hole in the damn for decades now and instead of a replacement they’re saying we all should do it. Like Justin Troudeau and his mother smoking pot. I can’t tell anyone how wrong I felt it was to smoke pot and break the law and as a boy scout and a Christian I believed in the law before I learned that the Judge was a drunken intellectual who couldn’t stand up to read what he’d written. And now I know that what I wrote stoned and drunk was somehow off, like meditations on LSD.
I figured out one day that drugs and alcohol were like sneaking over the walls of heaven as thieves, like the fools in Pilgrims Progress. Heaven is invitational only. It’s not to be taken by force. I am a beggar at the gate. I am a second nano second after the thought. God is the first. I’m a reaction. Thought is something later. Experience is first. Grok.
God I long for you. I pray for you. I beg you to come into my life. Light up my night. Raise me from ignorance. Fill me with your love and wisdom. Show me your way. Thy will be done not my will. Guide me. Help me.
Thank you for this day. Thank you for the daily bread. Thank you for awakening and sleep. Thank you for all your blessings. Thank you for food and water and air and this life. Thank you for this ‘game’ of pixels and keyboard and help me win to a higher level. Help me to get from this bottom of consumer materialism accounting financial quandary where I want and need to that higher power place of faith and trust and living in the flow. I’ve cared for so many people through you. I’ve given with all my heart as those I’ve given to have counted ventricle and vessels to be certain I’m not short changing them an atrium.
Lift me out of this place of fear and sorrow into that world of freedom and prayer and meditation and certainty of you where there isn’t the constant negativity.
It’s my work. Lord. Help me help those who are daily in the grip of delusions. Help me help those who are the pawns of the government psychopaths who enable addictions and write off the many for the profit of the few. Help me help each and every person who comes to me for solace. Help me give them hope and lead them from the darkness. Help me be a better healer so I can work myself out of a job. Help me end this life of constant service in insanity where there seems no end to the business. Help me make a difference,is that what it is, no I don’t think I’m that naive. I just want to move forward an inch at most, a nano second. Help me to change myself and my attitude and help me to pray and love more deeply. Help me to help others more fully and show me the way. The Way. The Way.
Life is a journey. I’m feeling like I’m staggering about in the ditch lost in a forest when there must be a trail or some easier way forward. Some place where tax men don’t threaten and bully like the men who bring guns to their doctors visits and the girls who see you as disposable ass wipe.
And I know too late how much my mother and father loved me and how I never loved or appreciated them enough. The dead call to me. I miss them so much. I regret I couldn’t have enjoyed the silences we shared more. I miss the packs and tribes and nations and groups. I understand the Salvation Army, their good work, their platoons. I would know that there are others when I feel my back to the wall. I call out to you Jesus. I repeat your holy name. I pray that I am not alone.
Yet I feel alone. I feel separate and apart. I feel alien to the heard. I feel judged by my financial tag. I’m worth only what the bank says I’m worth and it’s a fixed game in a gambling casino and the tattoo on my arm was put there by someone sometime who said I was worth only this much. Arbitrarily someone else was worth more and I’m struggling to pay the rent when I think I should have a rocket ship.
But I don’t really want a rocket ship.
I want Luxor and Cleopatra and grapes and mommy.
Really I want back in the womb.
I’ve been expelled from eden for eating the fucking apple and I want back in the garden.
I am at war with God because that fat old man with a white beard won’t let me in his garden. I named everything as I was told and even listened to her prattle on about the fucking snake. The snake says this the snake did this. I ‘m without a rib and all I hear is what a shit I am.
I need a new publicist.
I want the role of God next time round. Even Jesus didn’t have to live out a whole life. He kicked the can in his 20’s . I used to worry about the crucifixion till I worked in intensive care and saw that people dying at 90 could suffer like a saint. Death and dying could be unpleasant any time. the Good died young. The lucky went with a bullet. War wasn’t such a bad thing as months in hospital. I felt saddest for the fistulas and the genetic ward. Theres the rheumatism and arthritis. There’s the fatigue of damaged hearts. Theres the insane.
I’ve spent my life in disease and sickness with Donovan’s song, “looking through crystal spectacles, I can see I’ve had your fun, the doctor bit was so far out’ revolving around in my brain as those drug dealers are laughing at me for my silly words like integrity and duty.
Even the judge twisted the truth and lied and lied and lied. Our big brains are not for honesty but for deceit the scientist says as with a bigger brain we can plan hunts better and sneak up together on wholly mammoths. But maybe we need our even bigger brains to learn our own self deception. To understand the deceit of State and Rulers and Bankers and the Media and the ……oldest law of the world is the Chinese Law of the Fish….there are big fish and little fish and the little fish must be fast and numerous.
I’m just a little fish.
Despilte all the self esteem training I can’t find it in me to think I’m a big fish. To be a big fish I’d need my own army and a rocket ship and mistresses. Lots of mistresses. An a movie company and a license to kill and super powers.
I’d like to raise the dead and heal like Jesus.
I’d like to heal like Jesus.
I’d like to be a better doctor. After all these years I still can’t convince a drug addict to stop killing themselves. I’ve stopped the suicidals but not the ones on drugs. Even the schizophrenics stopped killing themselves in my care but the drug addicts …..well….I failed…..he hung himself last year…..he was alone in the end…..family friends work all gone. ….and now they’re telling me it was a win….he hung himself but in the future I can ‘whack’ him with heroin and let him drift away.
A kid came in on heroin though. He was only 20. Should I whack him.
Do no harm.
And the judge and the college and the government laughed and laughed at me for saying I took the hippocratic oath and believed in it. I want to die in the wee hours of the morning and leave this nightmare where the doublespeak of 1984 is all about us, where the promises of Clockwork Orange are here today and I’m unable to do anything about even one life who insisted that smoking marijuana he’s a genius. And I tell him he’s a fool. He’s not enlightened. He’s a slave. and I wish I could sit another night with bikers screaming along the words to Goddam the Pusherman with Steppenwolf on the stage.
I’m grieving.
I want to raise the dead.
I want to walk on water.
I want to have telepathy.
I want a rocket ship and a license to kill.
I don’t want to kill my patients but I do want to kill the man and women who stole the money for the medicine and the man and women who gave the heroin for profit and didn’t include an insurance policy. Justin Troudeau and his mom can smoke dope all they want. Why are there so many bureaucrats getting on about ‘prevention’ when the police won’t even keep the streets clear of drug addict zombies looking to bounce off a car just trying to get to work each day in the insanity of the city.
And what am I doing in the city. She insisted that we had to return to the city. Twice I’ve escaped to the country, going with wives who have said they wanted to ride horses and have fresh air and do all that other country shit but once I was there with them they insisted they couldn’t be so far from their mothers and the shopping. I’ve tired of shoppaholics as well. And what am I doing here when I could be alone in the wilderness or alone at sea.
I’m here as one small voice.
I’m Isaiah. I’m the salt. I’m a spice. I believe the hysteria would run rampant with anti vexers and luddites and ISIS if not for a few who hold true to the delusion of democracy and all for one and one for all.
I’m silly.
I will go to work and do my bit. Stiff upper lip. My fear for family will pass. I am a cog in the wheel. I’m insignificantly significant and significantly insignificant.
The rioters don’t clean up after themselves. The journalists and bureaucrats and all the paper pushers and talkers condemn the police and nurses and all those others who work in front lines. We’re all plumbers. Were Jesus to return he’d not go to the fishermen but rather he’d come and say “Be a plumber”. Clean up shit. Constipation is the problem. The need is not in getting food but rather in getting rid of waste. And yes Jesus, ‘give unto cesar cesar’s due’ but really that was when taxes were 10% not the 50% today. Government is a cancer on the work of men. I see horrendous waste of resources in the DTES. Government funded crack pipes and government funded programs upon programs with little understanding of history or change put forward like kids who get a bag of gold and spend it on their friends and their ideas. Well I’m tired of seeing this waste and working to help individuals only to see things like school debt slavery for those who would have and education or costs of medications only the rich can afford.
