Tag Archives: discuss

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Disorientation

Oooo, I put orientation up as the Ragtag Daily Prompt today. Then I wondered if disorientation is a word and it is! A mouthful!

This is a series of poems or meditations or arguments I had with myself last week. I was thinking about love and how to handle people that I love that have stopped behaving in a loving way or have actually been cruel or cut me off. Do I stop loving them and hate them? Do I love them anyhow? What would that love open me to? Abuse? It is disorienting to think about. Here is the series.

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The Fall

I am small. The adults love me and give me away. I grieve each time. It doesn’t matter if I behave well or not: they leave me. I decide that the adults are confused. They do not know how to love. Why don’t they know? I want to understand! Babies should be loved! We are innocent!

All babies should be loved and protected. I do, with my sister. The adults continue their mysterious crazy doings. I recognize that alcohol does not help, nor other choices.

All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Sometimes they were not loved and protected and they are damaged. I train and then I doctor them. Healing is slow.

All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. All adults hold a baby that should be loved and protected: themselves. I try for a long time.

All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Each adult makes their own choices, to heal or not. To grow or not. To love themselves and the Beloved or not.

All babies should be loved and protected. All adults make choices. The Beloved loves them all.

I am not the Beloved. Nor an angel. I dream of falling.

I am not the Beloved. I let go. I fall.

I do not love them all.

Rise

Yesterday I fell. I let myself dislike four people that I loved.

But no, I choose not. Angels fall and rise again. I choose love. If that means distance, then I choose distance. For now I will love the cruel ones from a distance. No contact.

The Buddhas laugh at the needy ones, the angry ones, the ones who press. Some will be enlightened, some wait for the next life. The Buddhas laugh because they do not control it. It may be the quiet one who says nothing who rises, while one who wants and wants and wants may have to want for longer. Why, Beloved? Isn’t wanting you enough? Isn’t longing enough? How much must one want? How deeply must one long?

I choose love.

Prayer to Kwan Yin

Kwan Yin, I am sorry. I cannot be a Bodhisattva. I am tired. I grieve. I want to love everyone. They hate it. If I love the small child within they are reminded of the hidden hurts and they lash out. I am tired. I don’t want to be the target of that. Kwan Yin, how to do you return and return again, loving these? I am not strong enough. I give up. I throw myself on your mercy, I bow to your infinite love and strength, I abase myself. Forgive me, I am not strong enough. I give up. I do not have enough love in my heart and I am so tired.

Beloved, I am sorry. I tried.

Every Being (Sonnet 9)

Keep the cruel ones at a distance far.
Hold your enemies close in love’s embrace.
None to hate, yet cruelty glints like stars.
I hide quiet with cats in this home space.
My heart opens like the universe.
Projections batter me from head to toe.
Why tear at me with their deep hurts?
They project their pain: inside they know.
They know, don’t know, choose not to learn.
Dark rooms and texts and staring at the screen.
My skin scalded, heart black with new burns.
I think they’d like me too to turn out mean.
I will hide here with Beloved’s dove.
Each tear I cry sends every being love.

In spite of want

Sol set in my heart and rises again. I can love whoever I want. There are no boundaries to love. But I will not be abused or used, I will love quietly and silently and without letting my love know. And I will love who I want. No, I will love in spite of want, though I do not want to, though it is not deserved. But I honor my stubborn heart that does not let go of love.

Blessings, Beloved.

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This too two

This too two I want to remember.
Disagreeing. Respectful nearly always.
You say, “You argue with everything.”
“I think about both sides.” I say.
“And if I am alone I discuss both with myself.”
You roll your eyes and I grin and continue.
This too two I want to remember.

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Practicing Conflict II

Practicing conflict II

In Practicing conflict, I wrote about practicing conflict by arguing different sides of a topic inside my head. I wrote that I don’t fear conflict and have learned to enjoy arguing with myself. I am a physician and physicians argue all the time.

What? No they don’t. Well, the doctor persona does not argue with the patient much. Some doctors give orders to patients, others try to negotiate, some try to convince. But behind the scenes, doctors are more like the Whacky Racer Car with the Cave Guys, running with their feet and hitting each other with clubs.

