Let’s talk about today’s medical adventure.

Got dropped off by Joe and Julian. They have been so good to me through this whole bullshit with the thing on my leg.

There was a wait at Reg because apparently the lady working there suddenly had to do a whole whack of paperwork while a pregnant lady who quite possibly was in for induction {{1]}today waited patiently, and another customer waited behind me.

Me, I was in no particular hurry. Not compared to being with actual emergencies. Sure, I was somewhat annoyed by the delay, during which she disappeared entirely twice. but that’s because it left standing and therefore in pain.

Pain makes people impatient. Remember that, we will touch on that again later.

What worried me most was that I overheard her saying something about her partner not showing up till 3 pm, and it was 2:25 pm when I got there.

So I thought she was going to just leave and then we all would be stuck waiting until 3 pm before we had a chance of being served.

Now that would have been unacceptable for me and I was just a fat dude with foot pain. But it was definitely unacceptable for the poor pregnant lady waiting to find out if she would be giving birth today.

So I have started quietly seething, and forming a whole speech about what it means to have responsibility and that it doesn’t matter if you were supposed to be allowed to leave now, it is your responsibility to stay at the job until your relief arrives.

I mean, you’re not flipping fucking burgers back there. You’re dealing with people
who are having one of the worst days of their live and who despertately need medical attention that they can’t get until you do your goddamned job, lady.

But of course, she came back five minutes later, was profusely apologetic, and got down to business, leaving me to ponder my own mistrust and paranoia.

Things went smoothly for me after that. Drop the purple form off, nurse comes and hooks up the IV, and so on.

But once more there was someone in acute distress in the ER waiting room. He was a Polish man with great foot pain that kept him from even being able to walk and he had been waiting to see a doctor for hours.

And then the doctor shows up and she seems kind and sympathetic but she doesn’t listen when he says pain relief is the most important thing to him and goes on to talk about how she can’t do anything because his doctor works out of Royal Columbian and they are on a different computer system and therefore she doesn’t know what work has already been done on his foot.

And I am thinking, so call the fucking Royal Columbian and get someone to read his goddamned file to you. Or fax it to you. Or email it to you. Or TEXT it to you.

My point is, this is a easily solvable situation, and you would see that, Doctor Useless, if you would just pull your head out of your ass and put the patient first.

Oh, I almost forgot : She also said she couldn’t call the specialist working on this poor suffering man because it was Sunday.

I don’t fucking care! The poor man is in terrible pain. I don’t care if you have to send a black ops team to physically abdiuct his doctor and drag him here, that goddamned doctor has a responsibility to his patient and that’s the most important thing.

It’s noit the patient’s fault he got sick on a Sunday, god dammit. And the response, “Well, you got sick on a Sunday, sucks to be you!” is….

But that’s as far as that poor Polish man got. Once her blatant incompetence and the extremely unacceptable nature of her responses started to make her uncomfortable. the doctor just told him she was going to go off and check something, and never came back, at least not in the half hour I was there after that.

And I could tell the guy was crushed by all of this bullshit. He had gone to the hospital thinking (not unreasonably) that they would ease his pain, and had pinned all his hopes on that,. only to be ignored for a couple of hours then got told they couldn’t do anything for him because of file systems and Sunday.

NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE. I kept my thoughts to myself but I really wish I hadn’t. This man clearly needed someone to advocate for him and I am just the person to do it.

I would have told that goddamned doctor to call the Royal Columbian and get the man’s file and do what it takes to get him some relief. Even if that means hauling his specialist off the golf course for a few minutes. You’re a healer, god dammit, and that means you are here to relieve the pain and suffering of your patients, whatever it takes.

And if she’s asked me if I was a doctor, or otherwise made an appeal to authority, I would say “No I am not a doctor, but you don’t need to be a doctor to know how the phone works. It’s true that I have no official authority over you and there is nothing I can do to force you to do what I say. But if you walk away know, you will walk away knowing that you are leaving a patient to suffer because you are too goddamned lazy to make a freaking phone call. ”

By then security would have shown up and tried to get me leave.

And I would go once I had said my piece.

It would have severely complicated things for me, but I would not care because someone has to stand up for what is right. Someone who has the tools needed to wake the system from its usual stupor and force them to face reality.

I mean, that doctor was waaaay too comfortable telling that dude she couldn’t do anything. She didn’t even seem to be trying to help him. She did not care. She had already dismissed him and was already on to the next patient
in her mind before she said one damned word to him.

It makes me want to just hang out in the ER and advocate for people, because they clearly need it. I’ve been treated fine, but others are clearly getting stepped on by the the big bad system.

And when the big guy steps on the little guy, the first thing the little guy has to do is stomp on the big guy’s toes till he is paying fucking attention.

