Surgery without anaesthetic? It happened to me

This was going to be tacked on to my last post  about my hatred and dread of doctors,  but it  began to spill out of me dreadfully today and I couldn't make it stop. I just hope I don't lose followers, as I did last  time I expressed anything really painful.  Only celebrities can "admit" to  traumatic experiences like this and get a readership spike. The rest of us, apparently, get the opposite.

On Monday night I got a call, out of the blue, during supper, that I had to have a "consultation  with a surgeon" (?) on WEDNESDAY, and to do my "cleanout" tomorrow. Cleanout? Oh yes, for the colonoscopy. (But nobody told me I had to -) Which  was on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow - two days, what, what?  - followed by "the surgery". I was completely unable to take any of this in, because it was said by a receptionist who talked very very  fast and was obviously at the end of her shift. When I began to ask desperate questions, the putdown vocal tone and "calm down now!" attitude immediately kicked in. Only when I asked her for clarification did she email me colonoscopy "prep" notes, but nothing more, except a  time and place.

The prep is better not talked about, not something for family viewing anyway, but it left me in a lot of pain in a very vulnerable area. In the hospital I was "prepped" for the procedure by a mechanically cheery nurse whom I heard say the exact same things to patients on the other side of the hospital curtain. The "surgeon", whom I had never met in my life before and whom I could not see because they had taken my glasses away, rattled on about "if I can do the procedure" (If?. . .  Procedure?), then I was pushed into the next room. I was hooked up to an IV, so I assumed it would  be like the last time I had one of these: I'd lie on my side, they'd turn on the juice, and it would be "bye-bye- land" until it was done.

Except.

There was none. 

No. None. NO ANAESTHETIC for the colonoscopy - I was awake and conscious for the entire 45-minute thing, which was like being  assaulted by a roto-rooter. At one point I began screaming - the pain was approaching the level of childbirth as the probe with the camera on the end punched and twisted and jabbed at the turns and folds inside my colon, and the nurse kept on telling me to keep quiet because I was disturbing the other patients. I asked why I was awake,  and I was told, in  a slightly indulgent, sighing tone, "Dr. So-and-so doubled the dose of pain medication," no doubt a ploy to get me to subside because I was making too much of a fuss. In other words, if you've had all that pain medication, you can't have any pain, so what are you complaining about?  But I was awake, and in extreme pain, and no one would explain anything to me as to WHY this needed to happen.  Nor was there any sense of apology for hurting me. Getting someone to listen was impossible.

After the "procedure", everyone rapidly exited the room and left me completely alone. No one asked me how I was doing (horrible) or if it still hurt (which it did, a lot, though today it is MUCH worse and at least a 7 or 8 out of 10). Nobody said anything at all because there was no one there. They just left, with no explanation of anything they had done, or why. Then my husband took me home. I was too dazed even to cry, although I don't remember feeling  this deeply violated in many, many years.

When my husband recently had his prostate surgery, he was treated like a king. His urologist spent 45 minutes with him carefully explaining what they were going to be doing (and he had several weeks of lead  time  to prepare himself emotionally). He was given a FIFTY-PAGE document to read outlining the procedure, including every conceivable outcome from best to worst, so he wouldn't have to face any surprises. The feeling was that "men feel awfully vulnerable about things like this, it's their manhood after all, so they need lots of reassurance," which he got - in spades, from the family as well as the medical support team.

After the surgery, he spent the night in a quiet, beautiful room that even had a restful view. I remember him telling me the food was great. When he got home the next day, the entire family pitched in to help, and there were many solicitous emails flying  back and forth - and they are STILL constantly asking him how he is, weeks later, though his recovery was textbook, he experienced no pain at all (he was given an epidural, which means he felt nothing below the waist), and is back to normal now. While I can't sit down because of the inflamed, toothachey sensation in my unmentionable parts, and keep getting waves of uncontrollable, deep shuddering that I know is the awakening of a very old trauma.

I am an older woman, I have had  psychiatric and addiction problems in the past, and I was deeply violated, including sexually violated, in the hospital system over and over again, but whenever I express the view that the medical community treats me with dismissal or even contempt because of that bottom-of-the-barrel status, I am met with eye-rolls, sighs and shaking heads (followed by walking away). How on earth could I even THINK this would affect the professionalism of the medical community, which is always completely impartial and  treats everyone with equal respect?

