I hate doctors, and I don't want to go (take two)

The title sums it all up. I hate doctors. When have they done anything good for me? Every time I go, it turns out to be "nothing".

So should I conclude that it will always be "nothing"? The "it hasn't happened up to now, so it won't happen in the future" philosophy sucks rocks because it's illogical. It simply isn't true.

I am at the age - God, I hate that word - where I maybe need to worry. This is the time people are told to have screening tests like colonoscopies (which I always call colostomies by mistake - I freaked out a friend once by telling her I was supposed to have one) which scare me half to death because I've been told they can be agonizingly painful. One health forum had a comment from someone who said she would take her chances with serious disease rather than go through that again.

My husband collapsed on the floor about a year ago, and paramedics and police rushed over. Made me wonder why everyone ignores me when I have a medical problem, but then, he's male and considerably older than me. It might be heart disease, after all (because we all know women don't have heart attacks!). In the hospital they put him through a meat grinder, doing every possible diagnostic test on him. The follow-up was even more rigorous, cardiac, neurological, urological, bowel and guts and everything else they could ream out.

The result was exactly nothing.

So I don't want to go to the doctor. I don't want to go to the doctor because I've had some symptoms lately that are probably nothing, but at the same time scare the hell out of me.

It's funny, because Bill and I have talked about how we can't afford to live as long as our parents did (all four them were well over 90). In fact, we may have trouble affording our 70s. We've joked that if we make it to 80, we'll kill each other, kind of like a duel where we both shoot at once. But what if he misses, and I don't? Will I be charged with murder, or merely self-defense?

It doesn't sound good.

I think about cancer, everyone does, or do they? I don't know, I don't interview everyone in the world, or on the street. The thing is, people with cancer are usually seen as heroes, brave souls who keep smiling no matter how much it hurts. In contrast, don't ever get a psychiatric problem, for no one will visit you in the hospital with flowers and balloons. They will not. Talk about being left alone, but that is what happens. At a time when you are at your most vulnerable and in need of comfort, people shrink back in dread. They don't even talk about it except in whispers. This is not an idle statement, but based on some 50 years' experience. But I am doubted there, too. How can I even think that people could be so callous?

But cancer, now! There's a great opportunity for bravery, for heroism, for stoicism in the face of pain, and lots and lots of warm get-well wishes. Flowers, candy, visitors to perk you up, tons of Facebook encouragement, and So Much More.

Do I sound just a little bit cynical? I have my reasons.

I don't think I have cancer. So why go? I have this niggling worry. Shouldn't I just ignore it? I have had alarming symptoms for EIGHT years, with no relief because I've been told "we can't find anything" and "there's nothing we can do". Do I want to be called a hypochondriac? But how can you be a hypochondriac if you hate doctors and stay away for years at a time?

There is something cold and frightening about the medical assembly line, the way you come out the other end feeling like dressed meat ready for the oven. There is a "NEXT!" feeling that only seems to get worse over the years. They literally call it "processing patients", and see nothing untoward about it. Too many patients, not enough time, because the equipment is absurdly expensive, the tests take forever and suck up resources, and it's usually for nothing. 

But we are stuck with it. In the past, if you had cancer, you just died. Probably horribly, because there wasn't even a good way to manage pain. Unlike today, when it's the banner illness that has spawned a million fundraising walks in every color of the rainbow, it was heavily stigmatized: people didn't even say the name. Probably this was fear, a dread that "something" had taken you over, colonized your body and was eating away at you beyond your control. This "something" would suck out the marrow from your bones, cause you to waste away to a skeleton, and probably drive away all but the most loyal family members who probably prayed that it would all be over soon.

All kinds of stuff has been written about illness, its social and emotional significance, etc. Usually the sufferer is blamed for not having it all together emotionally, for having "unresolved issues" (as if everyone doesn't have those). I wonder now if it isn't just bloody bad luck. Have you noticed how unevenly luck and blessings are distributed in life? Ain't it a bitch, and don't you wish it was different? People still get sick and die, in spite of all that fancy equipment. I've had five friends die in the last few years, and three of them were only in their mid-50s. One who was exactly my age at the time pulled his truck over, opened the door, and fell to the ground dead. Perhaps his fate was better than the woman who battled breast cancer for years, or Glen, one of the most beautiful men I have ever known, who escaped from a psych ward, swallowed a bottle of pills, and was found frozen to death beside the railroad tracks.