I feel at times I just have to squeeze the pus out of my head. There’s the fear and resentment and I’m not able to stay in the day and work as a cog in the wheel because I’m lost in the illusions remembering the promises of politicians and how we all worked for this health care and education and one day found that all the money was going to CEO”s . When did a government manager need millions . When did the CEO of the CBC get off getting millions in perks and I’m a doctor working 12 hours a day and that shit is putting out the news that propagandizes the country and i’m sup[posd to tell the truth and he’s allowed to lie with impunity. When will the CEO OF the CBC be held accountable for the shit he puts out when all of us drive to and from work and listen to rank propaganda not from our government but from some insanity I heard 40 years ago.
I pay taxes for the news and I have to go to BBC to learn what’s going on in the world. I drive to work every day and want to hear the ’news’s but I have to have Facebook to learn about Tesla’s new home battery. I have a half hour when I could hear the ’news’ but instead I listen to the symphony because my taxes are being wasted on programmers who are propagandists and their bias and misinformation is unforgivable. I can only believe that those who write the news for CBC are living in the security and wealth of Luxor on some space station but their Canada is so far removed from what I experience.
All day long i see patients who are struggling financially in the richest country in the world. These are people who work and have worked and are good people but they can’t afford houses and they can’t pay student loans and they’re afraid for their kids and
I miss speakers corner.
In london, there was this shoe box.
I went at lunch with a sandwich and heard the ranters.
I loved the ranters.
Sometimes they’d sound just like the adorable CBC program called the Debaters.
In my head there’s rarely this mess. I block my negative thoughts with constant prayer. I’m focussed all day on solving problems .I’m teaching and showing and celebrating and elevating and explaining and encouraging and struggling to transfer experience and knowledge of disease and cure to people who have so many obligations and so little time. I’m other focused all day.
Then I wake in the night and can’t sleep.
And this is the Laing Knot that’s blocking the sleep. This is the despair and fear and worry. This is the sense of failure. This is the despite the big brain and all my effort I can’t keep people alive forever. This is the fear of losing another person or even another dog. I don’t do well with dead fish. I tear up inside. I literally fall apart when I see sickness or death and I blame myself. I blame myself all the time for the failure of life. This planet should be perfection. Everyone comes to me and complains. It’s a day long experience of complaints and I personalize it. I’m the cause of all disease and all failure . I ‘m the second law of physics. I’m supposed to be able to fix everything or at least reduce the pain.
I am daily given suffering and pain. All day long I’m faced with people blaming me for their pain which they caused by slashing their wrists and wanting to feel good slashing their wrists. I miss the simplicity and reasonableness of main stream general practice and the lie that it’s not as insanity as psychiatry.
I miss the collusion.
I miss the confabulation.
I am in the raw reality of life sucks. I want to die. Help me.
And all the fucking supreme court has to offer is physician assisted suicide. And all the government has to offer is pot.
Most of my patients would be a whole lot better with half the taxes and a little more money and jobs. Where are the jobs. Why did the university sell women’s studies degrees when there are no jobs for any more fine arts students. Shouldn’t those with women’s studies degrees be able to demand they be paid back their tuition and get to take accounting and engineering and plumbing course because that’s what the state is paying for. Could we half the cancer of baurocracy and reward entrepreneurs or admit we really no longer want ‘universal health care’ but only ‘health care for the useful’ and give physician assisted suicide to anyone who is unfashionable this month. The communists ran their countries by killing off half the people and letting the rest share the illusion of progress because they were double wealthy overnight.
There are these thought loops in the brain. Cognitive behavioural therapy helps to identify them. Buddhism and Christian mysticism, ala the Dark Night of the Sout worked on identifying these computer ’trojans’ which had somehow burrowed into ones’ brain and interfered with normal functioning.
Most of the fear is self created.
Most of the suffering is caused by lack of presence.
Most of the problems I think are problems are above my pay grade.
I’ve no useful information about the climate change or the life of the planet. The nonsense the media put outs and what’s available on the internet is quite silly. As a scientist I know the answer is in the ‘stacks’ but the ‘stacks’ aren’t readily available on the internet because they begin around 100 or 200 pages in as all the early internet stuff is propaganda and what stupid people want to know on a topic.There’s also the dark web.
Follow the money trails.
Whenever I research anything I find conflicting accounts and these are competing. For instance the destruction of Alberta which gave rise to the change in government followed the successful Warren Buffet fight against the Keystone Pipeline on the grounds that it would damage the environment. Warren Buffet moves oil by train. It costs 3 x as much and is highly dangerous , far worse than pipeline spills. But blocking keystone kept this monopoly and Canada suffered. Collectively Canada has been rich because of Alberta’s ‘transfer’ payments. Alberta has been condemned much as the police and much as scientists have been. The NDP win in Alberta. Canada is a ‘resource’ source for the mighty US. New York raped indiana. Canada can expect to bend over. There are big fish and little fish. Our enemy is not the US but rather China which is the new Russia. Russia is the new Germany and 60 is not the new 40. Old people are fighting yesterdays wars with yesterdays knowledge.
We’re due for a war.
In Europe their a major wars every 50 years.
Economic recessions are like tides.
Without a miracle we’re hooped.
The atheists and intellectuals are declining. They hope to fill their ranks with pot smokers. A study of the rationalists showed so many were emotionally immature due to addictions.
The enlightened can avoid war and recession. There is hope in God and spirituality.
I have to fight the demon of depression within me. The black dog. The part that just wants to give up. And I wrestle with the devil or god till the tiredness recurs and I get a possibility of sleep. I'm tired now. I've got out all the pus. All the stuff that doesn't make any real sense and isn't relevant to actual chopping wood and carrying water, all the media shit and all the conspiracy theories and all the anxiety and self pity.
Now I might sleep again a few hours before another day.
Please God be with me and guide me and if it be thy will let me die peacefully . Help me again to do the very best I can with what I have. Thank you for all that this life gives and for all the help I have. Thank you. Help me love more. Help me fear less. Help me be of greater service. Guide me. Please.
I feel so far from suburbia.
I feel so far from the comfort of ignorance and security.
Each day I meet the face of reptilian rage and the anger of wolves in packs. I remember the coyote female who tried to lure my little dog back to the pack for the ritual of canine cannibalism. I saw her face in passing today.
Eyes are haunting me. So much to read. So much horror.
People have even stopped shaking hands. Bumping knuckles.
I’m overwhelmed. Finances, health, family, friends, work, demands. Each day, the alarm rings, I drink coffee, wash, do a day in the life, feel the tunnel of work like a garbage shute. I slide down it and pop out the end in some dumpster. Pick myself up and drive home to enter the aloneness of books and tv, Netflix, wifi, Facebook and comments. Bit pieces. I love my fridge. I love the running water. I sometimes sit outside and love the air. The dog is happy for our walk by the river. It cleared some of the garbage smell away. Unclean bodies. Streets washed by water but needing soap. Too many needles. Old tents. Bits of cardboard. I could have sworn I saw a van dump an old sofa and garbage in a lane for someone else to clean away. So many people don’t know to use the toilet.
