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.

CATFIGHT! Girl fights in romance comics

I may have actually bought some of these, or one, back in the '60s, but only so my brother Arthur and I could make terrible fun of them. It wasn't hard to do. Never mind the sociological significance of these things. They're FUN, and that's all I care about at this point! The "catfight" scenes could not be cropped exactly to match the others (perfect squares), so I had to fiddle around with them a bit on white backgrounds, but it was worth it, they are just SO cool. The "jailbird" one is a favorite, as are the "nurse" specialties (nurses being especially hot). One thing I didn't realize - and this is illustrated in a couple of the pictures - some of these comics were done in duplicate for two different markets: white and black. It's eerie to see the exact same backgrounds, clothing, captions, etc., but with women of different races. 

Those issues are, of course, completely settled in 2016. Aren't they? We honestly thought we had fixed it once and for all, and things would only get better. NEVER did I EVER hear so much about racial hatred and violence and murder and strife back then, during the height of civil rights fever. It's worse now, much worse. This is but one of the things I must contemplate as I keep on chugging and blogging. As W. H. Auden put it: "Life remains a blessing/although you cannot bless."

The perpetually burning building

The Ghomeshi trial: this handful of slime

As the song says: I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to write a blog post commenting on the Jian Ghomeshi assault trial, and the testimony and subsequent crucifixion of one brave woman who stepped forward to point at him and cry, "J'accuse!"

Not because I'm not interested. Hardly that. It's the queasy impression I have that a great grasping hand has burrowed down into the depths of our sick misogynist culture and pulled up a vast, dripping, rotten clump of slime with hate-formed creatures writhing around in it like those nightmarish little figures from Hieronymus Bosch.

That's why.

But I've read things in the news, seen things on TV, and read posts on Facebook lately that have turned me as white as a ghost.  

Now that this seething clump has been dredged from the depths(before it is pushed back down again - which is what always happens, or we would not still be in this horrible mess), the contentious issue is the fact that at least one of Ghomeshi's victims maintained contact with him after he assaulted her. Flirtatious contact, in the form of teasingly sexual emails and bikini shots sent via Instagram. 

This leads to another issue poking out its slimy little head: why don't people consider that emails always leave a trail, and that "delete" means nothing when the police can easily crack the memory depths of any computer? In the case of Lucy De Coutere, that lack of awareness (obviously extending to her lawyer) led directly to disaster. It gave Ghomeshi's lawyer the opportunity to savage and humiliate her by forcing her to read these emails (now considered "incriminating" - not that SHE is on trial here!) out loud.
It didn't look good for her, and I will admit it does not sit well with me that she sent titillating photos and expressed a desire to "fuck his brains out". But I think I have a tiny inkling of what this was about.

Ghomeshi held all the cards here because he had such power in the media. His radio persona was seductive and "cool", which is highly unusual in this country. The media courted him, lionized him, and used him to do things like host the Gillers (though I can't think of one person who is less qualified) in a desperate attempt to make the Canadian image seem less stodgy and out of date, and perhaps to reduce the average age of CBC Radio listeners from, say, 73 to 37. This was in full knowledge that he was abusive, disrespectful, and a misogynist asshole, a man-boy holding sway over his own personal fiefdom. He habitually abused the system and exploited the people in it, but did that stop them from going back and sucking up to him for more favours? I mean, again and again and again?

There may have been a sense that it was some kind of dubious honour for women if he was interested in them, at least until he tired of them in a few weeks or months. (Ghomeshi has never been known to have any sort of lasting relationship with women, except perhaps his mother.) This does not mean all these women were stupid or weak. They may have been sucked in, but media were ALSO sucked in and seduced by Ghomeshi on a much larger, public scale, and it went on unabated for years and years.

But tell me this. Who ended up taking the fall?

Personally, I believe women are bewildered, embarrassed and frightened by being abused and will sometimes downplay it, even contacting the abuser to try to somehow make it right. Yes, it's a form of denial. But if it is, then the CBC was in PROFOUND denial in a situation with similar dynamics. 

There's even more to this as the oozing clump rises and drips in front of my eyes.  As is often the case, Ghomeshi may well have attracted vulnerable women who grew up with abuse as the norm. But this is considered an old saw now, and if you dare say it, someone will dig up a case where it "wasn't like that", demolishing your theory. Not that there is any emotional baggage/misogyny/discrediting of women there. But we don't necessarily know what we think we know. People are not always going to reveal their childhood wounds to the world. Does anyone - I mean anyone do that, unless they have no personal boundaries whatsoever?

My God, the tangled, visceral mess this is dredging up - do we really want to look? When it triggers belligerent name-calling rather than an attempt to understand an extremely complex, often-baffling situation, it just makes my gut sink. One very well-respected writer slathered the same abuse on Ghomeshi and DeCoutere, dismissing them both in a Facebook post as "morons". He seemed to feel it was perfectly all right so long as they were equally slagged and savaged. Quite a number of  the responses to his post were supportive, and I don't know how many "likes" it got because if I look at it one more time, I will likely gag.

