Out of Narita

When I was last in the hospital, at the Royal Jubilee, in Emergency Psych, I fell on the floor because I wasn't well.  The nurse thought I was malingering, so she took my fingers and tried to squeeze the tip of my finger to the base of my finger, hard - very painfully - to see if I would react.  Instead of helping back into my bed, the orderly picked me up by one arm and dragged me to bed across the floor.  It was about a twenty foot distance.  This hurt my back, so I twiched.  The orderly laughed at me and said I was faking.  My back has hurt ever since Kim the nurse threw me against the wall and put me in a headlock at Regional Hospital in London, Ontario. When I got to my room at the Jubilee, they propped my ankles up on the edge of the high (about two feet) wooden baseboards of the bed, so that the weight of my legs was resting on my tendons.  I couldn't move for some reason, so I had to just lie there in a lot of pain.  Eventually my legs started to twitch, and they jerked away off the baseboard of their own accord.   Around this point the nurses decided I wasn't faking, and they did a complete about-face and became as sweet as pie.  I was pretty out of it, but this volte-face didn't inspire confidence either.  The random cruelty could start up again at any moment.  Still, it is better to be a patient than a doctor.  It is better to have cruel things done to you than to be the sort of cruel and stupid subhuman who inflicts this kind of misery on other people.  I need to get out of the country, though.  Maybe Japan again.

I had a new doctor, Collins. His entourage wants to help me navigate the medical system.  Apparently you can get free passes to the local recreation centre!!!!!! Jesus Christ. They also want access to information about my finances, which they will get over my cold, dead body.

Update: I am so scared of Dr. Collins.  These people are so cruel.

Update: Besides, his team seems to be composed entirely of saccharine, fat females with a God-given talent for screwing up any kind of paperwork.

Update: The fat horror's name is Anne, I think, and she works for Collins.

Update: I am really scared of my doctor and the people who work for him. Most doctors I have been to were physically or verbally abusive, and sometimes both. I am really scared of my doctor.

Update:  I have an important decision to make about this blog entry.  It needs a theme.  I said I was going to re-write the section on Susan Rvachew's bad research practices.  I also said I was going to spend some more time making fun of the clowns at Schulich.  Talking about Susan Rvachew and McGill is depressing, while writing about Schulich always put me in a good mood.  I never feel guilty about anything I write about doctors.  I don't think they are real people with real emotions.  They scared me for that reason.  At Schulich I felt like they were trying to induce a sort of false personality in the students.  A very self-centred, self-confident personality, happy, but with no deep emotions, and no deep thoughts, either.  Maybe you need this sort of personality if you are going to cut someone open? Four months there did wonders for my self-confidence.  I developed this really self-assured manner of speaking.  Part of the self-confidence derived from knowing that I was in an environment where I could destroy someone's life, as a medical trainee, and the professors at Schulich would be there to cover for me.  They talked often about medical students killing off the patients by accident.  It's heady stuff.  It gives you the ultimate feeling in security to know that your life is more valuable than that of any number of disposable patients.  It's an ephemeral feeling, and it made me sick at the same time.  The other aspect of this newly-acquired confidence came from the fact that it was quite clear that, at Schulich, I was surrounded by nasty, spoiled little morons.  Not only was I as good as the medical professionals who had been giving me such shit for so many years, I was quite a bit better.  This confidence lasted.  I lost the really self-assured manner of speaking, though, a few weeks or so after I left Schulich.  It petered out.  Too bad.  For a while, however, that winter, I was asking for milk at the grocery store in a deep, ringing, commanding voice.  Putz.

It was pretty funny.  I think the reason that this imposed, phoney, personality didn't graft was because I was too old.  My real personality was too well-developed, and anyway, this was not the sort of person I had been brought up to be, or wanted to be.  I don't know what the instructional effect would have been like for younger people, who were less aware, and who were already rotten to begin with.  From my point of view, it was like watching a bunch of people being hypnotized, turned into pigs.  It was like watching a spell being woven.  It was unpleasant to witness. Even though I didn't agree with what the instructors at Schulich were doing, I was interested to see how they did it.

I worked very hard while I was there to crack the code of what they expected from their medical students.  I wasn't sure what they wanted from their medical students, so I tried everything at least once.  Insulting myself, denigrating my professional competence, always made them very happy.  Then they had the chance to take a leadership position and reassure me!  It was odd, because I was supposed to be self-confident at the same time.  I guess I was expected to degrade myself in a very confident manner?  Flattery worked wonders, but I had already figured that out for the Schulich school interview.  I had had no idea they expected me to keep it up, though, at least to the extent that they required.  I actually referred to doctors as "saints" when speaking to Mary Eisenhauer.  She nearly wet herself.  I couldn't believe she had bought that one.  

Another thing that made everyone happy was listening to me insult research practices at McGill.  The research falsification had bothered me for a long time.  I couldn't get anyone to talk about these problems at McGill.  It just made everyone (Elin Thordardottir, Susan Rvachew, Marc Pell and Ekaterini Klepousniotou) very angry when I tried, and they drove me into a nervous breakdown in retaliation.  I read about ten years ago about a Greek medical doctor who, with his team, was examining old research papers to find out which ones had statistical and scientific validity, and which ones had been falsified.  His team had found that a surprisingly high number of papers, at least 80%, had been falsified.  I thought that was very important work.  How I longed to be on that researcher's team!  In any case, I tried talking about McGill's bad research practices when I went to Schulich.  I expected people at Schulich to get angry with me, too, but to my surprise, they ate it up.  They actually talked a lot about bad research and research falsification in medical school.  They seemed to think it was a real problem, just as I did.  I suppose it is easier to worry about someone else's mistakes than it is to clean up your own house.  In any case, I am back to talking about Susan Rvachew's bad research practices.  Dear Schulich, this one's for you:

Update:  I'm really scared of my doctor and that fat idiot Anne who works for him.

Update: God, Collins and his people treat me like shit every time I go there.  I don't want him as my doctor.  Nasty, snide, rude people.

Update: Last week, I heard another patient getting in trouble for saying he would like to kill Collins and his team.  Poor guy.  I wonder what they had done to him?  Collins and his team are such disgusting people.