Letter from an American Hospital

It is 3:08 am and I am sitting in bed in a luxury hospital thinking about writing an open letter to the doctor who woke me three hours ago to express contempt for my conviction that I cannot take steroids or contrast dye, though he had accepted that to the extent of cancelling the scheduled scan.

Dr. Doctor:
Okay, you're short.  I wouldn't have noticed except that you were so aggressive, so angry at the possibility that I thought I know something about my body that you don't.  So had to be on top. Contemptuous.  What?  You're short, animals recognize power in size, it is not fair.  And you know what?  Nobody cares if you are king of your little mountain of being right. Get over it.  We're grown us now, we don't care who's tallest.

So you were so pissed off when the nurse told you at 10 p.m. that I refused steroids and cannot have a test with contrast dye, that you came bustling into the room two hours later to wake up a deaf 70 year old lady who has apparently had a heart attack for only one reason: to do your power thing.  You and the fiery nurse who had already talked to me like I was an idiot, "Do you have any idea what you're risking?"

Yes, I do.  If I let you do the test you so imperiously wanted, it could damage my kidney - the only working kidney I have or ever will get.  That would be a sentence to death. You didn't know that, and it really pisses you off that a woman, an old woman yet, would think she knew something you don't.   Okay, you won.  You woke me up.  I can't get back to sleep. Good for my health.

You're playing doctor here as if it were a war game.  Interested only in towering over me, not in discussing the other ways we could examine the issue, or in calling my transplant doc. Did not want his name.

That nurse earlier informed me she would be giving me a heparin shot.  I know all about that, Christ I was in and out of hospitals for ten years.  It's a blood thinner.  I said, "I just had four aspirins two hours ago.". Oh. (And why didn't urgent care give me an aspirin at noon when they saw symptoms of heart?  Why didn't the ER they sent me to?  Don't you people watch TV?  Everyone knows you take an aspirin.  I knew it, but didn't know vertigo was a symptom, but you knew that.). No heparin shot.

No use trying to go to sleep now. Someone will wake me to do another blood draw because that's protocol no matter that I only have one arm you can stick.  Then someone will wake me to do vitals.  Then someone will come in shouting at me to rate my pain. This is Western medicine.  It has a great kill rate.

Wandering in the Weeds

Late winter woods

I have modified this comment from an e-list I follow, but kept the flowing syntax.  This should give you the flavor of it:

John, none of us care about your gripe with Mary.  We're supposed to be supporting one another on this list, so please take your argument private, you are only going to cause people to leave the group. So grow up....

Don't you love that last friendly last admonition?  How nice is that, as we say flatly.  How helpful, for two people who are both acutely ill right now.  Then another person popped in to refer to it as "high-school drama."  As for me, reading it enhanced my high-summer problem of heat.  Aggression rises easily in my poor stomach, which finds some of my required meds, and some human meanness, hard to digest.

I had an impulse to reply to Perennially Irritable, but took a deep breath and thought I really don't know how to help.  I looked back over the threads on this subject and found others who were  upset by John or Mary's quarrel, and handled their pain by aggressively telling them not to be aggressive.

So what's a Buddhist to do?  In confusing times I go back to the basic commitment Pema Chodron writes about in her forthcoming book, How to Live Beautifully:

I vow to do no harm.