In residency in Family Practice at OHSU in Portland, Oregon, I start on General Surgery during internship. This is in the early 1990s and there was not much in the way of “disruptive physician” rules. I have to cover Trauma and Plastic Surgery and General Surgery at night on call. The resident is present but I get paged first for patients on the floor. I learn that I should go to all Trauma pages in the emergency room. If I know what is happening with the new Trauma patient, it’s a lot easier to handle the phone calls for more drugs and so forth. Also, the resident is less mean to me.

We attend the Trauma “Grand Rounds”. These are unreassuring to a new intern. A resident presents a trauma patient, giving the history in the accepted formal order. The Faculty Trauma Surgeons interrupt, disagree with management of the patient and yell. They yell at the resident and at each other. The upper level residents yell too, being well trained. The Trauma Surgeons do not agree with each other. They are inflammatory and rude. I am shocked initially: medicine is not a cookbook, is not simple and it appears that it is a controversial mess. It turns out that medicine IS a controversial mess.

There is not as much yelling on the next rotation. At that time Trauma Surgeons yelled more than any other set of doctors that I ran across. They yelled in the ER, at each other, at the staff, at the nurses, at the residents. The culture has changed, I suspect, but that’s how it was then.

I take Advanced Trauma Life Support as a third year resident. The Trauma Surgeons at OHSU helped write the course. They don’t agree with it. On some questions the teaching Surgeon says, “The answer to this question is (c), “ followed by muttering loudly, “though I totally don’t agree with that and I would do (b).” Another Trauma resident or surgeon then might start arguing with him, but they moved on pretty quickly, to teach the current agreed best practices in the book. Which change every few years. Great.

Years later (2009) I join the Mad as Hell Doctors, to go across the US talking about single payer. They are a group from Oregon. Physicians for a National Healthcare Program are a bit cautious with us the first year: we might be whackos. We have an RV with our logo and we have a small fleet of cars and what do you think we do in the cars? We argue. Or discuss. Or whatever you want to call it. We spend the driving dissecting issues and how to present things best and tearing apart the last presentation and rebuilding our ideas. The group does 36 presentations in 24 days. Each presentation takes an hour to set up, two hours to do and another hour to break down and debrief. We get more and more exhausted and cranky and um, well, argumentative, as the trip proceeds. Even though I think of the Whacky Racer Cave Guys running with their feet and bonking each other with clubs, this is the most wonderful group of doctors I have ever been with. A common goal that we all want to get to, discussing and disagreeing on strategy all the way! I feel closer to those physicians in a week then I feel to any of the physicians that I’ve worked with for the last 9 years in my small town. Conflict with a common goal.

Doctors are TRAINED to argue, even with themselves, to document every decision in the chart with reasons why they have reached that decision. And that they have thought about all of the reasons for say, a low potassium, thought of every possible cause and worked their way through testing. The testing always has two strands. One strand is rule out the things that could kill the person NOW, even if rare. The other strand is what is common? You have to think about both at the same time, always. And argue with yourself about which tests should be done, in what order, what is most important, how do you treat the person while awaiting results, and have I missed anything? And if we aren’t sure, we call another doctor, run it by them, wait for them to shoot holes in our logic or to say, no, I can’t think of anything else.

We can deal with conflict. We must deal with conflict. The world is too small not to deal with conflict, with disagreements, with different viewpoints and positions and ideas. If doctors can do it every single day at work, then everyone else can too. Trying to see all the positions and possible diagnoses saves lives in medicine. We need to extrapolate that to everything else. Try to see other positions, try to understand them, to respect them. We can and we must.

Blessings.

Here are the Whacky Racers:

And Madashell Doctors blog: http://madashelldoctors.com/category/uncategorized/page/3/

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: discuss.

The photograph is from my clinic once we had stopped seeing patients and were selling everything. Mordechai was our clinic skeleton, made of plastic, from China. This was in January 2021.