Yet it’s all getting better. It’s all moving forward. Only in my mind is their revolution and death. The big bang was yesterday. Today is actually pleasant. If I slip into the present, wear the day a little, then it’s not so heavy. Winter clothing changing to spring and summer. A frock here. Colours there. Buds and flowers. I carry too many parcels on my shoulders. My hands are weighted down with things. I’ve a storage locker I’ve not dug through in a year or two. What are mementos when they hold us back. I’m on the verge of purging.
Dreaming of the freedom and fear of the Pacific. Prayer in the daily uncertainty of ship and sea. I said I’d only come ashore to outfit. That was years ago. I’ve more than enough to escape. Yet I stay knowing I can cut a line but never could trust in bricks and mortar again. Abortions take place where there are such wall. She kills babies and blames it on him. He’s always at fault. It was ever thus. Despite stories of apples they can’t come together to get to Mars. NASA is already asking for colonists and we can’t even making babies anymore. The courts are insane with suicide solutions and a few rich men.
I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
I have helped as best I can. Been a healer. Saved so many lives. Held so many hands in nightmares. Calmed so many hearts. Even today I cured a body part threatening to leave an unkind human. There’s need for maintenance. And I was looking for the oil. My bicycle sits un used. I’ve got to find the tarp. In the meantime I have WD40 in another place. It’s not here. There’s a guitar too and I planned to sing. But the Bible in the other room. I miss the cockpit. I miss the easy reachability of critical things. Like the dog on the bed when I wake in the night. Where is he now. I reach out to him for comfort and he’s lying on the floor. We snuggled before bed. He came to me for assurance. The end of the day belly scratch.
I sometimes miss the cat. Her uncanny appearances. She moved between dimensions.
And did I meditate as I promised myself. Sitting cross legged chanting for hours as I did in an earlier day when there seemed more time in the day and less phone calls and less demands. So many people want a piece of me. And yet I’d feel worse unwanted. Popularity has it’s merits. I’m blessed beyond belief and yet I am never satisfied.
I call to God and he or she or it, the god program, sends me people, and I want a holy space man rocket ship pilot with wizard powers and magical capabilities. I want the devil really with his promises of earthly experience yet believe I want what Jesus wanted, solitude and silence. He shouted away the devil. Materialism and life are so much more immediate and sensual than the spiritual.
I would have sex and chocolate and my heaven would be a place where I could smoke and drink like in youth when forgetfulness was desired not now when its inevitable.
I want to know what I want to do. I want to have a purpose beyond myself. I am more than a consumer and yet I am just that. A consumer. To the consumer everything is consumption even God.
I ate God this weekend and drank his blood. The sacrifice is ever there before me. So when does one suicide. Physician assisted suicide is to be legalized and encouraged and yet I resisted suicide after the abortion when she wanted me dead and would not believe in life. She hid so deep in her fear and hatred of her parents and her own life that she would not give birth to tomorrow. Now there is Kate and the royal new born. Somewhere my future is dead in a drain and I am celebrating the children of those who believed when all I ever meet are those who wish to die and I am somehow entrusted in keeping them alive.
I’ve had my thumb in the hole in the damn for decades now and instead of a replacement they’re saying we all should do it. Like Justin Troudeau and his mother smoking pot. I can’t tell anyone how wrong I felt it was to smoke pot and break the law and as a boy scout and a Christian I believed in the law before I learned that the Judge was a drunken intellectual who couldn’t stand up to read what he’d written. And now I know that what I wrote stoned and drunk was somehow off, like meditations on LSD.
I figured out one day that drugs and alcohol were like sneaking over the walls of heaven as thieves, like the fools in Pilgrims Progress. Heaven is invitational only. It’s not to be taken by force. I am a beggar at the gate. I am a second nano second after the thought. God is the first. I’m a reaction. Thought is something later. Experience is first. Grok.
God I long for you. I pray for you. I beg you to come into my life. Light up my night. Raise me from ignorance. Fill me with your love and wisdom. Show me your way. Thy will be done not my will. Guide me. Help me.
Thank you for this day. Thank you for the daily bread. Thank you for awakening and sleep. Thank you for all your blessings. Thank you for food and water and air and this life. Thank you for this ‘game’ of pixels and keyboard and help me win to a higher level. Help me to get from this bottom of consumer materialism accounting financial quandary where I want and need to that higher power place of faith and trust and living in the flow. I’ve cared for so many people through you. I’ve given with all my heart as those I’ve given to have counted ventricle and vessels to be certain I’m not short changing them an atrium.
Lift me out of this place of fear and sorrow into that world of freedom and prayer and meditation and certainty of you where there isn’t the constant negativity.
It’s my work. Lord. Help me help those who are daily in the grip of delusions. Help me help those who are the pawns of the government psychopaths who enable addictions and write off the many for the profit of the few. Help me help each and every person who comes to me for solace. Help me give them hope and lead them from the darkness. Help me be a better healer so I can work myself out of a job. Help me end this life of constant service in insanity where there seems no end to the business. Help me make a difference,is that what it is, no I don’t think I’m that naive. I just want to move forward an inch at most, a nano second. Help me to change myself and my attitude and help me to pray and love more deeply. Help me to help others more fully and show me the way. The Way. The Way.
Life is a journey. I’m feeling like I’m staggering about in the ditch lost in a forest when there must be a trail or some easier way forward. Some place where tax men don’t threaten and bully like the men who bring guns to their doctors visits and the girls who see you as disposable ass wipe.
And I know too late how much my mother and father loved me and how I never loved or appreciated them enough. The dead call to me. I miss them so much. I regret I couldn’t have enjoyed the silences we shared more. I miss the packs and tribes and nations and groups. I understand the Salvation Army, their good work, their platoons. I would know that there are others when I feel my back to the wall. I call out to you Jesus. I repeat your holy name. I pray that I am not alone.
Yet I feel alone. I feel separate and apart. I feel alien to the heard. I feel judged by my financial tag. I’m worth only what the bank says I’m worth and it’s a fixed game in a gambling casino and the tattoo on my arm was put there by someone sometime who said I was worth only this much. Arbitrarily someone else was worth more and I’m struggling to pay the rent when I think I should have a rocket ship.
But I don’t really want a rocket ship.
I want Luxor and Cleopatra and grapes and mommy.
Really I want back in the womb.
I’ve been expelled from eden for eating the fucking apple and I want back in the garden.
I am at war with God because that fat old man with a white beard won’t let me in his garden. I named everything as I was told and even listened to her prattle on about the fucking snake. The snake says this the snake did this. I ‘m without a rib and all I hear is what a shit I am.
I need a new publicist.
I want the role of God next time round. Even Jesus didn’t have to live out a whole life. He kicked the can in his 20’s . I used to worry about the crucifixion till I worked in intensive care and saw that people dying at 90 could suffer like a saint. Death and dying could be unpleasant any time. the Good died young. The lucky went with a bullet. War wasn’t such a bad thing as months in hospital. I felt saddest for the fistulas and the genetic ward. Theres the rheumatism and arthritis. There’s the fatigue of damaged hearts. Theres the insane.
I’ve spent my life in disease and sickness with Donovan’s song, “looking through crystal spectacles, I can see I’ve had your fun, the doctor bit was so far out’ revolving around in my brain as those drug dealers are laughing at me for my silly words like integrity and duty.
Even the judge twisted the truth and lied and lied and lied. Our big brains are not for honesty but for deceit the scientist says as with a bigger brain we can plan hunts better and sneak up together on wholly mammoths. But maybe we need our even bigger brains to learn our own self deception. To understand the deceit of State and Rulers and Bankers and the Media and the ……oldest law of the world is the Chinese Law of the Fish….there are big fish and little fish and the little fish must be fast and numerous.
I’m just a little fish.
