Thursday Morning Journal

I woke to a warm squirmy furry body.  I’d dreamed of dancing in India.  It was a good night of dreams like the sailing dreams or the family dreams.  Good recollections and positive themes.  Dancing in my dreams.  I like that. I miss the word not taken often.  Here I’ve spent my life fighting the authorities to heal the sick and I wonder what it would have been like just to dance or act or write.  Instead I engaged in trying desperately to get the resources promised to my patients from the very people who made the promises.

Walking the dog I smelt spring in the air. There’s a lovely pink cherry tree where today he chose to deposit his morning offering. I like that tree.  In the back was blue sky.  I rode my motorcycle to the post office last night. It was a break from constant rain and gloom.  The cold is over. The tulips are blossoming.  

I’m going to the Turning Point Gala tonight. Brenda Plant is amazing.  Turning Point provides some of the best recovery homes in the province. Again yesterday I met an alumni years off heroin after being in their loving disciplined community.  I have friends in health care who began their journey in recovery at Turning Point.  Its a model of what recovery homes should be and a joy to support and celebrate their accomplishments.  

I am looking forward next week to the Christian Medical and Dental Society weekend.  My friend Laura is taking care of Gilbert that weekend and watching over my home. It’s good to have caring trustworthy friends. I’ll be glad to see nephews this month too as they’re travelling. One is returning to school, another is going overseas for more studies and another is making robots.  It’s amusing to hear what they are up to.  Just like learning about the God kids, this last week their walk in the forest with their parents facing the challenge of herding these little cats along the trails.  

I’ve faced more deaths.  People I knew, having passed on before.  The Downtown Eastside Fentanyl crisis and that horrible sense it’s all preventable and predictable.  I don’t doubt what I am doing though it’s common to front line medicine, patching up the civilians caught in a much bigger war. A friend has fallen to the struggles of competing dualities.  I struggle to trust God and remember Dr. Willi Gutowski’s ever repeated statement, “Jesus said, Do Not Be Afraid…that was a command….not a statement.”  We laugh then,

Dr. Seligman out of Pennsylvania has put out a course on Coursera.com on Positive Psychology.  I wonder about taking it though consider all my higher education has repeatedly put me at variance with the stupidity of government officials whose arrogance and safety surrounded by walls and guns and pretention has prevented them from being present.  I guess this will always be the way. Those furthest from reality have the greatest certainty about what is needed and actually believe in their own imaginations they know best because their insanity is not challenged by reality. I’ve known my whole career that I am but a human buffer for those who fear and deplore the mentally ill and addicted.  

I am grateful that I will be driving a sports car to work.  I’ll be able to have the top down if the rain doesn’t return. The Miata M5 is as close to a motorcycle as a car can be, like the MG of my room mate Fern back in our early 20’s when we performed on US television and worshipped girls.  

I often think of the Czeckoslovakian classic, the Incredible Lightness of Being.  I finish a day of work so burdened and weary.  I experience mental fatigue on Friday afternoon.  I remember the physical fatigue as a young man of a 12 hour day doing construction work and this is like that.  Yesterday the calls and meetings seemed overwhelming.  We’re using Oscar in the clinics and the distraction is monumental. I look at a screen rather than the patient and type into designed boxes with the machine shutting off if I don’t keep typing. I’ve always typed discretely into a lap top but this program and especially the pharmacist driven medication format are so demanding of attention.  I feel more and more like a Parts Department clerk and laugh at how the administration and lawyers have coopted the whole medicare process.  I remember meeting with a patient and listening and talking and writing a script and putting down one word diagnosis and a few scribbled notes.  Now we, the doctor and patient, are the least important part of this machine that serves especially the legal administrative process.  

I don’t have enough cherry trees and blue skies to counteract the anger and stupidity that dominates the media.  I pray every day to increase my faith.  I am not surprised to see more and more Canadians young people turning to drugs and death rather than listen to this government’s fear mongering corrupt Climate Change Cult and the horrid lies and disinformation coming out of the Prime Minister’s office.  Meanwhile the poverty of socialism is destroying Venezuela as it did all the communist countries before it.  And the Bernie Sanders are the richest fat cats blow hards of them all, little different from the Liberal Socialist Hitler, a great anti capitalist orator.

Now I’ve slummed in politics.  This is the world of paranoids. Them against us and reductionism.  It’s a verbal war as opposed to a physical war and yet I’m striving to be spiritual. I want to see the God in all . I want to feel that God is in charge and Love is the glue of the universe. I’m not Pollyanna. I see the Islam migrant wave of young men as invasion. I was never taught to die. I was always taught Love your neighbour as yourself but that didn’t mean suicide.  Homicide is justifiable self defence.  

Homicide is justifiable self defence.

