Tag Archives: gun

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A timorous culture

Over 20 years ago, when I first start practicing in Washington State, I get a letter from the state. It frightens me. It says that there is a complaint to the state from a patient and that I am being investigated. I think, “What did I do?” The letter says that they will notify me when they are done investigating. I am not allowed to inquire about it until they are done.

I worry, then shrug and go on working.

Eventually I get a letter from the state saying that the investigation is complete and has been dismissed. Now I can request information. I do.

The complaint is that on a yearly exam, I had asked if a patient had guns in the house. Since too many US citizens die by gun suicide and children can find guns and accidentally kill themselves or others, I was taught to counsel regarding guns. If a person has guns in the house I am to counsel them to keep the gun locked up with the ammunition locked up separately.

I was charged in the complaint with trying to find out how many guns this person has and “reporting it to the government”. I thought, that is ridiculous, but it did change my practice. Since there are paranoid timorous gun owners, I no longer asked if they had guns. Instead I said, “If you have guns in the house, as a safety measure, keep them locked up with the ammunition locked up separately.” We are supposed to counsel people to keep addictive drugs that can overdose and kill people locked up too.

I get three replies to the gun counseling. 1. “No guns!” 2. “I am a policeman (or hunter or retired veteran or gun collector) and all guns are secured at all times.” 3. Silence. The silent ones clearly have guns and do not lock them up. Truly I have had people tell me that they sleep with a loaded gun under the pillow. Really? That is our fear based timorous violent culture. We are terrified of….. someone. People on drugs, criminals, immigrants, people of another ethnicity, invaders, alien lizards in human disguise. Whatever.

I don’t have guns. I do have a fairly high level Tai Kwan Do belt, but my main home defense is that I am a packrat. Anyone trying to sneak into my house at night would trip over a cat or cat toy or the cardboard boxes in the kitchen that Elwha loves to sleep in. My house is seriously dangerous. I need to removed the stuff on the stairs by the time I turn 65 so that when they counsel me about fall risks at my medicare wellness visit, I can say that my stairs are clear.

Well, I do have a pop gun, loaded with a cork on a string. Also an Archie McPhee potato gun. Don’t shoot it in the house because those little bits of potato are hard to find. We have a 2 inch plastic ray gun that makes great sound effects and oddly has worked for years. I have a wooden katana and various instruments of garden destruction which could be deadly. I also have a lot of beach rocks and fossils, also fairly deadly, and other things. I’d rather not use any of these ever. Ok, I chased the 4 point buck out of the front yard with the baseball bat twice because he’d jumped the back fence and was eating my roses, but he’s allowed the run of the back yard. I was really mad at him.

We have to get past the fear based timorous culture, because it is making people crazy. Who are you most afraid of? In high school my daughter states, “Well, young white males with guns are the ones most likely to come shoot us, so that is who we should be afraid of.” That’s a sad, sad statement about the US culture.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: timorous.

Hummingbirds are not timorous at all! They guard the feeder and seem to enjoy chasing other hummingbirds and bigger birds away and aren’t afraid of me either!

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alternative medicine

Ok, I got this picture off Facebutt. I CONFESS. But I really want a doctor kit like this: so I can practice alternative medicine. I am disabled from Family Practice and I have to apply for disability payments (miles of paperwork) and I hear that even as a contractee I can apply for unemployment (miles more paperwork) and I see my hospital bill on line for the ER visit where I had chest pain and shortness of breath and the ER doc didn’t even give me an aspirin, so I want to know why I should pay them $900 and I am going to apply for reduced payments because last year I made 42 K, less then the nurses at Jefferson Healthcare (EVEN MORE PAPERWORK FOR THE REDUCED PAYMENTS) and really, it all sounds rather exhausting and I’d rather let the paranoia rise and hide under the bed. Where the OCD and ADHD will make me arrange the dust bunnies and dust elephants by size.

So this looks like a great doctor kit. If the patient sees me and doesn’t do a darn thing that I say, I shoot them with the gun in the forehead. If they do a little but not really very much, I set up the bowling pins and shoot them with the gun while I talk about how irritating it is to have patients use MY TAX DOLLARS though MEDICARE MEDICAID ACTIVE MILITARY DUTY AND THE VETERANS ADMINISTRATION NOT TO MENTION SOCIAL SECURITY DISABILITY to get advice and not follow it.