Despilte all the self esteem training I can’t find it in me to think I’m a big fish. To be a big fish I’d need my own army and a rocket ship and mistresses. Lots of mistresses. An a movie company and a license to kill and super powers.
I’d like to raise the dead and heal like Jesus.
I’d like to heal like Jesus.
I’d like to be a better doctor. After all these years I still can’t convince a drug addict to stop killing themselves. I’ve stopped the suicidals but not the ones on drugs. Even the schizophrenics stopped killing themselves in my care but the drug addicts …..well….I failed…..he hung himself last year…..he was alone in the end…..family friends work all gone. ….and now they’re telling me it was a win….he hung himself but in the future I can ‘whack’ him with heroin and let him drift away.
A kid came in on heroin though. He was only 20. Should I whack him.
Do no harm.
And the judge and the college and the government laughed and laughed at me for saying I took the hippocratic oath and believed in it. I want to die in the wee hours of the morning and leave this nightmare where the doublespeak of 1984 is all about us, where the promises of Clockwork Orange are here today and I’m unable to do anything about even one life who insisted that smoking marijuana he’s a genius. And I tell him he’s a fool. He’s not enlightened. He’s a slave. and I wish I could sit another night with bikers screaming along the words to Goddam the Pusherman with Steppenwolf on the stage.
I’m grieving.
I want to raise the dead.
I want to walk on water.
I want to have telepathy.
I want a rocket ship and a license to kill.
I don’t want to kill my patients but I do want to kill the man and women who stole the money for the medicine and the man and women who gave the heroin for profit and didn’t include an insurance policy. Justin Troudeau and his mom can smoke dope all they want. Why are there so many bureaucrats getting on about ‘prevention’ when the police won’t even keep the streets clear of drug addict zombies looking to bounce off a car just trying to get to work each day in the insanity of the city.
And what am I doing in the city. She insisted that we had to return to the city. Twice I’ve escaped to the country, going with wives who have said they wanted to ride horses and have fresh air and do all that other country shit but once I was there with them they insisted they couldn’t be so far from their mothers and the shopping. I’ve tired of shoppaholics as well. And what am I doing here when I could be alone in the wilderness or alone at sea.
I’m here as one small voice.
I’m Isaiah. I’m the salt. I’m a spice. I believe the hysteria would run rampant with anti vexers and luddites and ISIS if not for a few who hold true to the delusion of democracy and all for one and one for all.
I’m silly.
I will go to work and do my bit. Stiff upper lip. My fear for family will pass. I am a cog in the wheel. I’m insignificantly significant and significantly insignificant.
The rioters don’t clean up after themselves. The journalists and bureaucrats and all the paper pushers and talkers condemn the police and nurses and all those others who work in front lines. We’re all plumbers. Were Jesus to return he’d not go to the fishermen but rather he’d come and say “Be a plumber”. Clean up shit. Constipation is the problem. The need is not in getting food but rather in getting rid of waste. And yes Jesus, ‘give unto cesar cesar’s due’ but really that was when taxes were 10% not the 50% today. Government is a cancer on the work of men. I see horrendous waste of resources in the DTES. Government funded crack pipes and government funded programs upon programs with little understanding of history or change put forward like kids who get a bag of gold and spend it on their friends and their ideas. Well I’m tired of seeing this waste and working to help individuals only to see things like school debt slavery for those who would have and education or costs of medications only the rich can afford.
I feel at times I just have to squeeze the pus out of my head. There’s the fear and resentment and I’m not able to stay in the day and work as a cog in the wheel because I’m lost in the illusions remembering the promises of politicians and how we all worked for this health care and education and one day found that all the money was going to CEO”s . When did a government manager need millions . When did the CEO of the CBC get off getting millions in perks and I’m a doctor working 12 hours a day and that shit is putting out the news that propagandizes the country and i’m sup[posd to tell the truth and he’s allowed to lie with impunity. When will the CEO OF the CBC be held accountable for the shit he puts out when all of us drive to and from work and listen to rank propaganda not from our government but from some insanity I heard 40 years ago.
I pay taxes for the news and I have to go to BBC to learn what’s going on in the world. I drive to work every day and want to hear the ’news’s but I have to have Facebook to learn about Tesla’s new home battery. I have a half hour when I could hear the ’news’ but instead I listen to the symphony because my taxes are being wasted on programmers who are propagandists and their bias and misinformation is unforgivable. I can only believe that those who write the news for CBC are living in the security and wealth of Luxor on some space station but their Canada is so far removed from what I experience.
All day long i see patients who are struggling financially in the richest country in the world. These are people who work and have worked and are good people but they can’t afford houses and they can’t pay student loans and they’re afraid for their kids and
I miss speakers corner.
In london, there was this shoe box.
I went at lunch with a sandwich and heard the ranters.
I loved the ranters.
Sometimes they’d sound just like the adorable CBC program called the Debaters.
In my head there’s rarely this mess. I block my negative thoughts with constant prayer. I’m focussed all day on solving problems .I’m teaching and showing and celebrating and elevating and explaining and encouraging and struggling to transfer experience and knowledge of disease and cure to people who have so many obligations and so little time. I’m other focused all day.
Then I wake in the night and can’t sleep.
And this is the Laing Knot that’s blocking the sleep. This is the despair and fear and worry. This is the sense of failure. This is the despite the big brain and all my effort I can’t keep people alive forever. This is the fear of losing another person or even another dog. I don’t do well with dead fish. I tear up inside. I literally fall apart when I see sickness or death and I blame myself. I blame myself all the time for the failure of life. This planet should be perfection. Everyone comes to me and complains. It’s a day long experience of complaints and I personalize it. I’m the cause of all disease and all failure . I ‘m the second law of physics. I’m supposed to be able to fix everything or at least reduce the pain.
I am daily given suffering and pain. All day long I’m faced with people blaming me for their pain which they caused by slashing their wrists and wanting to feel good slashing their wrists. I miss the simplicity and reasonableness of main stream general practice and the lie that it’s not as insanity as psychiatry.
I miss the collusion.
I miss the confabulation.
I am in the raw reality of life sucks. I want to die. Help me.
And all the fucking supreme court has to offer is physician assisted suicide. And all the government has to offer is pot.
Most of my patients would be a whole lot better with half the taxes and a little more money and jobs. Where are the jobs. Why did the university sell women’s studies degrees when there are no jobs for any more fine arts students. Shouldn’t those with women’s studies degrees be able to demand they be paid back their tuition and get to take accounting and engineering and plumbing course because that’s what the state is paying for. Could we half the cancer of baurocracy and reward entrepreneurs or admit we really no longer want ‘universal health care’ but only ‘health care for the useful’ and give physician assisted suicide to anyone who is unfashionable this month. The communists ran their countries by killing off half the people and letting the rest share the illusion of progress because they were double wealthy overnight.
There are these thought loops in the brain. Cognitive behavioural therapy helps to identify them. Buddhism and Christian mysticism, ala the Dark Night of the Sout worked on identifying these computer ’trojans’ which had somehow burrowed into ones’ brain and interfered with normal functioning.
Most of the fear is self created.
Most of the suffering is caused by lack of presence.
Most of the problems I think are problems are above my pay grade.
I’ve no useful information about the climate change or the life of the planet. The nonsense the media put outs and what’s available on the internet is quite silly. As a scientist I know the answer is in the ‘stacks’ but the ‘stacks’ aren’t readily available on the internet because they begin around 100 or 200 pages in as all the early internet stuff is propaganda and what stupid people want to know on a topic.There’s also the dark web.
Follow the money trails.