Oh, and that's another thing: the war imagery we use, especially for cancer. She "battled" breast cancer, she "waged a valiant struggle", and sometimes she "triumphed" or scored a "victory" over it. I wonder why we do this. No one questions it, and when no one questions something I just get furious because we are PEOPLE, not cattle! My feeling has always been that you should question everything, especially loony social trends. The war imagery not only renders the sufferer especially valuable for being a "good soldier" (and we still think the military is special, no matter what anyone says), it places the whole thing at a safe, fictionalized distance, as if we're watching a World War II movie on TV or going to the Cenotaph for 45 minutes to watch old men stand in the rain.

Ah, the stoicism, the smiling in the face of doom. I wonder why people feel they have to do this, why it has become such a cultural imperative. If I had cancer, I think I'd raise bloody hell and be so hard to get along with, NO ONE would come visit me (a situation I should be used to by now). Then again, maybe I'd be terrified. I know I would not be stoical. I'd be shit-scared and probably miserable from all the clinical attention, the being fed through machines with no one talking to you.

I've heard it said that quite often, when you get your diagnosis, the doctor comes in the room, says to the patient "you have cancer", then turns and leaves you sitting there alone. If I don't go, I won't hear that, will I? These guys are sons-of-bitches, aren't they? Are there any good ones? Well, OK, my brother-in-law, he's a Gunning man and as far as I'm concerned they're all great, but he lives all the way across the country.

If I don't go, I don't need to hear any of that shit. But if I don't go, this little scritchy-scrabbly feeling in my gut may not stop for a long time. If ever.

Signifying. . . nothing?

Medical stuff is a poor topic, I know, but lately I’ve become  preoccupied with it. And this in spite of the fact that I hate seeing doctors and very rarely feel that I am being listened to or taken seriously.

I’m in that grinder of tests that everyone is fed into when there are any sort of symptoms at all.  So far I’ve been safely spat out the other side, given the all-clear. I WANT this to be over with and I WANT to feel entirely OK.

And I don’t.

I won’t recount what the “symptoms” are (and how I hate that word, as it implies “this person must really be sick”, when the “issue” is finding out if I am even sick at all.). They’re boring, “signifying nothing”, as Hamlet used to say on one of his bad days. But whatever they are, or aren’t, they won’t go away, not yet anyway, though I know they will be gone tomorrow morning and never be back.

I can’t go in. That’s what I told my husband today. I just can’t. The thought of “going in” stirred up an ice-storm of panic that sucked me up into some sort of whirling white vortex, and all I wanted to do was get OUT. I haven’t called and I haven’t made an appointment because I know there is nothing wrong with me, so there is no point.

Then how to ignore the swirling forces of “whatever” that I can’t seem to get away from? It’s probably nothing. I’m not bleeding to death, hey! I can walk. Sometimes I find it hard to walk fast however and don’t want to, or have to sit down.

I never get sick, and if I do they throw me out anyway. I am never listened to. This is one of these dysphoric, self-annihilating realizations that jams my face down in the mud of mortality. Have I had a good life? Have I felt wanted? And just what have I contributed, anyway?

It could have been worse, I suppose, could have ended me in my mid-30s, though I jumped clear just in time before the locomotive ran me over. But in the midst of the high of turning 50, at the very peak of my happiness and productivity, it happened again. This one was truly wicked and seemed to indicate demonic forces that I could barely grapple with. At the same time, I completely lost my faith.

I understand self-destruction, too well, but I refuse to do it. I’ve been pared down pretty far in the past few years, though you’d never know it to look at me (for I’ve gained at least blblblblt lbs.) I cling to the tattered remnants of my ambition, realizing that the playwright Clifford Odets was so so right when he said, “Success is the jinni (genie: playwrights can't spell) that kills.”

Another playwright from the same era, George S. Kaufman (whose wife Beatrice was BFF with Oscar Levant) said, “What makes you, unmakes you.” If you understand this at all, then you are already unmade.

But aren’t we ALL unmade in the end, like some great tumbled tangled psychic bed? Trees fall and rot, and so do we, though the medical profession tries very hard to beat back the flames (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I wonder why we scramble so hard to stay alive for as long as we possibly can.  Don’t we all end up in pretty much the same place?

I know that sounds bleak, and I would gladly give an arm and a leg and both kidneys to anyone in my very small, very close, very dear circle of family. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. But I just can’t see it in general. As Charlie Brown once said (speaking of great playwrights of the 1920s), “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

I’ve missed the comrades who’ve fallen, and there have been too many of them: wise Gerry the benevolent patriarch, quickly consumed by cancer; beloved Peter, the best friend I ever made in two seconds, who seemed to be gone in another two; Glen the journalist/poet who fled from the psych ward and committed suicide; Ken the devoted cynic and constant presence in my church choir, who literally dropped dead in his tracks. Then – weirdly – Kathleen, who never should have died at all, who cannot be dead because it just isn’t possible.