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Practicing Conflict

An essay from my church talks about the writer avoiding conflict, fearing conflict and disliking conflict. This interests me, because I do not avoid conflict, I don’t fear conflict and actually, I like it. Our emeritus minister once did a sermon in which he said that when you are thinking about two conflicting things at once, that is grace. I have thought about his words many times, especially when I am not in agreement about something.

Does this interest in conflict mean I fight all the time? Well, sort of, but not in the way you think. I don’t fight with other people much. I fight myself.

What? No, really. Most topics have multiple sides. Not one, not two, but many. Like a dodecahedron or a cut gem. Hold it up to the light, twelve sides, each different. I argue the different sides with myself.

I learned this from my parents. My parents would disagree about something, they would discuss or argue about it, and then they would bet. Sometimes they bet a penny, sometimes a quarter, sometimes one million dollars. Then one of them would get up and get the Oxford English Dictionary, or the World Atlas, or some other reference and look it up. This was pre-internet, ok? 1970s and 1980s.

Sometimes my parents would even pay each other. The penny or quarter. My father spoke terrible French and my mother had lived in Paris for a year after high school, so he could get her going by insisting that his French was correct. It wasn’t. Ever.

There were other arguments in the middle of the night that were not friendly and involved yelling, but the daytime disagreements were funny and they would both laugh.

Once my sister is visiting after my mother has died. My father is present. My father, sister and I get in a three way disagreement about physics. I’m a physician, my sister was a Landscape Architect and my father was a mathematician/engineer, so we are all three talking through our hats. However, we happily argue our positions. Afterwards, my gentleman friend says, “That was weird.” “What?” I ask. “That was competitive and you were all arguing.” “It was a discussion and we disagreed.” “I won’t compete.” “We let my dad win, because it makes him happy.” “That was weird.” “Ok, whatever.”

My gentleman friend is also shocked when my teen son challenges me at dinner. My son says, “I am researching marijuana and driving for school and there isn’t much evidence that it impairs driving.”  I reply, “Well, there is not as easy a test as an alcohol test and it was illegal, so it has not been studied.” We were off and having a discussion.

Afterwards my gentleman friend says, “I am amazed by your son bringing that up. We weren’t allowed to discuss anything like that at dinner.” I say, “We pretty much discuss anything at dinner and both my kids are allowed to try to change my mind. About going to a party or whatever.” He shakes his head. “That is really different.” “Ok,” I say.

This habit of challenging authority, including adults, did not go over well when my son was an exchange student to Thailand. It did not occur to me to talk to him about it. He figured it out pretty quickly.

Back to my internal arguments. If I take a position, I almost immediately challenge it. I think of it as the old cartoons, with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The devil will make fun of things and suggest revenges and generally behave really badly. The angel will rouse and say, “Hey, you aren’t being nice.” Then they fight. The internal battle very quickly becomes comic with the two of them trading insults and bringing up past fights and fighting unfairly. When it makes me laugh inside, I can also be over the driver who cut me off, or someone who spoke nastily, or whatever. My devil is very very creative about suggested revenges. When the angel says, “You are meaner than the person who cut you off!” I am over it.

When I was little and disagreeing with my family, my sister could tell. “You have your stone face on!” That meant I was attempting to hide a feeling, especially fear or anger or grief. Siblings and family are the most difficult because they can read us and see through us like glass. My physician training also teaches control of feelings. I have sometimes wanted to grab a patient and scream “Why are you doing this to yourself?” but that really is not part of the doctor persona. I am doing it inside, but I can put it aside until later. Then the devil goes to town! And the angel tries to calm the devil down.

Maybe we all need more of this skill. Pick a mildly controversial topic. Argue one side of it. Then switch positions and argue the other side. Go back and forth until it gets ridiculous. Let each side get unreasonable and inflammatory and annoying. This can play in your head and not on your face. Once you can do a mild topic, move on to something a bit more difficult. If you only know the arguments on your side, read. You can find the other side, the internet is huge. Start gently.

A friend says, “You always argue about things.” I say, “I prefer to think of it as a discussion.” “You always take the other side.” “Well, it interests me. And if there is no one to discuss something with, I discuss it with myself!” “Weirdo,” says the friend. I think he’s jealous, really I do. Don’t you?