There is always the question, when a woman is with an abusive partner, "Why doesn't she just leave?" First, there is no "just" about it. Women are most likely to be murdered by their partners when they leave. Abusive men get women on a yoyo string and keep yanking them around, sometimes for years. This does not mean these women are ninnies, have no will of their own, or are making stuff up just to damage someone's reputation for fun and profit.

Lucy Coutere got up there to try to stop this bastard. It probably won't work. She left herself open to considerable contempt because she exposed at least some of the complicated, contradictory dynamics of abuse to a culture that simply does not want to know. Will this change anything? Why do I feel like we're sinking here? My suspicion and my dread is that we are going not forwards but backwards in our disgraceful treatment of women, and I see nothing on the horizon that tells me it will ever be any different.

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. This is almost a separate post, but I decided to run them together because, folks, I am tired today. I'm dealing with unknown health issues and a change of doctor, and maybe yet another round of tests, which is why you're getting so many gifs lately, and comments about news items. But this I had to write about. It's my response to a breathtakingly abusive Facebook post that I discovered in that diseased, slimy clump I just wrote about. I don't know why I'm not running this asshole's comments with his real name on them, except that his tone scared the hell out of me and I don't want him coming after me.

This was not just a rant but an eruption of some corrosive substance that was so frightening, I didn't want it making contact with my skin. His remarks were loosely based on the Ghomeshi trial - or  maybe it was just an excuse to air his toxic views on women in general. He went into great depth about various types of mental illness and how they affected females. But this wasn't about mental illness. At all. It was about hate. He believed such women were inherently evil and almost gleefully destructive, deliberately wreaking havoc on the legal system to get their kicks. He painted a picture of savage harpies flying through the air like Valkyries, living for the barbaric pleasure of destroying other human beings. (This somehow was all tied in with Lucy DeCoutere and the "irreparable damage" she is doing to an innocent man with her obviously concocted accusations.) It was, incredibly, from someone IN the system who has dealt with mentally disturbed women for years. Looking him up on his Facebook page while holding my nose, I discovered he is a psychotherapist whose specialty is dealing with the "criminally insane", a term that should have been drop-kicked into the nearest sewer decades ago.

So. Not only is the Ghomeshi trial dragging out a truly incredible amount of hidden misogyny, it's jacking the cover off a jaw-dropping ignorance of what it is to suffer a mental illness. These are my NOT-dispassionate thoughts in response: 

"Have you heard of 'mental illness', or do you think it's just a form of evil or a choice women make to be perverse? Humanity still has incredible fear and loathing of mental illness and writes it off as a willful, even gleeful form of violence and destruction that people COULD "help"/change if they just pulled themselves together (with, of course, no resources to do so). Maybe, at one point, when they were little children, someone loved these women, but it's even more likely that they were horribly damaged. So at some point, did they decide it would be a kick to "go bad"? I am NOT saying, well then, let them go ahead and kill people, be destructive, etc. Society does need to be protected from those who are so sick they can't control themselves, or are not aware of what they are doing, or perhaps (like my brother, who died tragically from the effects of schizophrenia) are hearing voices telling them to kill people. My brother wasn't evil, at all, but he was constantly being "told" to do evil things by those voices. He virtually never acted on it, and now I wonder how he ever had the strength of mind to do that, probably far beyond what most "normal" people have. The feeling is, well, these women should just control themselves, or (something you hear all the time now, which always puts the onus on the sufferer) "reach out for help". Hmmm, WHAT help, I wonder? The kind YOU are offering? Might they not have better prospects for survival in the vastly more compassionate throes of their disease?"

POST-POST.  I usually think of "something after the something". Last night I went to Caitlin's dance recital, and I can't begin to tell you what joy it gave me, not to mention how terrific 12-year-old Caitlin has become in four genres of dance: jazz, tap, hiphop and musical theatre. I say "become" because this kid has worked so incredibly hard, completely overcoming the self-consciousness that used to cause her to take sneak-peeks at the other kids. Now she's bold, sassy and full of pizzazz.

But that's not what I have to say right now.

There was a puzzling number by another group. I forget the name of it: something like "One Person's Craziness is Another Person's Real", and it consisted of six teenaged girls writhing around on the floor in straightjackets.

At various times during the spooky, haunted-house-like music, they stood up and "made crazy" in the way we still think of as crazy, pulling faces, jumping and thrashing around. This wasn't just silly or stupid, it was disturbing, and it made me angry. It was playing with the trappings of "madness" (one of my least-favorite terms) in order to entertain an audience. A cheap trick, because craziness is still so vastly entertaining, particularly at the institutional level where a human being's worth seems to equal that of a block of wood. If we wish to write off or dismiss anyone in our culture, we accuse them of being a "whack job" (and no one stops to think how dehumanizing it is to be referred to as a "job"). 