And I have the feet and the weight and the big big mouth to do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] As in, “inducing labour”. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get it, it took me a while and a fair bit of brain work to figure it out.[[1]]

At some point in my life, I absorbed the message that I was being obnoxious and that I really should tone it down some.

I overcompensated by a wide margin.

I certainly get where people were coming from. Were I to act in the real world in the flamboyant, over the top, outrageous way I do online as Fruvous, a lot of people would think I was extremely obnoxious.

And yet, that’s the real me – so to speak. That is who I am when I am expressing myself as fully as I know how and following my social instincts and doing what feels right. That is me without inhibitions, without shyness, and without fear. Me without all that social damage causing me pain and driving me into fear by playhing those time-worn tapes from my childhood when I try to interact with others.

So I can do things like just plonk myself down in a handsome stranger’s lap, or tickle a random person, or make silly jokes about people’s names or species, and not only does it not get me in trouble (most of the time), it actually works.

I charm the pants off of people. Sometimes literally.

The very notion of being able to do that in the real world makes me tremble and tingle inside with giddy fear and joyous chills.

Like I said, I’m…..complicated.

But first I would have to accept that at the very least, I am risking being seen as obnoxious by some.

There are worse things to be.Too scared to find love comes to mind. Forever trapped in the darkness of your own cold and fractured mind because you lack the courage to overcome your own resistance is another.

Been there, done that. Time for something new.

If I could somehow shut down the clusterfucking shitshow in my mind when I am dealing with new people,that would be a big help.

I mean, I realize now that my entire time at VFS was one enormous prolonged panic attack. I was freaking out the whole time I was there.

That’s why I was so dopey, disorganized,and confused. Important higher thinking centers of my brain could not function while my mind was waterlogged with fear.

And that’s also what kept me from really connecting with my fellow students. Sure, there was an age gap, but the real problem was that there was demonic chorus of abject fear shrieking in my ears the whole time.

I’m enjoying expressing my talent for imagery.

Looking back over my life, that has pretty much always been my problem. On the surface, I don’t seem perturbed or distressed at all. I seem calm and confident, maybe even a little big arrogant and/or smug.

`But on the inside, I am a burning firehouse full of screaming homunculi clawing at each other and myself as they try to escape.

Hmmm. Too much like the demonic choir one. Whatever.

So one possible solution would be to lower my inhibitions and actually express the fear I am feeling at the time.

That would be…. hard to achieve. It would mean abandoning my social mask in a way that leaves me extremely vulnerable, and that’s not easy.

And to be honest, it probably would not go well. If a petite woman breaks down crying and expresses fear and anxiety, odds are good she will get a sympathetic response at least from other women.

But if a big fat biker looking dude does the same thing, the universal response will be contempt. As if I am somehow failing as a man and therefore detestable.

Been there, done that. Trust me, it ain’t pretty.

I imagine the only place I would feel comfortable doing that would be some kind of therapeutic environment. My psychiatrist’s office,a psych ward, whatever.

That would be the only place where I would let my feelings out in that way because the people are professionals and presumably know how to keep their prejudices at bay.

They know that mental illness does not discriminate, and that a big hug guy like me can have some serious demons just like anyhow else.

So letting the dogs out, as it were, is probably not an option.

The other solution would be to calm them the fuck down.

Anyone know where I can by Xanax flavoured Milkbones?

Seriously though, I have considered whether using one of the common fast-acting anti-anxiety drugs would be to my benefit.

The theory would be that if I can take one of those and have them quiet my demons, I can then interact positively with others. Positive human interaction is the antidote to social anxiety. It is the opposite input and cancels it out in the long term.

So the drug would merely enable the real cure, positive interactions.

Sounds plausible. I will ask my therapist about it.

And it sounds a lot better than the way a lot of people achieve the same thing, which is by drinking. Not only would that absolutely trash my fragile health, the fact that it is a depressant would dull whatever inputs I am getting and make the whole thing useless.

Of course, if the drug worked and I actually got a few hours of respite from my all-encompassing anxiety, I would likely become addicted to it.

Seems like a fair trade to me. Maybe it would shorten my lifespan,but at least I would get to live a little before I die.

Right now, all I see before me is a slow and tortuous descent into illness and pain and suffering ending in an ignonimous and pathetic death.

I see myself living the exact same life as I am now 5, 10, 15 years from now, with nothing to show for my time on Earth and all my potential growth still locked up inside of me like I am a seed that was planted far too deep.

Hopefully one day my shoots will emerge from the surface of the soil and burst forth into rowdy bloom at long last.

But the clock is ticking. I am not a healthy man. I might not live much longer.

And you would think the looming specter of death would be enough to galvanize me into getting my shit together and making something of myself.

But it ain’t.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.