Category Archives: grief

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Speaking up

For yesterday’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: justice.

I keep hearing “Why didn’t she speak up sooner?”

I spoke up. I was 7. The abuser was a neighbor. Nothing was done. I thought it was my fault, that I was not a virgin, and that at age 7 I was pregnant. I did not understand puberty. I spoke up to my mother, who dismissed it.

So I did the only thing I could: I tried to protect myself and my four year old sister. I told her never ever to go near that neighbor. And I never went near him again.

I was taken for a well child check a month or two later. I didn’t say anything but I thought that surely the doctor would have noticed if I was pregnant, so I must not be.

I grieved on the school bus, thinking that I was the only girl who was not a virgin. I was wrong about the not a virgin, but I also was probably wrong about being the only girl.

I didn’t even realize that hello, I was seven, it was not my fault, I didn’t even understand what was happening. I didn’t understand until I was in college and heard a radio program about how women who are raped feel guilty. Here is a poem about that realization: The bacon burning.

So do you think I spoke up after that? Why would I? No one helped me and I was silenced. I learned this lesson: no one will help and I am on my own. I did speak up in medical school: Make a difference.

Where is justice? And do you really want us ALL to speak up now? About ALL of it?

When I was in my early teens, a friend of my parents french kissed me. He said, “I wanted to be your first french kiss.” Hello, I avoided him after that and did I want a french kiss from an old friend of my parents? He had a PhD but no boundaries, no emotional intelligence and poor ethics.

Shall I go on? In college I worked in two labs: both fruit fly labs. In one the graduate student was professional, courteous and quickly gave me a raise. In the other, I never saw the professor again and I was ignored. I went to resign from the second. The PhD professor said, “What do you plan to do after college?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you plan to get married and become some man’s cow?”

Oh, really? Do you Mr. PhD professor refer to all married women as men’s cows? Would you have the same conversation with a male student? I quit. I don’t like you or your lab and that sort of comment reinforces my dislike.

In medical school we had two female physicians on the faculty. One was married but no children. Residents joked about her, that she had the balls in the family, because they were both physicians. The other was not married, an OB-gyn. We asked her to speak to our Women in Medicine group about children and career.

“If you want to be taken seriously as a physician, you should not have children.” she said.

I asked, “What if we have a house husband?”

“No man’s ego could stand up to that,” she replied.

I have children and a career.

I had worked in a clinic for a year and another provider talked to me. “Do you know that they are paying the other physician (male) twice what they are paying you?”

Oh, really? I set up a meeting with the administration.

“Oh, the male physician is the clinic director, that’s why we pay him more.”

This was a lie. I had been in the clinic for a year and there had never been one word that he was clinic director. The next year they standardized paying us by RVUs: his salary went down and mine went up. And so justice was done, right? No, the male physicians are given jobs such as head of hospice or medical director and extra money. Do they work harder? The jobs are not offered to the women physicians.

A male physician at the hospital was made chief of staff. He asks me in the hall, “Do women physicians just quit because they want to stay at home with children?”

“Do you want a serious answer?” I said. He looked surprised. We went to an office and I discussed that almost all the hospital staff were women at that time and that they have a different relationship with female physicians than male physicians. Most of the administrators were male, white males.

So really, do you want all the women in the US to speak up? Maybe we all should. The above is not anywhere near an exhaustive list, it is a start. This is just from thinking about it for two days. I can fill pages…..

 

 

 

 

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stay or go?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: migration.

I took this on a beach walk with my aunt and uncle on Sunday. They were visiting from Virginia. They’ve flown back now.

This is taken with the zoom all the way out. I recognized the great blue heron, but in the first picture I can’t tell what the geese are. With a face in profile in this second photograph it’s clear that they are Canada geese.

The geese are migrating but the great blue heron stays and winters over. Most of our hummingbirds migrate, but the Anna’s can winter over. And I have been asked: stay or go? My landlord asks if I will renew my lease for my clinic in February.

I reply that I am waiting on the US Congress. My clinic is more than half medicare patients. 48% are over age 65. Congress is discussing paying a flat fee for medicare visits: about $43.00 dollars. At the moment I do not see how I could keep my small solo clinic open if that goes through. Stay or go? It is stressful. I want to stay. But I may have to migrate like the geese….