I couldn't figure out if this thing was supposed to be funny, because at the end they all rushed off the stage into the audience and made everybody laugh. I didn't. I know that I have been, at various times, accused of having no sense of humour because I object to all this. It just isn't real to people, and that's the whole trouble: they don't get why it is a problem. (Is there someone in the room? . . . No? Didn't think so.)

OK, I hated it, but isn't one of the purposes of art to disturb and unsettle?  Last year a group did a strangely haunting dance routine called Gates of Auschwitz. This was set in - Auschwitz - and featured guards and captive Jews. But it was done in a surprisingly spare, restrained way, not playing down the horror so much as implying it in stark, minimalist fashion. I liked it, partly because it was provocative and daring and performed with a great deal of sensitivity.

The girls in the straightjackets were just. . . girls in straightjackets. Loonies, wackos, nutbars, and all those names we hear every day when we want to write someone off as less than human. And the funny thing is that no one bats an eyelash, because whack jobs are, apparently, always fair game.

(Speller's note. I am aware that the proper spelling is "straitjacket", but I am a little tired of being "corrected" when I spell things properly. Accurate spelling has gone the way of the dodo. So I hereby surrender to the WRONG spelling, just to save myself grief.)


Another word for mentally ill




Afflicted with or exhibiting irrationality and mental unsoundness: brainsick, crazy, daft, demented, disordered, distraught, dotty, insane, lunatic, mad, maniac, maniacal, moonstruck, off, touched, unbalanced, unsound, wrong. (Informal) bonkers, cracked, daffy, gaga, loony. (Slang) bananas, batty, buggy, cuckoo, fruity, loco, nuts, nutty, screwy, wacky. (Chiefly British) crackers. (Law) non compos mentis. Idioms: around the bend, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter, not all there, nutty as a fruitcake, off (or out of) one's head, off one's rocker, of unsound mind, out of one's mind, sick in the head, stark raving mad. See sane

mentally ill

see definition of mentally ill

adj unwell in the mind
cracked

Synonyms for mentally ill

adj unwell in the mind

cracked star
crazed star
crazy star
cuckoo star
daft star
demented star
deranged star
insane star
loco star
loony star
lunatic star
mad star
not of sound mind star
nuts star
nutty star
off one's rocker star
out of one's mind star
paranoid star
psycho star
psychopathic star
psychotic star
schizophrenic star
touched star
unbalanced star

More words related to mentally ill

mental
adj. insane

  
deranged
disturbed
fruity
loco
lunatic
mad
maniac
mentally ill
mindless
non compos mentis
nuts
nutsy
psychiatric
psychotic
unbalanced
unstable

troubled
adj. psychologically disturbed 

crazy
cuckoo
demented
disturbed
insane
loony
mentally ill
neurotic
nuts
psychopathic
psychotic
unhinged

bananas
adj. insane 

bonkers
brainsick
crackers
crazy
crazy as a loon
cuckoo
daft
demented
deranged
distraught
disturbed
dotty
kooky
loco
lunatic
mad
mad as a hatter
maniac
maniacal
mentally ill
moonstruck
not all there
nuts
nutty as a fruitcake
off one's rocker
out of one's mind
out to lunch
psycho
sick
sick in the head
stark raving mad
touched
unbalanced
unhinged
unsound
wacky

brainsick
adj. insane 

batty
bonkers
cracked
crackers
crazed
crazy
daft
demented
disordered
distraught
dotty
lunatic
mad
mad as a hatter
maniac
maniacal
mentally ill
moonstruck
not all there
nuts
nutty
off one's rocker
out of one's mind
psychotic
sick in the head
stark raving mad
touched
unbalanced
unhinged
unsound

crackers
adj. insane 

batty
bonkers
brainsick
cracked
crazed
crazy
crazy as a loon
cuckoo
daft
demented
deranged
distraught
disturbed
dotty
kooky
loco
lunatic
mad
mentally ill
moonstruck
not all there
nuts
nutty
off one's rocker
out of one's mind
out to lunch
psycho
psychotic
sick
sick in the head
stark raving mad
touched
unbalanced
unhinged
unsound
wacky

fruity
adj. insane 

bananas
batty
bonkers
buggy
crackers
crazed
crazy
crazy as a loon
cuckoo
daft
demented
disordered
dotty
eccentric
kooky
loco
loony
lunatic
mad
mad as a hatter
mentally ill
moonstruck
not all there
nuts
nutty
nutty as a fruitcake
of unsound mind
off
off one's rocker
out of one's mind
stark raving mad
touched
unbalanced
unsound
wacky

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THIS is why I unfriend on Facebook!

