I had a very rough night tonight. I have been suffering and struggling with the latest assault on my eyes. And feeling very anxious about expressing my feelings about it, because I have found that far too many people are eager to blame someone when they have been traumatized, instead of extend love and compassion and a helping hand. Writing is my way of overcoming. If I feel silenced, shut down, then I lose my strength to rise above and transform ugly situations.
I have endured many forms of assault in my life – physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual – from those whom I should have been able to turn to for shielding and healing from such assault – family and medical professionals. When an assault of any kind happens once (depending on how far along a particular society has come at the time), people may feel compassion and empathy. When it happens more than once, I have noticed, people start to blame the victim.
I hesitate to use the word victim because it is loaded. There are all kinds of writings about “victim mentality.” Quite simply, by my definition, a victim is someone who has been on the receiving end of unjust behavior, an assault of some kind. A victim is someone who was just going about her life, her business, and got blindsighted by someone else’s violent or otherwise irresponsible action. A victim is someone who has to pay the price for someone else’s bad behavior.
I feel angry – angry about what was taken away from me, angry about the tremendous amount of strength and will it has taken for me to overcome numerous traumas, only to face more trauma and have to go through it all again. I feel uncomfortable airing my feelings and thoughts publicly, because doing so makes me vulnerable to other people’s judgments and reactions. And yet, I refuse to hide. I believe that when I write and publicly voice my opinions, I am speaking to the Creator Spirit. And when I throw my seeds up into the air, all kinds of magic can happen. Maybe not today, but someday, those seeds can take hold and grow beautiful trees that bear fruit and provide shade and shelter and all those other good metaphors.
If I let other people’s limited thinking limit my own, I do not get to live the vibrant life that is my birthright. And yet it is so scary to go against the stream, to share my experience when I am vulnerable, and risk getting shot down – as has happened on numerous occasions.
When I was in a car crash recently, I was terrified to say anything about it to people other than those in my pre-selected circle, because I did not want to hear someone saying, “Again?” And while most people were kind and compassionate, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it did. Not because I was waiting for it to drop, as our pseudo-spiritual friends would have us believe, but because that is how a certain amount of people think and act. Which is the reason why I anticipate it: It has happened before and most likely, until society radically changes, will happen again. Which all goes to say, two people did respond with, “Another car crash?” which made me feel unsafe and feel like shrinking in.
I feel angry. Angry that people will look at certain details of my life, the scant few details with which they are familiar (and I say scant few despite the fact that I write extensively and very personally about my life, because truly, there is so much more that you have no fucking idea) and connect whatever dots they want in whatever formation they see fit. Variables. You do not know all the variables at play or how they all come together. It’s basic science: Stop assuming you know what is going on. Stop seeing through eyes that are of the fashionable thinking of this thinking. Stop. Observe. Listen. Ponder. Listen some more. Pay attention.
Pay attention to what someone is sharing with you about herself. About her story, her life, how things have affected her. Think about what this means about our world, what you can learn from the situation for your own life, what we can do to make the world a better place.
Tonight was a very difficult night. I was feeling despair. I have lost my connection to the outside world through my eyes. I feel blind. I can see, so it is something that no doctor will understand. The damage is on the sensory level. I feel as if my senses are throwing out tentacles through my eyes, to feel, but they cannot feel. It’s like there is a bounce back. It’s like there is dead space. It’s like my eyes have gone numb. And they very well may be numb. The medical assistant put numbing drops in my eyes, and my eyes have not been the same since. In the past six weeks.
I constantly feel disoriented and confused. I feel that the impact was neurological, which makes sense, because my eyeballs are in my head. I have trouble remembering words that, before the ill-fated eye exam, just flew through my mind, were accessible to me in the nanosecond that I searched for them in my brain. Suddenly it’s like I am going to the filing cabinet, opening the drawer, and pulling out a folder, but the damn folder is empty.
It is traumatic.
It was only after the fact that I found out that the doctor knew that some people have a very severe reaction to this numbing agent and prodding stick poked at the eye. The doctor did not find this to be information relevant to share with me, despite my specifically telling her at the beginning of the session that I am hypersensitive. I remember being so full of life and vitality, humming to myself, writing down my ideas for repositioning my business, so excited about my new projects and possibilities, while I was waiting for the doctor, prior to the exam. And then my life was turned upside down, again, by a doctor. And then when I contacted the doctor to share what had happened – to share the symptoms of burning, flashing light, blurry vision, intense headaches, shots of nerve pain, and so on – her response was that I need bifocals because of my age.
As if my age kicked in at the very second that I was in that exam. Amazing coincidence!
Age is a lame fucking excuse that doctors and even lawyers will throw at you to escape having to deal with the consequences of their actions or the complexity of a situation. When I was in my late 20s, and my lawyer – my lawyer – told me she needed to know everything that had happened to me, and every way I was affected by the car crash, purportedly in the interest of advocating for me, I shared with her that – among other things – was no longer able to dance as vigorously or as long I could before. Her response? “Well you’re no spring chicken!”
I was all of 27 years old.
When I shared with doctors the fact that my mobility had become severely limited, I was told it was my age. When I shared with an eye doctor that my eyes were adversely affected by liquid nitrogen splashing into my eyes, when a primary care physician decided to toss a cup of liquid nitrogen between my legs for funsies, the eye doctor responded that I was having trouble with my eyes because of my age.
It is infuriating.
It was so validating when I spoke with the owner of a café I frequented back in Oakland. He also was in a car crash, and when he had physical mobility issues and pain following the crash, the doctors told him that it was his age. I believe he was in his thirties.
It is sick. Absolutely appalling. And then when I speak up about it, I anticipate that some if not many people will respond by pointing a finger at me, because it is far less exasperating and far less work to single out one lone woman as a nut job than to deal with the fear and uncertainty of a medical system that might just hurt you as often, or more frequently, than it might help you.
In my world, doctors are not to be trusted. Any overcoming of that mistrust was just unraveled by the eye doctor six weeks ago. And that is what happens: Every time a doctor fucks you up, they do not just create a pain and suffering situation for that particular incident, but they make it that much more difficult to trust a doctor ever again, or to even go to a doctor.
The other night I was watching Netflix – some movie with Brittany Murphey starring in it. I looked her up on Wikipedia and discovered that she died from some over the counter drug cocktail she was taking to mange pneumonia. She fucking died from a mix of over the counter meds. I remembered when I was taking several medications for some health condition I had, many years ago. I started coughing very badly, and I called the doctor on the after-hours line, to verify if it was ok to take a certain cough medicine, since I was adding it to the mix of several medications.
The on-call doctor did answer the question but was pissed and admonished me for calling on an emergency line for something that was not urgent but could wait until morning. I told him that I did not want to add a medication to the mix, being that I was already taking several medications, when I did not know the reaction of the cocktail of drugs. The doctor began arguing how I was wasting his precious time. He was getting into a fight with me, instead of just being a fucking doctor and guiding me on whether the medication mix was safe. I told him that he was wasting more of his precious time by getting into an argument with me than if he just answered my damn question. He continued to argue with me, and I hung up the phone.
That kind of behavior is criminal, because it actively discourages a patient from calling in an emergency. That kind of behavior can kill. My mother has nearly died a few times, because she has not wanted to call a doctor, because she is terrified of doctors. This is what doctors do when they are patronizing and arrogant, when they treat you like a fucking imbecile, when they dismiss your complaints, make you feel worthless, or otherwise create an environment that is anything but loving, nurturing, caring, and supportive. Doctors may take the Hippocratic oath, but it’s more of a hypocritical oath, because from what I have seen, doctors can be as dangerous as disease.
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