My sister had breast cancer for 7 years. She said that the five stages of grief missed two. She adds “Acting Out” and “Revenge”. I am planning a series of stages of grief playlists, because we are coming up on one million US citizens dead of Covid-19 and we are at six million world wide and counting. We need help grieving. I have other stuff going on to, so my go to is music.
My theme for the April AtoZ blog challenge this year is art. I think it will mostly be my mother’s art. She died in 2000 of ovarian cancer. My only sibling died in 2012 of breast cancer and my father in 2013 of emphysema. And I have the art: my parents were both packrats and trying to deal with the house and an out of date will took about three years. Moving stuff around, getting rid of stuff. The art initially went in to a storage unit and then into my house. My mother Helen Burling Ottaway was prolific! And she kept every single piece of art and her diaries back to high school! I found a suitcase with my grandfather’s poetry as well: that will be for another day.
This painting is of my sister. My mother started oils later in her career and Michael Platt, a DC artist, said something like, “Quit doing tiny things. Do something big.” My mother started doing life size and larger than life portraits in chalk pastel and in oils. This painting captures my sister when she was twenty: emotions. I like it but I also think that it is frightening.
Christine Robbins Ottaway age 20, by Helen Burling Ottaway, oil, 1984
I wrote this poem a long time ago. I was thinking about how being a physician and taking care of other people let me avoid my own feelings. Doctors are trained to hide their feelings. When I was an intern, a patient died on my day off. I came back to find the person gone. No one on the team said anything. I was afraid I’d done something wrong. Was it my fault? Finally I screwed up my courage and spoke the the attending physician. “Oh!” he said, “I meant to talk to you about that patient. They had a lethal pulmonary embolus from the clot in their leg. They were appropriately anticoagulated. You did nothing wrong. This happens.”
I think the war is more of the same. Chaos, to avoid feeling. Let’s not do that. Let us grieve as a world. Let us not melt down in a conflagration. That is my prayer.
Chaos
So familiar
If there’s a mess And chaos Home that’s home Busy busy Run around Fire fire Fix it Crisis Now what Deal with it
No time for feelings
No no
No time
I don’t want chaos Liar liar
Chaos is so safe
Hero hero Put out the fire Catch the baby Confront Not a hero really Scared Hiding
If I stop the chaos I will have to feel
Maybe it’s ok To feel a little
I forgive myself I understand the chaos I can let go of it by degrees
I feel so vulnerable In the quiet clean safe place Take your time sweet self
I had the heart echocardiogram bubble study. Normal. I really really did not like having the mix of blood, saline and AIR injected and I COULD FEEL IT. My logical brain knew it was going into a vein, but my emotional brain kept yelling “Air embolisms kill people!” Yes, but that is arterial. My emotional brain did not care. Anyhow, it was fine.
Saw the cardiologist who said he can understand why I feel PTSD going into my local hospital. He says I should not need oxygen at age 60 with no smoking. He says “Not your heart.” Yeah, duuuude, I know. He suggests I go to the Mayo Clinic. I agree.
Meanwhile, my primary sent a referral to rheumatology to have me seen at Swedish to confirm chronic fatigue. This is to keep the stupid disability off my back. Swedish rheum doesn’t call me. I ask my primary’s office. Swedish STILL doesn’t call me. I call them, as follows.
“Hi, I was referred to Swedish rheum and I have not been called.”
“Name, serial number, date of birth, length of little toe. Ah, we just received the referral yesterday.”
“Um, I don’t think so. I was referred over a month ago.”
“Uh, oh,” scrabble noises, “Oh, uh, we got a referral in December. We were not taking new patients in December.”
“When did you start taking new patients?”
“Oh, um.”
“When did you start taking new patients?”
“Oh, uh, January. But we only took the ones that called us, because after they call, we then review the notes.”
“So you ignored the referral until I call? How am I supposed to know that?”
“Oh, uh, we will expedite your referral. Maybe even today.”
So THEN I get a message from my primary that they have REFUSED the referral. Great.
Meanwhile I read the cardiologist’s note, which pisses me off. “We will refer you to Mayo Clinic since you have unexplained hypoxia and you think you have PANS.”