There’s another one or two in there, and I can’t remember who they were. Now this is weird. I thought there were six, at least. How could I forget a whole person?

I just recently started nosing around in the work of Dylan Thomas again, remembering that he sometimes wrote “shape poems” (concrete poems that took the actual shape of objects or whatever-the-hell. Childish, really.) All I could find in his poetic imagery was mortality, and more mortality, rot and death, mixed in with some pretty ghastly sexual images. The guy ended at 39, self-ended I mean, awash in alcohol: the innocent baby-bird look of his youth had grown puffy, slur-eyed, deathward, with a large bulb for a nose. A tragic or pathetic or even disgusting clown. Poets seem to off themselves early, one way or another, hating life, seeing through it, or hating themselves. Robert Frost was one of the few who escaped that fate, though I remember reading somewhere that his son committed suicide.

So what does all this have to do with not wanting to call the fucking doctor?

I know I will call eventually, or maybe I will not, because nothing’s wrong anyway. I’m just all caught up in this stuff and have to get away from it. I am now in my 60^th year, for fuck’s sake, and though I don’t feel old, time has whipped by in such a blur that it shocks me sometimes. I was sitting in a restaurant across from my son at my birthday dinner last night, and thought to myself: he looks almost middle-aged. His hair is thinning and he has lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks great, is very buff, bulky with muscle as he never was in his boyhood when he generally got sand kicked in his face. He’s a superb athlete who has a good chance of reaching 90 because his habits are so much better than mine. But still. A receding hairline? I remember the night I gave birth to him.

And here are these two Nordic-looking blonde grandgirls who surely must have inherited their startlingly blue eyes and cornsilk hair from my side of the family, though several generations removed: I just helped push the blonde genes along. I noticed Erica’s hands as she did a magic trick with crayons, and I was shocked to note that they look like her father’s, which look like mine.

Well, you can’t bail on THAT, can you? My time with them is timeless, a complete absorption in giggly fun and a wash of unconditional love. Do I need to stay around to be the conduit for such love (for surely I am not the “source” but only the conveyor)? Or, like everyone else, will I stay because of the same primal urge to survive that has overpopulated the earth to the point of near-catastrophe?

Post-blog: Actually, I think it was Macbeth, that "signifying nothing" bit I mean.  I've always liked the Scottish play, and the "life's but a walking shadow" speech is just about the only Shakespeare I can recite by heart. I'm the life of the party, can't you tell?

Total abstinence: I won't last a day without food

I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without eating.

I used to go on extreme diets, but that was a long time ago. When I look at pictures of how thin I was BEFORE the diet, I plotz. In some photos I look like a ghost: it was at that point that I felt I was “thin enough”, at least until I put back 5 pounds or so.

I have had an uneasy relationship with food, with eating.  Whole industries have sprung up around it, billions of dollars’ worth. Buying food, preparing food, eating in restaurants so we won’t have to put out any effort at all.

I remember feeling a little shocked when a friend of mine (quite obese, and apparently going to a nutritionist because she said she had no interest in food ) said to me, after we’d finished eating in a restaurant, “So what's so great about it? It’s in one end and out the other.”

Well, it’s true, but we don’t think about that, do we?

Why make such a fuss about food? Everything turns to shit anyway. Kind of like a metaphor for life.

I’m thinking about all this, as I sit here already feeling hollow and groany in the stomach. I’ve been doing “prep” for a colonoscopy for several days now, first with a restricted diet (no this, no that), and today with a liquid diet restricted to anything I can see through.

Meaning limited Jell-o, limited chicken broth (these consumed as “meals”), ginger ale, apple juice, and water and water and water. And water.

Already I am feeling unmoored. For food isn’t just something that keeps us going, as in "calories in". It’s a way of marking the day, of orientation. “Haven’t you had lunch yet?” “You mean you don’t eat breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day.” (Why?) “Let’s have dinner some time.” Etc. Not “let’s get together and talk trash", but “let’s get together and stuff food into our mouths”.

I won’t write about the obesity crisis which seems to be blowing people up like balloons. My theory (one that I have never seen anywhere else) is that people are responding to the emotional stress of a harrowing, violent, climate-damaged world by stuffing things in their mouths. They’ve been doing it since they were babies.