One doctor I had seen for fifteen years insisted that the medical community had nothing to do with my perception of mistreatment and that I "stigmatize myself". Doctors "would never" do anything so harmful to anyone, and "people like me" are never treated any differently, they're really quite tolerant of those kinds of things, so I had better "work on my attitude".

Apparently, nothing can or will be done about this, because in their minds,  nothing happened.  It's done, and I am in extreme pain. I can't talk about it either, it's too embarrassing and no one is interested, and even writing this now is a risk. I don't feel good about it, but I ask myself why I even write, if I must censor myself so carefully about things that affect me so profoundly. 

I know that nerve damage, which is what this feels like, may well be permanent. Doing a colonoscopy without anaesthetic means the body is tense, the muscles are tight, and the pain made me involuntarily thrash, though I could  vaguely see (without my glasses) two figures holding me down, one on either side, while she "did it". I could NOT "just hold still, it'll be over in a minute", said to me in exasperated  "we've got another one" end-of-shift tones. The best image I could conjure up was of a bad dog at the vet.

I was only to find out later that there was also a surgical procedure done, surgery without anaesthetic, because it was easier for her to do this (and FASTER - I think the main thing was that she could get out of there quickly) while I was fully conscious. I kept thinking of the dentist's scene in The Boys from Brazil, and I keep wondering - some dark, hidden, wounded part of me keeps wondering - why? Well, why did ANY of it happen anyway, my past which apparently cemented me into  a marginalized, silenced, powerless category from which there is no escape except death?

And why the sighing, the eye-rolling, the "we've got another one" attitude when I screamed out in pain? I don't remember pain like  that, ever, except perhaps in childbirth, or being sexually  assaulted over and over which also happened - but we don't write  about that, do we, or  express it, you must just keep it to yourself because it's "not nice", it's "nasty", I'm meant to deal with it like a mature person on my own, and besides, it "probably didn't happen anyway".

But this did.

This. Did.

Fetish wear: woman walks in ballet boots

Fifty Shades: let's bring back perversion!

  

Most of what happened to me in my childhood happened in the den.

We called it the “den”, not the “TV room” or “family room” (the inference being it can't be a family room without at least one TV), for reasons unknown, except that maybe in the ‘60s, that was what you called it.

It had a pullout sofa-bed, a black-and-white TV, an ancient ironwork-sided sewing machine, and an “imprinting machine” (my Mum did imprinting, personalizing leather goods and even pencils for my Dad’s stationery store) with drawers full of magical gold foil that I was forever tampering with.

But most of all, it had books. Seemingly thousands of them, I always thought, though I now remember just one solid wall, and another with (? Did I transpose this from my older siblings’ ever-changing university digs?) brick-and-board bookcases.

Lots of these were in German. My sister studied German in university for reasons that are now a complete mystery to me. Why? There was not even the remotest connection in any part of our family to Germany, and yet she wrote her Master’s thesis, in German, on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

I would often hear the wailings of Lotte Lenya on the stereo when I came home from school, which was very embarrassing when I brought a friend home. But I digress. In those brick-and-board bookcases, there was Goethe, there was Schiller, and there was a feeling I was just supposed to accept this as “normal”, because my sister (13 years older than me) said it was.

To my 10-year-old delight, there were a few dirty books (hers, I assume) strewn amongst the dull novels in the den:  A Rage to Live by John O’Hara (“oh, darling, you’re in me and I’m all around you, just in time, time, tme”), Sons and Lovers (“I will always remember that evening when the peewits called”), and even Cocksure, a mildly gamey book by Mordecai Richler, which thrilled me because it had the word “bastard” in it.  All this mulled around and around in my mind. I was beginning to formulate, or even come up with a formula, for what sex meant.

It surely meant simultaneous orgasm. If you had anything else, it was dirty and even frightening, and definitely “wrong”. You were not normal. This was especially true if you were married.

It meant forbiddenness. It meant crossing barriers of class, power and station (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This was definitely stuff I wasn’t supposed to be seeing.

Then I discovered it, nestled dustily right against the volumes and volumes of Goethe and Schiller: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD!

Now I was off to the races.

Now I learned. I learned about penis envy. I learned about polymorphous perversity. I learned that women were inferior beings. I learned about latent homosexuality. I learned about vaginal orgasm. I learned.

