© Flavio Gregori
Dear friends and readers,
I cannot thank enough all those who have written to encourage me to go on and validated the significance of what I am trying to do while expressing myself and reaching out to others.
Many will recognize the source of my header, John Donne’s famous sonnet, “Death be not proud, though some have called thee”, and maybe others know it from Margaret Edson’s play, Wit, as revised by Emma Thompson for a film in which she starred, and was directed by Mike Nichols — to the surprise of many a commercial-minded person, an award-winning play brought to New York City, a hit on HBO, and then a quiet gatherer of patrons in paid cinemas.
I bring Wit up (again!) because today’s cruel incident — sometimes it seems to me every day but has its event exacerbated into body-wearing and soul-destroying experience by the way the modern medical establishment conducts its business — today’s 2 and 1/2 hour endurance ordeal has enabled me to realize how searingly true its dramatization of the human condition facing death as seen through the prism of a system that refuses to acknowledge what all their fuss is about. I haven’t the strength to tell it, and suspect one needs to be inside the maelstrom to grasp the full indifference to the human beings in front of them which the apparently benign behavior of a medical staff subjected us to. Suffice to say I probably made things worse by growing so angry I could scarce contain myself, and the Admiral began to cry. They had hurt him again and again with their needles, their sticks; he had gone hungry to do this procedure which now we were told we could not go until Tuesday when of course we would have to return.
The origin of the problem was again this horror of a pharmacist (Dr [?] Lee) who is empowered to phone me from Prince George with orders about the Admiral’s blood. Again I was pressured into this time giving him a shot of lovenox 2 nights before this procedure. I feared it would thin his blood too much. No, says this guy, and then the threat about pulmonary embolism. So I did it. And then his blood was too thin. For weeks and weeks we have endured this absolutely dangerous set-up where a man hundreds of miles away sends orders for us to give such-and-such blood thinner and then the Admiral is to go to a lab and have his blood tested. This landed us in hospital last week, got the people threatening me with an emergency room, and now this. I asked him, Wasn’t he ashamed to be part of such an impossible to coordinate set-up. I asked him, How much do you make? The doctor at the place denied it was the lovenox; it was some ambiguous mixing of bodily fluids. Right. One thing when we got home: we decided no more lovenox.
Your ability to fight them is limited lest you offend as you need them: once again, it’s need that is ruthlessly exploited here and silence and tact that is enforced — on whose behalf? At one point one of the nurses asked me, “What you are upset about?” as if this is a total mystery. I wish I had said “I’m upset because if we don’t do this we are told inside 3 weeks he’s dead. Sorry to be in such bad taste as to bring it up.” I am getting closer to this kind of talk, but not there as yet lest I turn anyone against him. He says it’s all right as I play bad cop to his good one. I’m not sure.
I screened Wit for years, showed it again and again to class after class. I did think Donne’s sonnet in context ironic, as the behavior of the medical staff in Wit, no matter how bizarre their operations, how revolting their medications, is that of people whose techniques are all a function of avoiding death, and thus paradoxically (very Donneian this) enslaved to death as they conducted their “poison, warre, and sickness.” Now I realize the line also means plainly, death be not proud of what you have led human beings to do and to accept.
Were the medical staffs to acknowledge this, they would have to relinquish their control over everyone who comes for their services — and make less money, abuse people a little less. Why should an exhausted gravely ill patient have to come to a medical center for a test? because he needs it and it’s not made available any other way. Why is this?
I put on the teaching part of my website two student papers whose theses I now see take us to the heart of the matter in reality (beyond the parable movie): Positioned on the borders of decency; a “poignant film.” He looks like Emma Thompson in his wheelchair. This YouTube contains my favorite moment in the movie: where Susie puts her hands in front of Jason, haven’t you harmed her enough:
He is now resting and we again hope to have a better day tomorrow — apart from all these people (including the Hospice ones who are not there for any indeterminate care) I said to him before he went to sleep, Does he think that if I got him dressed, packed our stuff, got us tickets, that anyone at the gate of the US or the gate at Venice would refuse us entry? How about dying in Venice? He thought no one would stop us. But then I thought about the need for galoshes, and decided it would be too wet for us in his present state. He smiled at the picture I conjured up.