I think a frightening number of physicians would either migrate or stop taking medicare patients, opt out of medicare, if Congress passes this bill. The AAFP is fighting it. I contact Congress too, but I am tired of fighting for single payer, medicare for all. Patients spend more on their dogs’ health than their own. How can I do good care and feel valued for $43.00 per clinic visit?

I thought the thing most likely to close my clinic is the cost of my own health insurance. But Congress may close me down by dropping my payments from 48% of what I bill, to less than 25%. Yet they say they want good care for our country….

Message me if you contact Congress to say do not do this. And thank you so much if you do.

The proposal for medicare changes is 1472 pages. So I am supposed to find time to read that and comment on it in addition to taking care of my patients? What sort of insanity is this?

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copyright

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: copyright.

This is my sister being a goofball on Christmas morning in 2010. The puppet was a family gift that we all played with. The Christmas hat is mine. This was after her cancer recurred: she died in March of 2012.

My sister wrote on line. She wrote at everything2.com and a blog: http://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/.

After she died, the people who write on everything2 were notified that another blogger had stolen multiple write ups and posted them on a blog as their own writing. That is a violation of copyright. And it feels particularly painful when it is my sister’s writing, who is dead at 49 from cancer. I do not think nice thoughts about the thief and I hope that the person regrets and makes penance for what they did. Hundreds of write ups were stolen from all sorts of people.

That is what the word copyright brings up. Don’t steal. Don’t steal my work or photographs or my sister’s or anyone else’s….

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sky

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: slapdash. I can’t think of a photograph of something I want to call slapdash. It feels judgemental today, unless it’s something of mine, and that feels vulnerable. And then I start thinking about the sky…..

sky

Is this a careless sky?

Were the angels in a hurry when they painted it?

Did the clouds come out as heaven wanted?

There is nothing slapdash about the sky.

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admit deny

For mindlovemisery’s prompt: opposing forces. The prompts are admit/deny and presence/absence.

The pairs bring up my current sadness right away. I am struggling with the realization that we have a pervasive legal substance that works at the opiate receptor, is all over the US, and I have to send out urine tests for ALL of my chronic pain and opiate overuse and anyone on any controlled substance. You say, “but it’s legal”. I say, “Overdose and death risk. I can’t ignore it.” Here is the resulting poem.

admit deny

admit to yourself you deny your addiction
the presence of the drug means the absence of the one I love

 

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Container dream

I dream I am at a concert in a park. Or some very big event. With my significant other. It is a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the grass is green, there are rolling hills and trees. People are arriving.

There is a gasp of horror. There is a large box, like the hold of a ship. We hurry to look in: there are three open containers down inside, tops removed. They are full of children. Smuggled? Immigrants? The containers are surrounded by water. My significant other and I drop our things and climb down the long hold ladder into the water, which is cold, filthy, and comes up to my thighs. I’ve kicked off my sandals. We are wading to the containers. An ICE agent in a black uniform, bullet proof vest, belt with tools and guns, and riot helmet, blocks me and says, “You have to be wearing shoes to help.” He is handing out plastic stretchers. He can’t see my feet. Yes, I know it’s dangerous and my feet could get cut, but this is probably sewage and dangerous even with shoes. We should really be in hazmat gear but the kids could be dying. I just look at him, silent, and he hands me a stretcher.

Enough people have come forward, into the water, that all the kids have been placed in one of the containers. None of them are dead. They are being lifted out one by one, to ambulances. Now the hold is surrounded by rubberneckers. I climb out and find my purse and camera and shoes. I am grateful no opportunist has stolen them. The ICE agents are telling people to back off and give them room to work. The news crews are there and a Washington State politician says, “This is Washington State, we will take care of these children, we will not see them separated and incarcerated, I will see that they are returned to their parents.” Good luck, I think, but at least there are tons of witnesses and cameras and news crews.

I need to find somewhere to scrub my legs down with soap and to find my significant other. It’s getting more crowded.

I wake up.

And what I notice is that the water did not stink and was not full of lumps of floating excrement. As I wake I hope that I won’t catch something horrible and die….usually my dreams have full sound, color and smells too. I wonder where the children were from, and why, and whether they had some sort of sanitation….

