I wrote this piece a while back, but refrained from posting it. Now I decided to put it up.
Reliving the Kavanaugh Syndrome
A few weeks ago, I found myself, like many people, irritated with the Kavanaugh debacle unfolding on Capitol Hill. The gut feeling was so irksome that I’ve had to sit myself down to try to understand why the scenario bothered me so much. Then I realized what had happened: the specter of Ruth’s death had risen its head after many years of dormancy.
Dr. Blasey-Ford has had to live with a trauma caused decades earlier by persons indifferent to the harm they are causing (and it seems, still indifferent today). On the outside, she has continued on with life, built a career, married, and tried to have a normal a life as possible. But the memory of trauma doesn’t disappear.
The shock– of routinely taking Ruth to urgent care in the morning, only to hear ER physicians screaming loudly “Get me 2 units [of blood] NOW! NOW!” in the afternoon while the defibrillator sent pow-pows to Ruth’s chest, to having her lay brain dead in the evening on a gurney above the floor covered with pools of blood– is a memory I would rather not have lodged, using the sentiments of Blasey-Ford, in my “hippocampus.” But there it sits, even to this day.
Victims of sexual assault say they don’t report their incidents because, as they say, “What’s the use?” Instead they try to reclaim their lives as best as they can and try to move forward toward normalcy, knowing all the while the traumatic scene is still lodged in the brain.
Unlike those victims, I tried to press on– because I was stupid– to address the wrong done to Ruth. But what I encountered was institutional resistance. The law says the patient– not the medical institution– is the owner of the respective medical records. When I went to claim the records for Ruth’s very last visit (the one she had several days before her death), the medical institution (Healthcare Partners) said there was none for that particular date because “she never came in that day.” That, despite the fact that I myself brought her in that day. If it ever went to court, it would be one man’s word against a cadre of doctors, nurses, medical assistants and so on. What is truth is what is written– and if nothing is written, then it isn’t truth. Such an erasure of records could only have been ordered from higher up. The machinery of that institution sanctioned the lie of “no services given that day,” in the same way that the machinery of Capitol Hill sanctioned the placement of Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
The other memory is my last meeting with the Vice President for Quality at Healthcare Partners, William Chin, a meeting I had asked for. (I refuse to put the designation Dr. in front of his name in the same way I refuse to put the designation Judge in front of Kavanaugh’s name.) Even though I had gotten permission to use a voice recorder from another participating physician in the room when I first entered, William Chin lost his temper when he saw the voice recorder during our discussion. He angrily and loudly berated me (so much for proper manners) for having the voice recorder and ended with the statement “This meeting ends NOW!” With that he left the room, as I sat there. People with a lot to hide think the general populace would see their ire as “righteous indignation” while most of us in touch with reality fully realize the pathology in their actions. I’m sure you see the correlation with the Kavanaugh hearings here.
In the end, I didn’t have enough on paper to pursue Ruth’s case, in the same way victims of sexual assault don’t feel they can bring their matters to light. I, like many victims of trauma, have since tried to regain some normalcy by putting the event behind me and pursuing activities “normal people do”. Not long after Ruth’s death, I met with some victims harmed by medical malpractice, and one talked about making a social cause of going after the medical establishment’s wrongdoing (which should be done). But most just want to put the events behind them and try to regain some sense of normalcy. Most felt that the institutional inertia toward wrongdoing is too strong, and just wanted to spend their energy toward regaining a normal life.
Which I have done as well. The tentacles of medical avarice, medical malpractice, and medical despotism are very strong. The change in the medical sphere can only come from a groundswell of serendipitous events and a press ever seeking justice. (It should be noted that both normal people and certain areas of the press are indeed going after the gargantuan problem of medical wrongdoing, so the issue is not hidden.) Most who know me say I am now moving toward having some kind of normal life, while I myself know what is lodged in my “hippocampus.” While I would like to think I had pursued some kind of social justice when I was younger, now I just feel my soul is tired from so many people in the public realm acting like narcissistic little kids. Thus my irksome feeling.
“Respectable” people in “respectable” positions of judge, doctor, political leader, pastor, religious leader, and many more– people in positions of responsibility to the public– continue to perversely maintain that they are doing the public good while in truth only seeking their own. The #MeToo groundswell is showing “respectable” people really are not. Am I too hopeful in wishing that recognition will spread to all the corners where “respectable” people can be held to account for their duty– or lack of– to humankind?