Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
The nurse had a corner office. “Yes, you can see Olive Garden over here and the Allina clinic over there. Oh, and cars on the freeway.” She’d had it all day. When she handed me the gown and robe, she assured me that the glass had mirroring, “You’ll not be making a show.” Didn’t bother me either way, though spread out immediately below the third floor windows were two large parking lots and people came and went from their cars.
After gowning and robing, I got a look in a mirror. There was another old guy in hospital wear, slightly bemused. Me. This time the old guy in the mirror was me. Took me a bit to acclimate that.
We make these visits once in a while as strangers from the non-medical world, visiting a world truly known and understood only by those who work in it daily. Kate was among them. It’s a world where the casual infliction of pain is part of the job. Like the IV I had inserted. It’s a world where strong boundaries in our world are constantly breached.
People not known to us, or known briefly, may touch our naked bodies and may insert objects in different orifices. These are acts that, outside of this special world, are crimes, even felonies. Here we consent, play the masochist to the system’s sadist.
That system says it wants us as partners in our own health care but our lived experience of the medical world is one of subjugation and submission. We take and do what the doctor orders. Subjugation and submission. Rebeling here challenges your own self-interest in a very direct way, so the penalty is high.
The TSA, as I observed last month, trains us in submission, too. Take off belts, shoes, empty your pockets, carry only this much shampoo, this much toothpaste, stand here, raise your arms. Wait. Wait. Wait.
These self-contained worlds, whirring and buzzing, act as they do for our benefit. And I believe they do. He said, choking a bit on the TSA bone.
Still, for those of us with stubborn, strong personal boundaries and a high sense of self-agency, encounters with these systems jars the most basic and sensitive aspects of our psyche. They leave me tired and out of sorts unless I’ve been drugged. As was the case yesterday.
My regard for the often maligned American health care is, paradoxically, quite high. I’ve had generally good results, confounding my aversion to subjugation and submission. Efforts I’ve made to make myself more of a collegial actor in my health care have helped.
Still, as I look at third phase life and its inevitable downward turn, the thought of entering the strange and often alien world of medicine more and more often is not a pleasant one. It does motivate me, if I needed another motivation, to stay healthy. Not sure what to do with this, but here it is.