Whenever I research anything I find conflicting accounts and these are competing. For instance the destruction of Alberta which gave rise to the change in government followed the successful Warren Buffet fight against the Keystone Pipeline on the grounds that it would damage the environment. Warren Buffet moves oil by train. It costs 3 x as much and is highly dangerous , far worse than pipeline spills. But blocking keystone kept this monopoly and Canada suffered. Collectively Canada has been rich because of Alberta’s ‘transfer’ payments. Alberta has been condemned much as the police and much as scientists have been. The NDP win in Alberta. Canada is a ‘resource’ source for the mighty US. New York raped indiana. Canada can expect to bend over. There are big fish and little fish. Our enemy is not the US but rather China which is the new Russia. Russia is the new Germany and 60 is not the new 40. Old people are fighting yesterdays wars with yesterdays knowledge.
We’re due for a war.
In Europe their a major wars every 50 years.
Economic recessions are like tides.
Without a miracle we’re hooped.
The atheists and intellectuals are declining. They hope to fill their ranks with pot smokers. A study of the rationalists showed so many were emotionally immature due to addictions.
The enlightened can avoid war and recession. There is hope in God and spirituality.
I have to fight the demon of depression within me. The black dog. The part that just wants to give up. And I wrestle with the devil or god till the tiredness recurs and I get a possibility of sleep. I'm tired now. I've got out all the pus. All the stuff that doesn't make any real sense and isn't relevant to actual chopping wood and carrying water, all the media shit and all the conspiracy theories and all the anxiety and self pity.
Now I might sleep again a few hours before another day.
Please God be with me and guide me and if it be thy will let me die peacefully . Help me again to do the very best I can with what I have. Thank you for all that this life gives and for all the help I have. Thank you. Help me love more. Help me fear less. Help me be of greater service. Guide me. Please.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Confidentiality
Sometimes, as a physician first, and a psychiatrist, now, I see some one, a friend of a friend, a family member of a friend, the patient of a colleague, and the person doesn’t return or I hear they were upset about me.
I worry and wish I could have ‘acted’ differently, ‘been better’, ‘reassessed the situation’, shown "more sensitivity’. Other times I think why did I disrupt my schedule, work late, miss lunch, allow someone to jump the queue only to be treated like this by an ‘ingrate’. It fluctuates depending on mood and hours of lost sleep, missed lunches.
I’m older now and still ‘worry’ as much, but accept more.
What I notice though is that there’s something ‘missing’. More often the person who was ‘depressed’ and ‘suicidal’ and really in ‘need’ was doing something specifically they were not telling their family, friends or doctor about. Then I realize that they were upset with me most likely ,probably, because I was doing my job and doing my job very well.
I have patients come in with a ‘rehearsed’ ’spiel’. This ‘story’ that they tell others doesn’t ‘ring’ true to me so I ask specific questions, like doctors do, and this ‘derails’ this sort of patients ‘routine’. They’ve got their ‘poor me’ down pat and want me and everyone else to ‘see’ things their way. They don’t want to ‘learn’ what I’ve got to say or ‘hear my opinion’. They principally want me to rubber stamp their bullshit.
But their friends and family don’t know a critical detail.
One of the most common is ‘drugs or alcohol.’ One man remains furious at me a decade later. I know his friend who referred him to me. The man drinks 80 oz of vodka a day and called me a quack when I told him that alcohol was a chemical depressant. “I am sure I could treat your depression but you’d have to stop drinking’. "You're nothing but a quack, I don't have a drinking problem".
A man saw me recently and he was smoking pot all day long and everyone was concerned he wasn’t motivated. No one had a clue as to just how much pot he was smoking and how much money this was costing.
My gambler wasn’t telling anyone about his losses. If I owed those people what he owed I’d be depressed too.
There’s no ‘magic’ pill in medicine. If you are cutting your wrists and bleeding a good doctor is going to tell you to stop cutting your wrists, take away the knife, and bandage your wrist.
But today you can get a lawyer to sue me for telling you to stop cutting your wrists claiming I didn’t ‘respect your rights’. Further a human rights commission will insist that my first obligation was to refer you to a doctor who does euthanasia. Already the millionaire abortionists insist we pimp for them so it’s only days before the euthanasia folk will have their own financial future legislated such that suicidals are given their ‘choice’. No one considers the conflict of interest that a State Health Insurance creates.
Further, you can complain to the College of Physicians and Surgeons that I wouldn’t cut your wrists for you. The poor College of Physicians and Surgeons will be obliged to berate the doctor who took an oath to do no harm.
The other thing people don’t tell people about is their illicit sexual lives. Even as a gp I was seen usually only once for treatment of gonorrhoea or certain types of bugs or warts best not discussed in ‘polite’ society. After I’d successfully treated a person they would go to another doctor so their ‘file’ was not ‘tainted’ by their nights of forgetting their marriage. Increasingly the insurance companies and courts are destroying medical 'records' and increasing the costs of health care exponentially because patients will go to extremes including multiple doctoring to conceal their 'dirty secrets'.
The common theme is that when people say the ‘doctor wasn’t that good’ or ‘they didn’t like the doctor’ it may not be so 'simple'. No one tells their mother or father, husband or wife, I didn’t like the doctor because he told me stop doing crack cocaine. They don’t even tell their family physicians often.
A week doesn’t go by that a family physician doesn’t learn something critical about their patient after they’ve been sent to a good psychiatrist, when I say good I mean thorough conscientious or maybe just plain 'curious' about their patients. Hundreds of times I’ve been told by collieaques, “I never knew”.
Yes, I can learn to be more ‘diplomatic’. I can learn to ‘speak more softly’. I can learn to go quicker or slower or be less intrusive or wait longer. Yet, I’m paid for by my time and addicts especially want to do their whole ‘routine’ on you. There are people these days who want to talk to the doctor for years before telling them what the real problem is. They want to ‘work’ you like they have ‘worked’ their family and friends. They want to do their ‘sales pitch’ on a professional. What they don't want me to do is weigh them if they're obese, ask for a release of their records from the hospital if they're a hustler, or ask them 'has anyone questioned your drinking or drugging' rather than asking them 'how much' so they can lie by saying 'only two drinks' .
The sociopaths are even better. The fact that most people don’t know that their friend or a family member is a sociopath isn’t surprising. They chameleon. These are most often the girlfriend or boyfriend who comes along on a visit. The ‘loved’ one thinks the person is there for ‘support’ and doesn’t know that they’re a ‘hostage’ and that the ‘loved’ one wants to be there to ‘control’ them more.
There is innocence.
There is purity.
There is truth.
There is ‘good intentions’ But where there is disease there are commonly ‘secrets’. We are as ‘sick as our secrets’. I learned that harsh one in physical medicine when people would come in late in the course of disease of cancer and ‘share’ ‘too late’ that they’ve had this ‘lump’ in a breast or a gonad or a pelvis or an anus and it’s hurting too much. When I’d examine the lump I’d know it had been growing for months sometimes years but the person, ashamed, usually didn’t want to tell anyone. Often it was too late.
There is so much people don’t tell their family, friends, and colleagues. They tell their doctor and often their way of returning to the safety of silence and to the illusion of lies is to simply say “I didn’t like the doctor’. Then they go looking for another one hoping for better 'news'.
When patients tell me they didn’t “like" a doctor 90% of the time I learn by careful concerned questioning what exactly the doctor ‘said’ or ‘did’ that disturbed the person. This is true even when it’s said about a doctor I personally think is an ass. 10 % of the time the complaint is true. The doctor was an idiot but mostly it’s because they focussed the patient on something they didn’t want to address.