 

If I let a person kill me I have caused that person to be homicidal and I have been suicidal.  Two wrongs don’t create a right. If I kill a person who is homicidal I have cancelled their homicidal tendency by living. My own intent is not to kill anyone and I’m not suicidal though often the thought passes these days that death is good too. Wherever I go God is there but I must do Thy Will. And Jesus did not suicide but died like a man saving his wife and child. He died like shepherd protecting the sheep. He died knowing he would rise from the dead.

I was reading a Mithra and the Persians last week. The Zoroastrians were a great group before murderous Mohammed killed them as Lenin  killed so many of the religious that stood in the way of his atheism megalomania. 

Live and let live.

I have so much I’d like to read. I dream of sitting by streams like the Buddha and meditating under a tree.  I dream of sitting like St. John of the Cross and studying the great writings like Buber.  I imagine writing some day and regret how little I’ve played my guitar this spring.  

It’s so much work with the dead lines and demands and the government threats backed by guns and jails to comply with even their littlest issue.  Harsh Roman Empire language coming out of Ottawa increasingly these days.  I think of the Irish and the Scots hiding potatoes to survive from starvation. 

A lovely Christian lady told me of Faith for Potatoes. I watched Hillsong’s lovely movie. I must find time to watch the uplifting South African movie.  Soon the sun will be shining most days.  Even Wall Street turns optimistic when the sun is shining.  

Now to work. I’m so thankful to be of service and I really do struggle to pay for my truck so that I will be able to tow a trailer to sit beside a river or the lake some summer in the near future reading and drinking coffee and thinking like Lear and Cornelious of ‘courtly things, whose in whose out.”  

Thank you Lord for this new  day. Please help Gilbert’s eye resolve and ensure he is, though blind, not in pain. Protect his other eye from this tragedy.  

Positive Psychiatry

For years psychology has focused on loss as an explanation for negative behaviour.  The Rahe Holmes Scale looks as the amount of ‘change’ that precedes catastrophic health problems like heart attacks and strokes.
Positive Psychology, the work of greats like Seligman of the Authentic Happiness site, looks at what it is that underlies happiness, joy and well being. Resilience and forgiveness are traits that have been noted in this research to be far more important than ever before considered.
I’m proposing that grief research looked at what was absent whereas positively what change has resulted in improved attitude and health is equally important. .  Working with drug and alcohol patients,  I can actually predict the intolerableness of individuals based on their ‘withdrawal symptoms’ from their marijauna, nicotine, cocaine, crystal meth, heroin or alcohol.  There’s a window of ‘well being’ with each of these agents and even  in the tiniest amounts they all have some positive medical usage. The addiction though is readily apparent and the ‘hang over’ effects on mood and mental function are increasingly being as well documented as the studies of decreased car driving capability associated with alcohol blood level effects.  People actually seizure in the withdrawal phase of alcohol intoxication.
So to this end I am suggesting   that we need to monitor the last ‘chocolate’ binge, ‘sexual intercourse’, ‘last dancing all night’ , ‘last gym work out’, ‘last lottery win’.  We can’t expect counselling and medication  alone to make up for or counteract the results of a unloved lifes,  days of quiet desperation, or existential angst..
People somehow assume that they should feel well without ever doing anything more than viewing computer screens.  The research says differently. People who go bowling are far healthier than those who argue on Facebook and only exercise their fingers and their venom.
Indeed, there is likely going to be a time when our smart watches will calculate the last time we had sex or ate chocolate and say ‘you are due for love” or ‘you must eat some chocolate….it’s been x hours and you’re getting cranky.'
I can honestly say that since several women and male friends can’t remember when they last lay naked with another human being that this explains utterly their lack of humour. Only the unclothed who gather together in absurdity can truly appreciate humour.  The clothed are always too armoured to laugh with utter abandon.    People who are well fed, especially with chocolate,  and have lots of human intimacy simply laugh more.  People who are alone more tend to paranoia and negative projections about government agencies. People who are at the computer too long become irrational and constipated.
Exercise, love, good food, picnics, walks, church, sing alongs, and dancing are all critical to well being.
I work in the DTES with drug addicts and the developers and high cost industries of construction with all the corruption want housing as number one but frankly I’d say daily public dancing and public singing might be a whole lot cheaper and more successful solution.  The majority of the addicts I treat have housing but they haven’t a life.  I am never surprised when I learn that depressed patients haven’t had sex in years or just as commonly haven’t been bowling or ice skating in as long.
In earlier years I must have written a hundred prescriptions, “Make love to your wife weekly ” or “Make love to your husband weekly”  or “Take a vacation from your kids at least once a month”.  I don’t do this now.
However I still personally love to make love, eat chocolate, walk the dog, go for rides and sometimes even sing and dance.  I’m sorry that whereas I’ve not forgotten this there seem to be many who have.  And certainly we need far more research which will support what we all already know.