Venice — he’ll never get there now
I admit I never thought the movie would relate directly to me and my beloved. I knew it directly related to many students in my classes over the years. They’d sometimes tell about it.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
You are doing important and painful work, Ellen. The Admiral is fortunate to have you by his side. May you find ways to keep up your own strength.
Mahsa wrote: “The Wit! still remember when we watched it in your class …. thanks Dr.Moody for opening our eyes:)”
Q: Why should an exhausted gravely ill patient have to come to a medical center for a test? because he needs it and it’s not made available any other way. Why is this?
A: HMO: Horrible Murder Organization. When people are in their 30s and their employer graciously gives them the choice between private insurance and HMO, they look them over, compare, and naturally choose the less expensive, centralized, very convenient and smooth running option. No brainer; no down side. In their 30s, 40s, and 50s, it does just fine for Pap tests, a strep throat here, a little bursitis there. Come the big stuff, and it’s the other side of the coin. (“Coin” is apt.)
Private care is the elite care. The very poor get free government care and it is often quite good. The middle class with their HMOs get the rigamarole and the shaft. If I wasn’t convinced before, I am now. Yes, Jim’s lucky he has you to be his advocate.
I’m wincingly sorry for your awful day, and hope tomorrow is better!
We chose Kaiser because for the first time we really had a doctor to turn to. A place to call in an emergency. Before 1980 it was always catch-as-catch can — there’s more than the poor and middling, there’s lower middling and there’s people who don’t know where to go. Especially before the Internet it was hard to get information — quite deliberately. Even now if you can go to sites run by hospitals where you can see how reputable they seem, you never know how good or bad a doctor is, only how successful he’s been in placing himself (or herself). Until this cancer, and only since the mid-1990s when the psychiatric services went down the drain (Kaiser regularly gets a D as do many “mental health” places around the country), the services we had were fine and yes we were not over-charged or downright fleeced which to us was a real consideration.
I agree had in the 1940s a single payer gov’t health care been put in place, that’s what we’d had now, but in Paul Starr’s classic book, The Social transformation of American Medicine, he suggests it was too late even then because the AMA had already set up schools to make sure there would not be too many doctors, and the insurance companies had begun to be used by them, with employers supposedly paying part as a “benefit.” FDR did try for a medical program but WW2 had begun and social security had been such a fight, he let it go.
I fail to understand why so many in the US are anti a NHS type medical service. Maybe it’s only the rich and powerful. It was reported here that somebody in the media had said it was a form of Communism! I have reason to know that the NHS is far from perfect, but this kind of cruelty cloaked in “apparently benign” front is much less evident here. Also expensive procedures just to gain more income is much less common, although not unknown. I do hope that the Admiral gets some peace from these vultures. I so understand your impulse to run away with Jim to Venice.
Clare, short answer, I suppose it’s because those with elite health care aren’t eager to sacrifice and get slightly less elite care themselves (having to wait for surgery, etc.) in order for everybody else to get care. Probably if national health care had been introduced back when it was in the UK and Canada, it would be working today. Now it’s a gargantuan clusterf–k. And we’re a bigger country with correspondingly more massive problems, too.
Yes, I agree, however, the US is the richest country in the world, but it seems that poor and middle-class folks get a rough deal. I’m not disparaging the US, it just seems that health for most of you is a lottery and expensive. It’s not perfect here by any means, but at least decent families aren’t financially bankrupted by a serious disease. Thanks for enlightening me Diana. It’s always been a puzzle to me.
Oh, I am so glad to see Martha (Deed) here. I hope you have read her book, too, dear Ellen. I’ve had an emAil today from a student whose family is facing hospital horrors with her sister. It goes on and on.
God bless and keep you both, Ellen, and soften the leather hearts of the medical idiots you have to deal with. Judith Lindley
Get those galoshes and die in Venice!!! Love to you both.