If they are merely disrespectful and tell me what Dr. Google says, I say “Duck.” and throw one at them. If they say, “I don’t take any farmasuiticals.” and bring a bag with the 12 supplement and vitamin pills they take daily, I give them the plastic pills to replace all their stupid supplements. “Here, take this. If it doesn’t work, I have suppositories, but they are four times this size so some people complain that they are uncomfortable.”

I am not sure WHAT the thing in the lower right corner is. A hair dryer? A fentenyl lollipop? Part of an old fashioned telephone?

Anyhow, someone find me one of these kits and send it to me. Pretty please. I am not allowed to do Family Medicine any more and really want to get started on Alternative Medicine.

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guns in the house

During wellness visits I used to ask, “Do you have guns in the house?” in the safety/accident prevention part of the visit. Along with helmets, seat belts, smoke alarms and not driving under the influence.

As a Family Practice Board Certified Physician, I counsel patients. Family Practice is a specialty, just as internal medicine and general surgeon are specialties. A three year residency training after medical school and I retake the Boards every 10 years. I counsel patients in “annual exams” or “medicare wellness” visits.

A patient reported me to the state board because of that question. I then got a letter from the state board saying that I was being investigated but not why. Later I got a letter saying that the patient had complained that I had asked about guns. The state replied that in fact, I am supposed to counsel patients about gun safety.

I changed my counseling. Now I say: “If you have guns in the house, I am to counsel you to keep them locked up with the ammunition locked up separately.”

I get three responses:

1. “My guns are in a gun safe, locked at all times, with the ammunition locked.”

2. “I don’t have any guns!”

3. Silence.

It is the silent ones that worry me.

I did not change my counseling because I was reported to the state and the state did not tell me to change it. I changed it in hope that someone who keeps their guns unlocked and loaded, in the bedside table, under their pillow, up in a closet, or where ever, will think about it. The question “Do you have guns in the house?” is too loaded for those people.

I met a woman with an impressive star shaped radiating scar on her chest. Her boyfriend kept a loaded gun under his pillow. One night she was returning from the bathroom. He shot her in the chest.

They are not together any more.

When my son went to preschool, over 20 years ago, I counseled him. “If another child says they can show you a gun or they have a gun, say that you have to go to the bathroom. Go and tell an adult right away. People can get killed.”

He reported an overheard conversation in preschool between two other boys. One said that he knew where his parents kept a gun. The two boys were planning to leave the school to go look at the gun. I called the preschool. They already knew about it and had talked to both boys’ parents. I don’t know if the parents locked the guns up.

In Portland one of my neighbors chased his upstairs neighbor into the street one day during rush hour, stark naked, trying to hit the upstairs neighber with a 5 iron. Yes, a golf club. I am very glad the downstairs neighbor did not have a gun right then, because he would have used it. Any of us could have been killed. And later the SWAT team was called to deal with him: he did have a gun that time. He threatened to shoot himself in the head. Then he did: well, except he only creased himself. He went to involuntary psychiatry, supposedly for six months. He was back in three months. The neighborhood was very very nervous. The house next door was sold and he disappeared and we were all relieved. He was strong, completely illogical and terrifying. We discussed how to deal with him but mostly we hid.

When he chased the neighbor into the street, I had already called 911 because I heard screaming next door. My voice shook. The dispatcher said, “Yes, we know the address, we’ve had three calls and they are on their way.” The traffic stopped dead at the sight of a nude man chasing another man with a 5 iron. I unbolted my door and stuck my head out. “(C—-)! Up here!” The upstairs neighbor ran up my steps and into my house. I slammed the door and bolted it and crouched by the front window with a baseball bat, ready to hit the downstairs neighbor as hard as I could if he came through my front window.

He didn’t. The police arrived. The whole thing was over the upstairs neighbor “playing music too loud” and “not turning it down enough”. The downstairs neighbor had broken down the upstairs neighbor’s door with the five iron. The upstairs neighbor had tried to defend himself with a butter knife and then ran. The police explained to the downstairs neighbor as he was arrested that if someone breaks your door down, it is not assault to defend yourself with a butter knife.

We discussed which illegal drugs we thought he was on. This was in the 1990s, so we thought it was crack. There was a big article soon after that about a crack house. We said, whew, glad we aren’t those neighbors and then realized that it was within two blocks of our house. Great.

Drugs and alcohol and guns and anger and grief….. it is a toxic mix.

Please, lock your guns.