It’s self-comforting, and the thing is, when you walk into the average store, I mean a drug store or department store like Walmart or Target or one of those, one of the first things you see is a WALL of junk Sometimes walls and walls of it. None of it is really edible and most of it consists of sugar, fat and other empty calories. All of it is within easy reach and does not cost very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s your pacifier! Come stuff it in your mouth, and a few hours later, shit it out in your diaper. Or wherever.

But I set out to write about this strange fast, this abstinence, fortunately only one-and-a-half days long. Later this day I must purge, and I’ve heard this stuff is a Roto-Rooter to your insides. It scares me half to death  because the whole reason I am having this procedure is that I’ve been having abdominal pains. Might they be made infinitely worse by this liquid Draino I have to drink tonight?

I am not one of these people who wants to “watch”, by the way. I don’t know why they let anyone watch the procedure. The whole reason it’s done is to screen for cancer, tumors and other abnormalities of the colon. Who wants to be lying there staring at the screen and suddenly hear the technician say, “Oh my God, that’s the worst one I’ve ever seen"?

It’s seven minutes after eleven, and all I’ve had today is coffee (black) and water (clear). I thank the Lord I can have coffee at least. When I have my fasting glucose test every few months, coffee is not allowed, and by the time my arm is stuck and bled, my head is pounding. After the siphoning I run for Starbuck’s or, even better, McDonald’s, which has surprisingly good coffee that is just loaded with caffeine.

As I sit here listening to my stomach make noises like a grizzly, my mind bounces back and forth. I’ve been doing this for weeks now, but it has intensified over the past few days. Of course everything will be all right. I’ve “passed” every medical test I have ever had. Nothing is ever wrong. EVER.

Then why am I having this?

There’s no cancer in my family. Anywhere. But that turned out to be a lie, or a “mis-truth”, a form of selective amnesia. My Dad was indeed treated for bladder cancer and completely cured and went on to live another 30 years. My mother had her uterus removed, but no one ever told me why (and in fact I did not find out she had a hysterectomy until many years later. At the time, she was just “in the hospital”.)

So it is quite possible that BOTH my parents had cancer. A strange sort of flip-flop from what I believed until quite recently. I wasn’t lying to myself. I just didn’t “know”, though in fact I knew very well. I was protecting myself from the truth.

So how do I feel without the anchoring effect of food, the three meals a day that prevents everything from blurring together into “blunch”, “linner” and “dupper”? I find I’m already forgetting and almost grabbing something to eat. Just a banana. (God, I had a lot of bananas yesterday.) I am holding off on my feast of peach Jell-o and Knorr chicken broth (“Made from real chicken!” Hell’s bells, what ELSE would it be made from?) until I am truly desperate.

I don’t want this “procedure” to happen, but at the same time I want it over with. I know the most likely result: no phone call, which is good news, isn’t it? Better than the other kind.

I can’t help but remember, though, all the friends I used to have, the ones who fell to disease: cancer, heart attack, AIDS, more cancer. . . Oddly enough, the one that bothered me most was the recent death of someone I could only call an acquaintance. I had not seen her for years – she was once a member of my former church and had just been ordained as a minister – and then suddenly I’m getting a Facebook message inviting me to her memorial service.

MEMORIAL SERVICE?

When you leave a place you’ve been part of for years, it sort of freezes in time. If you meet someone you knew years later, you can’t help but think, God, they look old. But when someone dies at 50. . .  Someone you admired, liked, even though you weren’t really friends. Someone whom you knew would make an outstanding minister because of her soaring spirit and vibrant faith.

And now she’s dead. Dead?

I am still having trouble getting my head around it, don’t really believe it, can’t associate her with death at all. And it was cancer, that looming shadow, perhaps the main thing we are trying to rule out tomorrow, which is why I have to be so cleaned out. If she could die like that, just vanish, so that I’ll never see her again. . .

I can’t finish that sentence.

This is just a procedure. Millions of people have it. I haven’t had any real symptoms. At least, I don’t think they are symptoms. I don’t know what they are, just things that have been bothering me. I only know I am not allowed to eat, and the peach Jell-o quivering in the fridge is beginning to look like coq au vin.

Not eating, fasting, is like missing a step in a dance or a skipping rhythm. Or maybe stepping back from everything. It feels weird, hollow. It leaves you clutching at the air. And oddly depressed, your pacifier snatched out of your mouth, so that you are forced to see, and feel, all the things that you would really rather not.