I learned about stuff, then believed to be crucial to understanding human nature, that is now so dusty and obsolete that nobody even thinks about it any more, let alone talks about it. When you think about it, it is remarkable that so many people accepted without question theories that had never been proven clinically, or any other way. It was simply the truth.

The one hangover now is “anal”, which means, I don’t know, uptight or something. It did to Freud, too. An anal personality, anal retentive. Holding in your poo for some reason, though I couldn’t tell why, maybe because you were constipated or couldn’t get to the bathroom.

These were the golden days. These were the days of “perversion”. Do you remember perversion? Back then, anything that wasn’t simultaneous orgasm in the marriage bed was perversion.

Homosexuality was the result of a domineering mother and a weak father. Nobody questioned this. It was the only thing I ever heard about the matter, except for the expressions “limp-wristed” and “pansy”.

There was still a moral taint on it, the shadow of illegality that broke the spirit of Oscar Wilde. There was a sense that it was a sort of blight, that it was impossible to “correct”, and that the sufferer just had to abstain (I mean, forever) and conceal it completely to be socially acceptable.

So. Homosexuality was a mental illness or even a “perversion”. These attitudes, we now see, were groaningly wrong and must have caused immeasurable grief to thousands of people.

I didn’t know about a lot of other things, extreme things such as whips and chains.  I didn’t really know until tomorrow (oops, that’s the future, so I’d have to know in advance) when this Fifty Shades of Grey movie comes out. (Note: this was written on February 12. Confusing.)

ANY kind of inflicting of pain or punishment on another person was, in my backward day and with my den mentality, seen as sadism, and therefore “perversion”. It stood to reason, in my mind. Being turned on by experiencing pain, or (worse) inflicting pain was so twisted that I could not understand it at all. But it has changed, and drastically, in a fairly short period of time. At this point in our social evolution, it’s quite OK so long as the other person, the masochist, “gives consent”.

This happened with Jian Ghomeshi, remember? All his girl friends “gave consent”, so in an official sense, it was all OK.

Except that they didn’t. And it wasn’t.

“You can’t give consent if you are abused,” a very smart person I know (an award-winning news reporter) told me. Therefore, the woman who had been pounded to a bruised pulp and had her ribs broken by Ghomeshi hadn’t “consented”, because if someone beats the living shit out of you and breaks your bones, your abuser cannot use the legal excuse that you “gave consent”. Even if you did, it's null and void, because presumably you didn't know in advance that you would be brutally crushed.

Or maybe it's not. We’ll find out, won’t we?

The BDSM “community” insists that the receiver knows exactly what he or she is in for, wants it, and can get out of it any time, with a signal of some kind. But it seems to me that sadism is something that can be awfully hard to manage. Doesn’t it sometimes, just sometimes, go over the edge? By its very nature, I think that the possibility of loss of control might be part of the thrill.

And what of a person who “consents” but is deeply masochistic and profoundly self-hating? I’ve heard of “rough trade”, though I don’t know much about it, and I will confess that I don’t want to. Brian Epstein used to be found beaten, bloody and unconscious after such encounters. Was this  “OK” because he had given consent? Or did he, in the first place? 

(And if everybody's drunk or stoned and out of control, what does THAT add to the mix? It isn't fashionable to ask these things, but I ask them now.)

Such a person (a victim in my view), and I am only putting this out as a possibility, might WANT to be very badly hurt, even killed. Moreover, it might not be good for them to get what they want, because it’s too dangerous and they are too psychologically sick. I can hear the screams of protest right now: wait a minute, that’s impossible! It can't go too far as long as everyone's cool about the "rules". But in the wild and woolly world of human sexuality, is anything truly impossible?

Ghomeshi could argue that she wanted it, even told him it was OK. I don’t know what was going on there. If his unknown victim (the one with the bruises and broken ribs) claims it WAS consensual, then we’re really in a mess, aren’t we? Caught in a legal and sexual murkiness that we may never straighten out.

I have hardly touched on this Fifty Shades phenomenon, but I see that some women’s groups are protesting that it glorifies domestic violence. But hey! Violence is OK (or, at least, playing at violence is OK), even exciting, if you give your consent. Isn't it?  How about if you have a domineering husband who keeps threatening to leave and pull his financial support out from under you and your children? Might you be more likely to “consent” in this situation? You’d probably do anything to save your children, not to mention your life.