I send my primary a very pissed off note saying, could we please phrase this as “a psychiatrist suggested PANS in 2012 and while no one likes this diagnosis, no one else has suggested an overarching diagnosis since that time in spite of her seeing four pulmonologists, neurology, cardiology, infectious disease, four psychiatrists, allergy/asthma, and immunology”. Saying “the patient thinks she has PANS” automatically labels me as crazy and obsessed.
So, it seems I should write a book, about how the medical communities treat patients, including a fellow physician, horribly. Of those doctors, three have treated me with respect and were grown up enough to say, “We don’t know.” The neurologist, the infectious disease doc and the present pulmonologist. All the rest are dismissive and disrespectful. Oh, and the one psychiatrist, but the next one says, “I don’t believe in PANDAS.” I stare at him in disbelief, thinking “they are animals related to raccoons that live in China, you moron”. I did not even know it was controversial until that moment. Holy PANDAS, Batman.
My primary has suggested I write to the Mayo Clinic myself, and I am going to. Because the present people aren’t listening, except my pulmonologist and she is short staffed and looks like death warmed over post call every time I see her.
So it’s all annoying as hell. The cardiologist seemed pretty nice, but damn, he put the same damn rumor down about me self diagnosing. Most of the doctors apparently think I might be a tolerable person if they could just drug me with psych drugs. And from what I have seen, there are many patients who are in this situation.
written 12/26/17. I wrote this about another writing site. It is falling to bits, like a old building not maintained. It makes me sad, because it is where my sister used to write.She died in 2012and I still often miss her.
My maddest baddest skill, shared with my younger sister, is reading hidden emotions. Children of alcoholics and addicts learn that one young. Or die. Or start drinking/drugging to numb young.
Our culture is bloody weird. Emotions are stuffed like turkeys until people are near bursting. I swear that half my clinic time was letting people talk about emotions and then saying, well, those seem like pretty reasonable feelings in view of the insanity going on in your family. There would be a silence while the person thought about the horrible terrible feelings being reasonable and then I would say, “You said you want an antidepressant. Do you want to discuss that?”
Often people put it off. Once the feelings are OUT and present and looked at instead of stuffed/contained/terrifying, the person would say, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I need it.”
“Do you want to schedule to come back in two weeks?”
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If they wanted to start an antidepressant, I would caution that the recommendation was to stay on it for six months minimum if tolerated. Also, if they were starting it in June, I would say, “Don’t stop it in January. Wait until the sun is back. Here that can be July 4th. At least wait until spring.”
The plants are all thinking about spring now. My magnolia would like three more days of sun and then it will burst into bloom. The plums are budding and close to exploding. My camellia is usually first, but I trimmed it at the wrong time of year and so it is not blooming. It looks healthy, though. It is sort of sulking for a season. I would like to sulk for a season too.
Why is our culture, the US, so terrified of emotion? We think everything should be about logic. Emotions are both hormonally and electrically mediated through nerves and blood and they are INFORMATION about our environment and each other. We should let emotions roll through us like waves, and not worry about them so much. I think of myself as an ocean. The emotions are the weather. They roll through. Ok, big storm. Then rain, and lightening. Then low clouds and some fog. Then sun and a beautiful day to sail with a light breeze. But the deeper currents change slowly and the weather is not really that important. I reside in the depths.
The furor over rising prices seems ridiculous to me. The roaring twenties has begun already in housing and buying stuff on Amazon. I have bought two things from Amazon in the last two years. I like to buy local. One order was for my future daughter in law’s wish list. I think people are buying so that they do not have to feel. It is cultural mania. Everyone is rushing around trying to make money instead of grieving. Yesterday I thought, if this keeps up, we WILL have a depression like 1929.
Don’t do it. Don’t buy stuff to avoid the stuff inside. Sit still twice a day, for at least five minutes, and just listen. Try to listen to the depths.
Today is my father’s birthday. He died in 2013. I am missing him this morning. I would like a hug, even if it smelled of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Hugs to all.
Discover and re-discover Mexico’s cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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