The search for second opinions is commonly a search by a person for a doctor who will support them cutting their wrists while accepting the duty to bandage. Life was a lot easier and lucrative for doctor swhen they didn’t practice ‘prevention’ and we knew less about the fact that most diseases, especially any of the chronic ones, are ‘lifestyle diseases’.
Working now in addiction I most commonly face someone who wants to convince me that anything from heroin to marijuana to obsession with pornography isn’t the problem. Mostly sons want to tell me their mother is the problem, husbands that their wives are the problems and everyone that its ‘stress’ from the boss or work. Just ‘stress, Right? Everyone wants the problem out there, not in here.
It’s so hard to be an artist, a physician, a school teacher. “I just need a pill, doctor.” " I really need medical marijuania to take the edge off the crack hangover.”
A lot of people don’t want to hear the truth. As a physician I’ve enraged, thoroughly enraged, elephant women in my practice, by stating frankly ‘you’re obese’. Mostly though these days it's the marijuana addicts who want their 4 joints a day but also want happiness and motivation to get a job. So many of the single children in their 30's and 40's who see me don't want to leave the tit and are angry that the parent won't pay for their increasing expenses.
People want to have ’symptom relief’ and yet if we ignore the ‘disease’ and just treat the symptoms we’re not good doctors. The smokers want ‘ventolin’ inhalers to breath better, the alcoholics want valium for hang overs and percocets for headaches. The list is endless.
I am such an amazing clinician that I could be the physician to the emperor and live making the emperors life of debauchery comfortable but the insurance companies would be furious with me and the College of Physicians and Surgeons might yank my licence. Like Michael Jackon’s doctor I could get sued or lose my license. The most demanding and critical of my patients never have the millions it would take for me to do ‘celebrity’ practice medicine for them alone. Increasingly everyone is angry with me because I won't order an MRI and a complete 'battery of tests' for any truly minor concern. Hypochondriasis is truly common and thanks to Dr. House everyone cold is now a rare disease that stupid doctors are missing. None of my patients do statistics. But who am I to judge, the moment I get a fever, I'm calling the morgue. The only difference is I don't want to have 'unnecessary' tests done because I know that 'unnecessary' tests almost invariably lead to more 'unnecessary tests' and even more 'unnecessary procedures'.
I loved the doctor who told me that rubbing my eyes after picking my nose was causing my recurrent conjunctivitis. I was a university student studying all night and had several episodes of conjunctivitis. I’d seen several doctors before that. Personally I lost respect for them when the real Dr. House in my personal life truly solved my real problem. There was no more return business. I’ve not had conjunctivitis since. I still pick my nose but I don’t rub my eyes after I do.
Now I go to work and do the best I can and tell people what my teachers taught me and say the truth as nicely as I can knowing nothing angers and upsets people more than the truth.
I didn’t like talking about my nose picking with that doctor who had the smarts to ask. I certainly didn’t tell anyone I had red eyes from nose picking. For maximal sympathy I told everyone it was because I was studying all night. Some things you only share with your doctor.
I worry and wish I could have ‘acted’ differently, ‘been better’, ‘reassessed the situation’, shown "more sensitivity’. Other times I think why did I disrupt my schedule, work late, miss lunch, allow someone to jump the queue only to be treated like this by an ‘ingrate’. It fluctuates depending on mood and hours of lost sleep, missed lunches.
I’m older now and still ‘worry’ as much, but accept more.
What I notice though is that there’s something ‘missing’. More often the person who was ‘depressed’ and ‘suicidal’ and really in ‘need’ was doing something specifically they were not telling their family, friends or doctor about. Then I realize that they were upset with me most likely ,probably, because I was doing my job and doing my job very well.
I have patients come in with a ‘rehearsed’ ’spiel’. This ‘story’ that they tell others doesn’t ‘ring’ true to me so I ask specific questions, like doctors do, and this ‘derails’ this sort of patients ‘routine’. They’ve got their ‘poor me’ down pat and want me and everyone else to ‘see’ things their way. They don’t want to ‘learn’ what I’ve got to say or ‘hear my opinion’. They principally want me to rubber stamp their bullshit.
But their friends and family don’t know a critical detail.
One of the most common is ‘drugs or alcohol.’ One man remains furious at me a decade later. I know his friend who referred him to me. The man drinks 80 oz of vodka a day and called me a quack when I told him that alcohol was a chemical depressant. “I am sure I could treat your depression but you’d have to stop drinking’. "You're nothing but a quack, I don't have a drinking problem".
A man saw me recently and he was smoking pot all day long and everyone was concerned he wasn’t motivated. No one had a clue as to just how much pot he was smoking and how much money this was costing.
My gambler wasn’t telling anyone about his losses. If I owed those people what he owed I’d be depressed too.
There’s no ‘magic’ pill in medicine. If you are cutting your wrists and bleeding a good doctor is going to tell you to stop cutting your wrists, take away the knife, and bandage your wrist.
But today you can get a lawyer to sue me for telling you to stop cutting your wrists claiming I didn’t ‘respect your rights’. Further a human rights commission will insist that my first obligation was to refer you to a doctor who does euthanasia. Already the millionaire abortionists insist we pimp for them so it’s only days before the euthanasia folk will have their own financial future legislated such that suicidals are given their ‘choice’. No one considers the conflict of interest that a State Health Insurance creates.
Further, you can complain to the College of Physicians and Surgeons that I wouldn’t cut your wrists for you. The poor College of Physicians and Surgeons will be obliged to berate the doctor who took an oath to do no harm.
The other thing people don’t tell people about is their illicit sexual lives. Even as a gp I was seen usually only once for treatment of gonorrhoea or certain types of bugs or warts best not discussed in ‘polite’ society. After I’d successfully treated a person they would go to another doctor so their ‘file’ was not ‘tainted’ by their nights of forgetting their marriage. Increasingly the insurance companies and courts are destroying medical 'records' and increasing the costs of health care exponentially because patients will go to extremes including multiple doctoring to conceal their 'dirty secrets'.
The common theme is that when people say the ‘doctor wasn’t that good’ or ‘they didn’t like the doctor’ it may not be so 'simple'. No one tells their mother or father, husband or wife, I didn’t like the doctor because he told me stop doing crack cocaine. They don’t even tell their family physicians often.
A week doesn’t go by that a family physician doesn’t learn something critical about their patient after they’ve been sent to a good psychiatrist, when I say good I mean thorough conscientious or maybe just plain 'curious' about their patients. Hundreds of times I’ve been told by collieaques, “I never knew”.
Yes, I can learn to be more ‘diplomatic’. I can learn to ‘speak more softly’. I can learn to go quicker or slower or be less intrusive or wait longer. Yet, I’m paid for by my time and addicts especially want to do their whole ‘routine’ on you. There are people these days who want to talk to the doctor for years before telling them what the real problem is. They want to ‘work’ you like they have ‘worked’ their family and friends. They want to do their ‘sales pitch’ on a professional. What they don't want me to do is weigh them if they're obese, ask for a release of their records from the hospital if they're a hustler, or ask them 'has anyone questioned your drinking or drugging' rather than asking them 'how much' so they can lie by saying 'only two drinks' .
The sociopaths are even better. The fact that most people don’t know that their friend or a family member is a sociopath isn’t surprising. They chameleon. These are most often the girlfriend or boyfriend who comes along on a visit. The ‘loved’ one thinks the person is there for ‘support’ and doesn’t know that they’re a ‘hostage’ and that the ‘loved’ one wants to be there to ‘control’ them more.
There is innocence.
There is purity.
There is truth.
