Just got off the phone with Doctor Chao around ten minutes ago.
And it went well. I didn’t get angry with him like I was planning to do. Or at the very least get rather stern with him.
But I got him to understand how worried I am about my weakening muscles and how I feel like we have to take care of it soon or I will end up in a wheelchair, and that was the most important part of the mission anyhow.
I am particularly proud of the fact that, just as he was about to end the call, I brought the whole thing back up and how I wanted to be sure we (he) stayed focused on the problem with my muscles because I felt like in the past, we (he) had gotten distracted by other, less critical matters.
I felt I needed to say that because we ended up talking about my blood pressure slash dizziness on standing up issue and while I want that to be addressed as well, it is not nearly as important as my retaining the ability to walk.
Even if I need a walker to go more than six steps.
You know, they call it a walker, but I still gotta do all the walking myself.
Ba dum tish.
And in bringing things back to the point just when he thought the conversation was over, I forced him to go over the details of my case in order to prove to me that he had not forgotten them again.
I even got a little dig in when he said something like, “Your legs stopped working and you ended up in the hospital for 16 days… ” and I said, “And that was a year ago!.”
Yeah, remember that, DOC? That it has been an entire year with no diagnosis? Wonder why that is? Got any theories, DOC?
I feel pretty darn good about that.
He is going to ask Doctor Caswell’s office for the results of that blood pressure monitor thing I did a while back. I will see him in his office next Monday at 10:30 AM.
I suspect this to be yet another delaying tactic of his where he seizes upon some immediately actionable part of my case that lets him send me off for now and thus lets him go on to his next fee/patient ASAP.
Whatever. Having asserted myself successfully today, I feel confident that I have what it takes to keep pushing and prodding until I get a satisfactory result.
As for the lack of hauteur (it was, at best, warmeur), that’s all for the best anyhow. Angry insistence has never been my strong point.
I am much better at earnest persistence. No accusations, no crankiness, no bile. Just giving the unmistakable impression that I have a problem that will just keep popping ujp and making you feel terrible until you frigging solve it.
Kind of like my hero Columbo, actually. He almost never gets mad. And he is never rude. He just keeps popping up, all humble charm and sharp mind, and asking increasingly probing questions that really put the screws to the murderer.
That’s how I deal with bureaucrats and I guess it probably works on doctors, too.
I miss my Dad. I learned it all from him.
More after the break.
I remember Larry
My father was the villain of my childhood. And I kind of regret that now.
Let me get this out of the way : it was his own fault. He was impatient, and short tempered, and verbally abusive, and demanding, and scary as hell to all us sensitive, nervous, bookish kids.
But in hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if I could have reached him somehow. Maybe showed him a way to relate to his kids in a more relaxed and human way.
Because I know he was not all bad. There was the makings of a pretty good father under all that crankiness. Maybe if he had access to some other way of working out his frustrations, he would have been easier to get along with and we kids would have been a lot closer to him. \
Not sure what would have worked for him. Kung-Fu?
Now on the surface of it, it might seem absurd to think that I, a child at the time, might have been able to “fix” my father.
But I know myself. I know what I am capable of. I can connect with people on a deep level and maybe even learn to speak their language in time.
Not that I am on any level or in any sense saying I should have “saved” him.
But I am mature enough to be able to look back and see a lonely, frustrated man who was greatly hurt by the lack of closeness with his kids but could not (or would not) calm the fuck down enough to fix the problem.
The fact that it was all his fault does not entirely prevent it from being tragic.
I wish I had known just how hellish his childhood had been back then. But he was never going to tell us. We had to learn it from his sister Mary Jane, who witnessed it all.
God knows what my Grandpa did to her. But I don’t want to think about that.
There is only so much of my spirit I want to invest in hating a dead man.
No matter how tragic our childhoods were, though, we are still accountable for our actions. Everyone has bad shit in their past and could use that to whine and complain justify their own bad behaviour.
But at the end of the day, we still expect people to goddamned behave themselves.
And my father, Larry Donald Bertrand (RIP), could not do that.
So he died alone.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.