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slow deep

on the rocks, the canadian shield, old rock
rock that extends for miles and miles
water cupped in the rock
cupped like a hand, holding a lake

you say
You seem so deeply at peace

I say
No, I am not at peace at all

then I say
Yes, in the depths I am at peace

like the lake

the surface is all weather
glassy sometimes
then surface chop
then rain singing and bouncing
then waves crashing on the shore
reflecting the sky
light, dark, blue, the green of trees
pale pink in the morning
or orange and blue with the setting sun

the depths change slowly
not that slowly
in the fall the water temperature drops
to 4 degrees
and the lake turns over
all the 4 degree water dropping into the depths
and the warmer water rises
until the whole lake is 4 degrees and most dense
and then the surface freezes
the ice is lighter and floats on top
until it is solid and deep
and the lake winters over

in the spring the ice melts
and the ice breaks up
and the lake rolls over again

my surface is choppy with emotion
memories
grief and joy

my slow depths turn over

and there is deep peace

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water

For Raynotbradbury’s “my life in percentage” challenge.

I have just returned from a vacation, a trip, a pilgrimage where I was unplugged. No list. No goals. No internet. No outlets. Just a lake and old cabins and meals and weather and quiet. Percentage, I wonder, of what? Happiness? Efficiency? Joy? Gratitude? Percentage genuine? Percentage genuine and present. What percentage is a loon at?Β  Either 0 or 100 percent and they are both the same.

We travel to the lake. It’s hard to get to from my home. We drive to a Seattle hotel for a park and fly. Stay the night. 6:08 flight Seattle to Detroit. Short layover but I know the airport, we make the gate with 120 seconds to spare. Our checked bags make it too. Flight Detroit to Sault St Marie, MI. I did not reserve a rental car soon enough to get one in Michigan, so we have a limo reserved. It’s a van. The van takes us across the border into Canada and to the Sault St Marie, ON airport, where we get a rental car. We drive to a grocery store and get a few groceries. The plane landed at 3:08, and I would like to get to the lake before dark. We drive from Sault St Marie to Blind River, and the 17 miles to the lake. We find the old boat, load in our stuff and get the four stroke started, one hour before sunset. The cabins can be reached by boat, no road. The dock was destroyed by ice so I have to pull the motor up as we come in to the pebble beach. I am just big enough to do yank the motor up. We are here. We unload.

Crazy, right? I have been describing it as “shacks on a lake”. No electricity. Propane stove and refrigerator. We used to use candles, but the fire risk is high this year. LEDs now. One cabin was built by my grandparents somewhere between 1936 and 1938. The other is a log cabin, built in the war years by a pair of French Canadians, logs chinked like tinker toys. Not quite though. It’s the log above chinked to the log below.

We set up tents and are unplugged. I have two phones. My t-mobile won’t work at all. The old I-phone will work sort of sometimes on the front rocks. I have camera batteries and take a lot of photographs.

I open my computer once at the library in two weeks.

We sleep in tents except for the two nights with major thunderstorms. It’s really the outdoors I want. The lake changes color and mood from moment to moment. I swim this year: I am way stronger than in 2015 or it’s warmer or both. We are in the cabin to eat and do dishes, but otherwise we are nearly always outside. The loons call. A family of mergansers comes up on the rock with us, 10 or 11. Otter sliding through the water. A pair of raccoons. A snapping turtle the size of a platter. Three pileated woodpeckers come to check out my flute. Three sandhill cranes by the road on the way into town. My cousins report a moose on the way into town.

The loons answer when my daughter plays violin: every time she plays the E string, they reply.

I’ve been visiting that lake since I was 5 months old. The lake, the rocks, the trees. The lake changes color every moment, changes surface mood, change. But the depths change slowly and are present, a turnover when the lake thaws in the spring and freezes in the fall.

I am the lake and the lake is me. Unplugged and being. Minimal doing. No list. Eat when hungry. Sleep so deep and swim and canoe around the lake.

I canoe and there is a woman, way across the bay. We talk. I know her last name, she knows mine. She remembers playing at our cabin with me and my sister, our long hair, running around while the adults talked about Watergate. About 1970. Her father just died in his upper 80s. He defied the doctors after a stroke a decade before, walked again and she kept bringing him to the lake. Now they are trying to maintain an old cabin, as we are.

Home again.

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My sister’s writing about the lake from 2009: Rain on water.