“It was just a sex game gone wrong.” Yes. I know this has been used before. “She wanted it, she asked for it.” What does that mean? How often do sexual and gender boundaries get blurred and confused? How about financial/power boundaries? (Christian in Fifty Shades certainly fits the rich and powerful profile.) How many ways can one human being make another human being submit, and how is this so different from slavery? (Master-slave language is very much a part of the “lifestyle”, making me wonder what black people think of it.)

I have not heard the word “perversion” in so long, I don’t know where it went. Does it even exist now, does the concept exist? I know that certain Christian fundamentalists seem to think that if people are “allowed” to be gay, it will open the floodgates to having sex with horses: an “anything goes” philosophy.

That’s horse’s-ass stuff, but I will say, I wonder where all this is taking us. Even playing at inflicting pain alarms me: why would anyone need to do it, unless they were, in some way, sexually perverted? Hurting someone is wrong. Wrong. Isn't it?

But no, now it’s stylish, and it’s certainly popular. I just found out that the original Fifty Shades trilogy started out as Twilight  “fan fiction’. With all its supposed restrictions on content, if fan fiction has become this sexually extreme, I honestly have to wonder what will come next. I wonder what will become of human boundaries, if there are any, and what will happen to the nature of something we still insist on calling “making love”.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The cure for depression

 The Cure for Depression

(or: “Can’t you just. . . ?”)

NOTE. Whenever mental illness pushes its way to the public forefront, a thing we all seem to want to shove back as hard as possible, for one brief shining moment people have all sorts of good intentions about being sensitive, being compassionate, listening, etc. I am here to tell you that it is ALL BULLSHIT and that practically NO ONE practices any of it. Instead, the depressed person is bossed around, due to the non-depressed person's primal terror of their friend's perceived weakness and loss of control. When Robin Williams destroyed himself, I saw things on Facebook that made me want to howl: "Oh well, he was just a whack job anyway. It was only a matter of time." Our free use of terms like "nut job" and "whacko" reveal the horror and contempt we feel for anyone suffering from ANY form of mental illness.(At the same time, we mouth certain pre-recorded words such as, "We need to reduce the stigma around mental illness.") As with the Black Plague, we fear contagion. We'd rather put these people in the stocks in the public square and throw rotten apples at them. But since that is "uncivilized", instead we tell them "helpful" things like the following - and it is, of course, all for their own good.

“It’s all in your mind.”

“You just need to give yourself a good swift kick in the rear.”

“No one ever said life was fair.”

“I think you enjoy wallowing in it."

"Depression is a choice, you know."

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

"There are a lot of people worse off than you.”

“But it’s a beautiful day!”

“You have so many things to be thankful for!”

“You just want attention.”

“Happiness is a choice, you know.”

"Just read this book. It'll fix you right up."

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“There is always somebody worse off than you are.”

“You should get off all those pills.”

“You are what you think you are.”

“Cheer up!”

“Have you been praying/reading your Bible?”

"People who meditate don't get depressed."

“You need to get out more.”

"Don't you have a sense of humour?"

“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

“Get a job!”

“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”

"Just read this book. It'll fix you right up."

“But you don’t look depressed. You seem fine to me.”

“You can do anything you want if you just set your mind to it.”

“Snap out of it, will you? You  have no reason to feel this way.”

“I wish I had the luxury of being depressed.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

"Just read this book. It'll fix you right up."

"Do you want your family to suffer along with you?"

“Can't you at least make an effort?"

“Believe me, I know exactly how you feel. I was depressed once for several 

days.”

“Turn it over to your Higher Power.”

“I think your depression is a way of punishing us.”

“So, you’re depressed. Aren’t you always?”

“You’re always so negative! Look on the bright side.”

“What you need is some real tragedy in your life to give you perspective.”

“You’re a writer, aren’t you? Just think of all the good material you’re getting 

out of this.”

“Have you tried camomile tea?”

"I TOLD you to read that book."

“Go out and help someone who is worse off than you and you won’t have time

 to brood.”

“You have to take up your bed and carry on.”

“Well, we all have our crosses to bear.”

"I was depressed until I tried yoga."

“You don’t like feeling that way? Change it!"

“SMILE!”

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home