(I highlighted that in the hope that I will get it.)  The first reaction I always have when I have to bring this to mind is, Whoa.  Slow.  Down.  Chill out. Don't say it.  And especially, Don't write it on the internet.
~~~~~
I'd written the above yesterday.  Last night, I myself got annoyed by a supercilious (judgement word) comment about me made by a Facebook acquaintance.  (Yeah, friend, I don't remember how that happened.)  I wrote an answer, deleted it.  Wrote another, delete.  One more, trying to explain that I am not the idiot she seems to think I am.  Delete.  Went to her page, clicked the Friend button, clicked again, fixed it so nothing she writes will come through anymore.  I will not miss her.

Kind of thing I've learned in almost 15 years of practice (!!!!!) is that this hodge-podge self I am, made insane by my childhood, is hypersensitive to criticism.  And meanness, even when it's not directed at me.  All the King's horses and all the King's men, in the form of a succession of therapists and self-help books and practice and journaling and retreats, you name it, I've done it - these things have not changed this part of me.

What getting to know myself has done, though, is that I know how I feel.  I can control my impulses.  And then, I guess a form of wisdom, I accept that I am who I am.  Hypersensitive.You are not a thing to be perfected by meticulous work.

Got to reading Shunryu Suzuki last night before bed, and God bless him, he was talking about how it is exactly when we are working with the weeds in our life that we are enlightened.  This is our practice, to work with our weeds, not to sit on a cushion in bliss.  Though he does advocate nonthinking.

So I'm okay this morning, and didn't set the internet ablaze last night.

Rest

[These photos are among those Tom found yesterday on the retired digital camera.]

postscript next day:  One long-term group member, who was valuable and a frequent commenter, has resigned from the list over that quarrel.

Freedom to be weird

Our grandson visited last weekend. We sang and danced along with "Come Together" - Tom had printed out the words. A fourth-grader has no trouble at all with nonsense. We sang all the way through "Hey Jude," passing the microphone back and forth so people could sing or howl during that almost endless ending. That was in Tom's computer room downstairs, which can pass for an electronics studio. It was exhilarating. I never could dance, but I don't care anymore. Fruit of practice.

Upstairs, Otto showed us a YouTube video, an audition for American Idol in which General Larry Platt raps on the gangbanger's uniform - a great teaching for black kids, I thought. The man is a Buddha. As of today this particular video has had 2,359,493 views. I would never have heard of it if not for Otto. What tickles him so about it, that he couldn't wait to show us? I don't know. He's in fourth grade.

We played Uno, of course. I actually won a few points this time, and Otto won more, gaining on Tom, figuring out how to be a little strategic. We don't try to expose Otto to our idea of culture. But I do like that he likes to play board games and cards, old-fashioned entertainments that go back to our childhood.

In the van, on the way to take him back to his folks, Otto and I sat in the back while Tom drove. There is an intimacy in a car. Otto made a casual comment about how Sometimes kids say somebody's weird, and my ears went up.

"Some kids are uncomfortable when people aren't all alike," I said. "But what would the world be like if we were all the same?"

The diet of remastered Beatles and American Idol had loosened us up, I guess. We started shooting ideas back and forth like writers do, about writing a book, call it The Day No Kids Were Wierd. What if everyone was exactly alike? The cafeteria would go crazy because everyone wanted pizza for lunch and nobody wanted hot dogs, so they would run out of pizza. Then everyone wanted grape juice, nobody wanted orange. . . . We worked on the idea, me making notes on the index cards I carry, I just do that hoping to someday snare a golden idea.

Social animals are relentless about conditioning one another to conform. I read of a study recently which showed that every corporation has a network of unwritten rules that everyone knows, though nobody says. Kids are like that, and maybe ruder about it, meaner than adults. I didn't expound on that to Otto. I didn't try to delve into what had happened in his world. Something had. I remember that kind of teasing being terribly hurtful when I was little.

We discussed whether it should be a chapter book, or a picture book, how many pages it should have. Otto thought the main character should be a bully who makes some little kid feel bad for being weird. Then that bully will have a dream, and a ghost will visit him and take him into a world where everyone is exactly the same. In other words, the bully will get what he deserves - ah yes, this is why we read fiction, for the pleasures of living a while in a world that makes a certain kind of sense. By the end, the bully will be a former bully. Like Scrooge, he will have learned a lesson, and be happy to return to the real world. A world where everybody's different, only now that same boy will find himself sticking up for the little kids instead of tormenting them. Yes. An enlightenment story.