There is ‘good intentions’ But where there is disease there are commonly ‘secrets’. We are as ‘sick as our secrets’. I learned that harsh one in physical medicine when people would come in late in the course of disease of cancer and ‘share’ ‘too late’ that they’ve had this ‘lump’ in a breast or a gonad or a pelvis or an anus and it’s hurting too much. When I’d examine the lump I’d know it had been growing for months sometimes years but the person, ashamed, usually didn’t want to tell anyone. Often it was too late.
There is so much people don’t tell their family, friends, and colleagues. They tell their doctor and often their way of returning to the safety of silence and to the illusion of lies is to simply say “I didn’t like the doctor’. Then they go looking for another one hoping for better 'news'.
When patients tell me they didn’t “like" a doctor 90% of the time I learn by careful concerned questioning what exactly the doctor ‘said’ or ‘did’ that disturbed the person. This is true even when it’s said about a doctor I personally think is an ass. 10 % of the time the complaint is true. The doctor was an idiot but mostly it’s because they focussed the patient on something they didn’t want to address.
The search for second opinions is commonly a search by a person for a doctor who will support them cutting their wrists while accepting the duty to bandage. Life was a lot easier and lucrative for doctor swhen they didn’t practice ‘prevention’ and we knew less about the fact that most diseases, especially any of the chronic ones, are ‘lifestyle diseases’.
Working now in addiction I most commonly face someone who wants to convince me that anything from heroin to marijuana to obsession with pornography isn’t the problem. Mostly sons want to tell me their mother is the problem, husbands that their wives are the problems and everyone that its ‘stress’ from the boss or work. Just ‘stress, Right? Everyone wants the problem out there, not in here.
It’s so hard to be an artist, a physician, a school teacher. “I just need a pill, doctor.” " I really need medical marijuania to take the edge off the crack hangover.”
A lot of people don’t want to hear the truth. As a physician I’ve enraged, thoroughly enraged, elephant women in my practice, by stating frankly ‘you’re obese’. Mostly though these days it's the marijuana addicts who want their 4 joints a day but also want happiness and motivation to get a job. So many of the single children in their 30's and 40's who see me don't want to leave the tit and are angry that the parent won't pay for their increasing expenses.
People want to have ’symptom relief’ and yet if we ignore the ‘disease’ and just treat the symptoms we’re not good doctors. The smokers want ‘ventolin’ inhalers to breath better, the alcoholics want valium for hang overs and percocets for headaches. The list is endless.
I am such an amazing clinician that I could be the physician to the emperor and live making the emperors life of debauchery comfortable but the insurance companies would be furious with me and the College of Physicians and Surgeons might yank my licence. Like Michael Jackon’s doctor I could get sued or lose my license. The most demanding and critical of my patients never have the millions it would take for me to do ‘celebrity’ practice medicine for them alone. Increasingly everyone is angry with me because I won't order an MRI and a complete 'battery of tests' for any truly minor concern. Hypochondriasis is truly common and thanks to Dr. House everyone cold is now a rare disease that stupid doctors are missing. None of my patients do statistics. But who am I to judge, the moment I get a fever, I'm calling the morgue. The only difference is I don't want to have 'unnecessary' tests done because I know that 'unnecessary' tests almost invariably lead to more 'unnecessary tests' and even more 'unnecessary procedures'.
I loved the doctor who told me that rubbing my eyes after picking my nose was causing my recurrent conjunctivitis. I was a university student studying all night and had several episodes of conjunctivitis. I’d seen several doctors before that. Personally I lost respect for them when the real Dr. House in my personal life truly solved my real problem. There was no more return business. I’ve not had conjunctivitis since. I still pick my nose but I don’t rub my eyes after I do.
Now I go to work and do the best I can and tell people what my teachers taught me and say the truth as nicely as I can knowing nothing angers and upsets people more than the truth.
I didn’t like talking about my nose picking with that doctor who had the smarts to ask. I certainly didn’t tell anyone I had red eyes from nose picking. For maximal sympathy I told everyone it was because I was studying all night. Some things you only share with your doctor.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Honeymoon Cystitis
Cystitis refers to urinary track infection. Honeymoon cystitis referred to the common phenomena in the past of girls developing cystitis after their honeymoon. The female uretha is short, merely a few centimeters. Most urinary tract infection occurs because bacteria which are normal for the outside skin get in to the usually sterile urine which is a particularly attractive soup for bacteria growth. The most common cause is E. Coli. Sexual intercourse because of the action tended to pump bacteria on the outside into the bladder. If a girl didn't pee before sleep the bacteria had all night to grow. Hence the 'honeymood cystitis', there being excessive sexual activity at this time.
Antibiotics are the treatment of choice and work well for treating cystitis. The symptons of cystitis is burning urination with a desire to go more frequently. If back pain is noted in combination there is concern that the infection may have traveled from the bladder up the ureters to the kidneys. Kidney infection is called pylonephritis and is a more dangerous condition and the reason for treatment of bladder infections.
Preventions for bladder infection in women is remembering to urinate after sexual activity. Further it's important to ensure that fecal content (poo or shit) from around the anal cavity isn't tracked into the urethra. To this end women and girls especially those who have acquired a urinary tract infection wipe from front to back and not back to front.
Cranberry juice is still a good prevention though there are controversies around why.
Urinary tract infections can be treated with a one to three day dose of trimethoprim/sulfmethoxazole (160/180) or a ciprofloxacin 250 twice a day for three days. Nitrofurantoin 100 twice a day was an old standby that is again being used because of bacteria being drug resistant to the newer drugs.
The treatment for 'acute cystitis' is relatively straightforward and commonly done by family physicians. Recurrent and chronic urinary tract infections because of their risk for pylonephritis are usually referred to gynecologists or urologists for more definitive investigation and treatment.
Men shouldn't get urinary tract infections even if their urethra's aren't as long as they may claim. Urinary tract infection in men is different and should be treated as such.
Antibiotics are the treatment of choice and work well for treating cystitis. The symptons of cystitis is burning urination with a desire to go more frequently. If back pain is noted in combination there is concern that the infection may have traveled from the bladder up the ureters to the kidneys. Kidney infection is called pylonephritis and is a more dangerous condition and the reason for treatment of bladder infections.
Preventions for bladder infection in women is remembering to urinate after sexual activity. Further it's important to ensure that fecal content (poo or shit) from around the anal cavity isn't tracked into the urethra. To this end women and girls especially those who have acquired a urinary tract infection wipe from front to back and not back to front.
Cranberry juice is still a good prevention though there are controversies around why.
Urinary tract infections can be treated with a one to three day dose of trimethoprim/sulfmethoxazole (160/180) or a ciprofloxacin 250 twice a day for three days. Nitrofurantoin 100 twice a day was an old standby that is again being used because of bacteria being drug resistant to the newer drugs.
The treatment for 'acute cystitis' is relatively straightforward and commonly done by family physicians. Recurrent and chronic urinary tract infections because of their risk for pylonephritis are usually referred to gynecologists or urologists for more definitive investigation and treatment.
Men shouldn't get urinary tract infections even if their urethra's aren't as long as they may claim. Urinary tract infection in men is different and should be treated as such.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Acute and Chronic Sinusitis
Symptons and signs:
Upper Respiratory Infections (ie cough, nasal discharge, passibly fever and chills - ie 'a cold) that are accompanied by "fascial pain (Degown & Degown' Diagnosistic Examination, Richard L. DeGowin, McGraw Hill Inc 1994) suggests 'acute suppurative (draining) sinusitis'). If it is the maxillary sinus then the fascial pain is dull and throbbing in the cheek and several of the upper teeth on that side. Thumb pressure tenderness may be noted over the sinus invoved. Frontal sinus involvement is noted with pain in the forehead and along the eye brow ridge. Ethmoid sinus is medial (next to) the eye and deep feeling. Sphenoid Sinusitis generates pain behind the eye. Chronic or subacute sinusitis is sinusitis that lasts more than 3 weeks. Xray or CT scan may help with the diagnosis at this time. 12 week is the figure used by Mayo Clinic for diagnosis of 'chronic'.