This hateful meme showed up on my news feed, posted by someone I thought I knew. Not quite as bad as the Tea Party Republican I had to cut loose, in spite of the fact she was cozied up to the Lloyd family (though she cut all ties with me for no reason that was ever explained). Her meme stated that the wrong Democrat had been assassinated: it shouldn't have been JFK (which was a waste of a good bullet), but Obama.

It's been stated that mass shootings wouldn't happen if everyone in the United States was armed at all times. THEY could kill THEM first, solving the problem. We have no such problems in Canada, but we do have despair. There are guns, but mostly in the hands of gangs.

I have known, in my lifetime, two people with guns: a collector of antique rifles, and a cop. The gun didn't even belong to the cop.

I just don't see how this can work.

The real tragedy of the Sydney Siege

Seriously. I am not making this up. This is the decline and fall of civilization as we know it.

Sydney siege casts pall over Christmas shopping

December 15, 2014 - 4:33PM

Sue Mitchell and Carolyn Cummins

Police have sealed off part of the Sydney CBD. Photo: Getty Images

Martin Place siege: Live updates
Dollar brushes fresh lows as Sydney siege unfolds
Business disruption as thousands of office workers evacuated or locked down

Retailers fear the siege in Sydney could further dampen already subdued consumer sentiment in the countdown to Christmas.

"I don't want to be prophet of doom and gloom but you do worry about how this could affect spending," Australian Retailers Association chief executive Russell Zimmerman said.

While major retailers such as Myer and Woolworths said their stores in Sydney's CBD were trading as normal, David Jones closed the doors of its flagship Elizabeth Street store - which is less than two blocks from the besieged Lindt cafe - and customers and staff left the building.

Many specialty retailers in the area around Martin Place were also forced to close and consumers have been prevented from accessing the centre of the city.

"For Sydney city retailers it's going to be a huge drain on cash flow and a huge issue for them," Mr Zimmerman said.

"In the short term people will question whether they go into the city to do their shopping," he said.

"You could also get people questioning whether to shop where there are major crowds. They're going to miss out on a lot of business - this is the time you want people to get out and spend money." (Italics mine.)

The siege is likely to further dampen consumer sentiment, which has fallen this month to the lowest level in more than three years.

Many retailers are already under pressure and have been forced to step up the frequency and depth of discounting.

The Australian National Retailers had forecast that consumers would spend a record $8.3 billion nationally this week but those forecasts could now be in doubt.

"One would hope consumers would look at this and say it's a once only event and its not going to happen again," Mr Zimmerman said. (Oh?)

"I suspect that retailers will need to reassess various aspects of their business moving forward, such as security," he said. (But if it ain't going to move merchandise, forget about it. Hostage-taking happens.)

About 100 stores in Westfield Sydney in Pitt Street Mall were closed, and other main shopping centres in the CBD were empty of people.

Priceline Pharmacy chief executive Stephen Roche said its stores in Westfield Sydney and Pitt Street were closed to allow staff to leave the city.

The seige in the Lindt Chocolat Cafe comes with only a week to go before Christmas, which is the time when retailers make a significant amount of their yearly turnover. (Do you seriously think the hostage-takers are too stupid to know about this?)

Westfield said tenants in its Pitt Street shopping centre were given the option to close and send staff home.

A store operator in the shopping centre confirmed most of the shops had closed, while Martin Place jewellers Tiffany & Co and Fairfax & Roberts also shut and sent staff home.

Global cosmetics chain Sephora was one of the retailers to close for safety reasons. Its first Australian store in Pitt Street opened less than two weeks ago.

Stockland and AMP Capital also told retailers in the city malls and arcades they could close for the day.

"Our advice to all centre managers remains the same: to maintain high awareness and vigilance," a Stockland spokesman said.

With the recent bad weather in Sydney and job-security concerns, retailers had already been feeling the pressure of weak consumer sentiment.

Many shops have been quietly discounting before the traditional post-Christmas sales officially start to entice shoppers.

The retailers say they had been predicting a busy season, but the poor weather along the eastern seaboard had hit them, and they expect the latest round of discounting to continue well into the new year.

It's great to know that at this festive time of year, the malignant spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well. After all, commerce should always trump safety, shouldn't it? It won't happen again, will it? Well, maybe not here, and maybe not now. So get out there and go shopping, you ignorant people! Don't ruin our holiday profit margin with your ridiculous concerns about survival. Surely buying perfume and ties and chocolate is more important than making sure your kids are OK. Or at least, it should be. Don't you know "values" refers to sale prices and not some lame attempt at a moral compass?

I'd say this would all come home to haunt them, but it probably won't. Increasingly, I see a numbing of compassion and concern in the human race that is the real villain in a dehumanized, hostage-oriented world. This is the thing that will finish us, and a lot sooner than we realize.