Treatment:
Home remedies for acute sinusitis are warm compresses on the face, avoid alcohol, sleep with head up to increase drainage, antiinflamatories ie aspirin, ibuprofen, lots of liquids, antihistaminines, juices especially.
Antibiotics for empiric treatment, ie treatment where it's based on symptons and signs rather than an actual culture of the pus, include amoxil 500mg tid (three times a day) for 10 to 14 days, trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole 1 DS tab bid (twice a day) for 10-14 days, cefuroxime 250 mg po q 12 h for 10 to 14 days, clarithromycin 250 to 500 mg twice a day for 10 to 14 days, azithromycin 500 mg for 1 day then 250 mg per day for 4 days......(Epocrates)
For Chronic Sinusitis Empiric Antibiotic Treatment changes to include Clindamycin 450 mg 4x a day for 4 to 6 weeks and metronidazole 500 mg twice a day for 4 to 6 weeks followed by a macrolide treatment for 4 to 6 weeks or amoxicillin/clavulanate 875/125 mg twice a day for 4 to 6 weeks. The last one, Amoxicillin/clavulanate may interestingly be used for acute sinusitis as well and is the only one which could be recommended for both. (Epocrates).
Always with antibiotics avoid where person is allergic. Note each antibioltic has side effects and those side effects will often make one better than another for an individual patient.
For this reason it's obvious that seeing a physician is the best medicine. Ear Nose and Throat surgeons are the people who are the specialists and authorities on this condition. They have little cameras on probes which they can use to enter and look in sinuses and extract fluid for culture and sensitivity assessment of antibiotic optimization.
Sinusitis can be caused by fungus. It can be caused by allergies. It can represent an underlying autoimmune disorders. All infections can be made worse or arise in depression and stress. People who are over stressed or experiencing anxiety and depression have reduced immunity and risk for infections and risk for persisting infection is increased. Rest is therefore beneficial at first.
Psychosomatic medicine suggests that people who are healthy are best able to fight illness however those who are chronically stressed, threatened, abused, neglected, over tired have less 'fight' in them. They are more at risk for having a mild illness become more major or extended. Why if a 'bug' is equal, do only certain people in contact with that 'bug' get infected. That's what immunity is about. Some people are more immunity. Immunity is affected by stress. Mind and heart affect immunity.
Environmental factors such as cold and damp are not conducive to sinus healing.
Sleep disorders increase risk of infections because sleep is a time of self healing. Pain disorders beget sleep disorders and sleep disorders beget reduced immunity to psychiatric and physical illness. Too often we treat connected matters as disconnected when in fact they aren't. Today most things are recognised as multifactorial.
However, often a 'cure' can result from a change in a specific or focal area: resolve the pain or improve the sleep, and the immune system can take care of the sinusitis. Sinusitis affects sleep by affecting breathing and thereby can cause depression and pain is worse with depression. So there are these inherrent cycles that can work against one unless recognised. Then the very cycles can be used to benefit the individual.
Using an antihistamine to improve breathing and drainage from sinuses can improve sleep and thereby improve healing. Advil sinus is one of many over the counter preparations which can be used early. While it is considered messy, the old fashioned sinus washing process is actually still considered beneficial and recommended by some ENT specialists.
MayoClinic.com is a good safe mainstream resource.
Upper Respiratory Infections (ie cough, nasal discharge, passibly fever and chills - ie 'a cold) that are accompanied by "fascial pain (Degown & Degown' Diagnosistic Examination, Richard L. DeGowin, McGraw Hill Inc 1994) suggests 'acute suppurative (draining) sinusitis'). If it is the maxillary sinus then the fascial pain is dull and throbbing in the cheek and several of the upper teeth on that side. Thumb pressure tenderness may be noted over the sinus invoved. Frontal sinus involvement is noted with pain in the forehead and along the eye brow ridge. Ethmoid sinus is medial (next to) the eye and deep feeling. Sphenoid Sinusitis generates pain behind the eye. Chronic or subacute sinusitis is sinusitis that lasts more than 3 weeks. Xray or CT scan may help with the diagnosis at this time. 12 week is the figure used by Mayo Clinic for diagnosis of 'chronic'.
Treatment:
Home remedies for acute sinusitis are warm compresses on the face, avoid alcohol, sleep with head up to increase drainage, antiinflamatories ie aspirin, ibuprofen, lots of liquids, antihistaminines, juices especially.
Antibiotics for empiric treatment, ie treatment where it's based on symptons and signs rather than an actual culture of the pus, include amoxil 500mg tid (three times a day) for 10 to 14 days, trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole 1 DS tab bid (twice a day) for 10-14 days, cefuroxime 250 mg po q 12 h for 10 to 14 days, clarithromycin 250 to 500 mg twice a day for 10 to 14 days, azithromycin 500 mg for 1 day then 250 mg per day for 4 days......(Epocrates)
For Chronic Sinusitis Empiric Antibiotic Treatment changes to include Clindamycin 450 mg 4x a day for 4 to 6 weeks and metronidazole 500 mg twice a day for 4 to 6 weeks followed by a macrolide treatment for 4 to 6 weeks or amoxicillin/clavulanate 875/125 mg twice a day for 4 to 6 weeks. The last one, Amoxicillin/clavulanate may interestingly be used for acute sinusitis as well and is the only one which could be recommended for both. (Epocrates).
Always with antibiotics avoid where person is allergic. Note each antibioltic has side effects and those side effects will often make one better than another for an individual patient.
For this reason it's obvious that seeing a physician is the best medicine. Ear Nose and Throat surgeons are the people who are the specialists and authorities on this condition. They have little cameras on probes which they can use to enter and look in sinuses and extract fluid for culture and sensitivity assessment of antibiotic optimization.
Sinusitis can be caused by fungus. It can be caused by allergies. It can represent an underlying autoimmune disorders. All infections can be made worse or arise in depression and stress. People who are over stressed or experiencing anxiety and depression have reduced immunity and risk for infections and risk for persisting infection is increased. Rest is therefore beneficial at first.
Psychosomatic medicine suggests that people who are healthy are best able to fight illness however those who are chronically stressed, threatened, abused, neglected, over tired have less 'fight' in them. They are more at risk for having a mild illness become more major or extended. Why if a 'bug' is equal, do only certain people in contact with that 'bug' get infected. That's what immunity is about. Some people are more immunity. Immunity is affected by stress. Mind and heart affect immunity.
Environmental factors such as cold and damp are not conducive to sinus healing.
Sleep disorders increase risk of infections because sleep is a time of self healing. Pain disorders beget sleep disorders and sleep disorders beget reduced immunity to psychiatric and physical illness. Too often we treat connected matters as disconnected when in fact they aren't. Today most things are recognised as multifactorial.
However, often a 'cure' can result from a change in a specific or focal area: resolve the pain or improve the sleep, and the immune system can take care of the sinusitis. Sinusitis affects sleep by affecting breathing and thereby can cause depression and pain is worse with depression. So there are these inherrent cycles that can work against one unless recognised. Then the very cycles can be used to benefit the individual.
Using an antihistamine to improve breathing and drainage from sinuses can improve sleep and thereby improve healing. Advil sinus is one of many over the counter preparations which can be used early. While it is considered messy, the old fashioned sinus washing process is actually still considered beneficial and recommended by some ENT specialists.
MayoClinic.com is a good safe mainstream resource.
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