"Self Portrait"
doesn't seem like the right title for this piece of artwork,
but other titles keep becoming sentences like,
"Patients think someone is watching out for them."
You can click it to enlarge it, but to save your straining your neck to read the words penciled along the border, they say,
"When the nurse is evil, the way women can be when tempting and taunting men, and gropes you while you are tied down and helpless so that she can taunt her lover, the surgeon, with it, and he explodes in a jealous rage and beats you until you have life-ruining injuries, the other people in the operating room do not stop him."
Maybe I'll make a larger one so that there is room to add that they also don't call security. They also don't made a record of it. They also don't ask you if you are all right. And they also are only doing what is normal when things go wrong in medicine. They are trained not to any of those things. They don't want there to be any memory or record of anything negative. The hospital wouldn't even let me file a complaint. They don't want anything that could hurt their rating.
It was true 200 hundred years ago. It is true now. It probably still will be true 2000 years from now. So I made this out of material that will last that long. There are artifacts thousands of years old made this way. Today they call it vitreous enamel, but no one understands what that means. It means that it is glass melted onto metal. It is a technique that humans learned even before the discovery of blacksmithing.
Usually this is done in a kiln or furnace. I do it with a torch, which takes practice. I melted the white glass onto copper. When it cooled I penciled the words along the border of the white area. Then I melted a layer of clear glass over that. Graphite doesn't fade. And now it is encased in glass. It will be here to speak for other victims of crimes in medicine 2000 years from now. Perhaps I should have put a date on it to try to correct the assumption victims usually jump to about these things - that medicine didn't used to be this way. It always has been this way (see Dr. Benjamin Rush).
* * *
I would prefer saying no more about it. It's fine with me if you stop reading right here, but so many doctors and police officers and medical board investigators and lawyers and such like have required me to explain why a surgeon would assault a patient, and I am so tired of explaining it to them as they stare at me as though it is tiresome to have to listen to the answer, and I am so tired of being interrupted and told to wrap it up when the answer takes more than three sentences. It would not have to take more than three if information like this got out often enough for them to have some basic knowledge about crime in medicine, but the medical community is amazingly successful at preventing that. Perhaps if I put it on this web page from now the link can be one of the three sentences.
They only are looking for an excuse to disbelieve it anyway. It's like asking a victim why a doctor would rape a patient, as though lust and jealousy and anger and other sociopathologies do not exist in medicine. As though no nurse ever groped a patient before and no doctor ever intentionally disabled one.
And it was a nurse who pushed him over the edge. Unwittingly I had primed him. Not on purpose. It's something I've had to deal with my whole life.
That is something I first tuned into in grade school. I was an obedient, peaceful child with no interest in being the alpha male. So why so often did I get singled out by boys wanting to fight? At first adults I asked about it suggested that it might be because I always was the tallest person in the class. Perhaps that made me the target for boys wanting to prove themselves. But over the years I finally noticed a pattern. It happened after I made people laugh.
I wasn't aware of that for a long time, but others were. With a group of boys on the playground during recess I'd be one of the more silent ones as the bullies and braggarts ran things. Then I'd mutter an aside that would send the group rolling in laughter. Eventually, I figured out that the one who did not laugh would be the one who would pick a fight with me later. Unfortunately, it is something boys don't grow out of.
Like when I got to be an adult and was standing in the isle at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park during intermission when a woman I knew stopped to say Hi. During the three minutes that we spoke she laughed more than she talked. When she walked to go back to her seat her date did not follow immediately. Instead, he stepped into my space glaring, with nostrils literally flaring, gritting his teeth, clenching his fists, all the clichés, as he was a cliché by this point in my life, making sure that I understood that he was the alpha male. I'd been through this enough times to know that it was because I'd made his girlfriend laugh. Maybe he never had been able to do that. I don't know.
Like when I was at my sister's for dinner and her brother-in-law had brought a new date. Late in the meal when I said something funny, apparently I had said a lot of things that were funny that evening, because someone said that I really should find someplace where I could be funny for a living. The new date of the brother-in-law agreed saying, "Yeah. Like maybe in my apartment." The mood in the room changed abruptly. My sister's brother-in-law and I had been semi-friends until then, but after that moment he would spend the rest of our lives treating me as though I could not possibly be of enough consequence to warrant his even acknowledging my presence. Like decades later at his father's funeral when I complimented him by saying that he gave a nice eulogy. He looked down, turned his back to me, and walked away without saying a word. Making someone's girlfriend or wife laugh can have permanent consequences. And, frankly, it was a self-inflating eulogy. I only had been trying to be polite.
Enough people had said to me that I should find a way to get paid for being funny that one time I let someone drag me to where I could look into that. There was a comedian an hour away with a regular gig in a comedy club. He needed material. Every week he gathered would-be comedians to sit in a circle on the floor and brainstorm material. To entice people to come he offered lessons and opportunities to get on stage. A guy who owed me a favor thought that this would be the favor he owed me - taking me there.
We sat on the floor in a circle following the comedian's lead. One of the things he had us do was to take turns coming up with a word or phrase that would be funny at a specific point in his routine. The person to your right would offer a suggestion. Then you would. Then the person to your left would.
We were trying to think of a name or a description for a character who was being identified in a story the comedian was putting in his act. After a few rounds a guy across from me said, "Ricearoni." The next several people said entirely unrelated things, but when it got to me, I said, "The San Francisco Treat." The comedian laughed and wrote that down. It was going in his act.
The guy across from me looked at me accusatively and said, "I already said that."
"You did?"
"Yeah. I said Ricearoni."
"Oh. O.K."
"I did. That was mine."
"O.K."
"It was. I said it first."
"I'm not arguing with you. It's yours. Sorry."
Saying "Ricearoni" is entirely different than saying "The San Francisco Treat" in that context. I got the idea to say it because of what he said. That is the purpose of taking turns throwing out thoughts - to feed off each other. But if he wanted credit for it, he could have it. It's not as though we were getting paid or getting our names in a program.
Still he still wasn't happy. He wanted to take this outside. He appeared as though he might have been a football player two or three years ago in high school. He was shorter, but probably outweighed me by 50 pounds - a sturdy, powerful guy who was ready to fight because I made a comedian laugh. We only were amateurs, but I gathered that it probably would be like this with professionals claiming ownership of material and fighting for dominance. It made the idea of getting paid for this a lot less interesting. Guys like these are everywhere. Even in operating rooms.
As I got older, I tried to get better at avoiding being funny. But I never think that what I am about to say is funny. It is hard to edit it out when you don't see it coming. I needed to because when you make people laugh, people nearby start paying attention and the circle paying attention to you widens. In a minute or two you can be the center of attention in a room in which there are other people who thought they deserved to be the center of attention. Sometimes they hate you for that.
Like when you are lying on an operating table with an open incision in your abdomen and an IV in your arm, but only under a local anesthetic so you are conscious. When you are making quips in response to the operating room staff's conversation and everyone is laughing except the surgeon, perhaps it is time to pause. The surgeon had started interrupting me. It was clear he was one of those guys who has to be the alpha male. He resented not being the center of attention even for a moment.
I resolved not to say anything else funny, but there was something in the IV that was relaxing me. I needed to be wary and cautious, but some drug was relaxing me and undermining that. After a while, at a particularly opportune moment, I made one more quip. The operating room staff let loose with the loudest collective laugh yet. And that was when the nurse decided to make the surgeon jealous by letting him see that she had been groping me throughout the course of the procedure, actually from even before the procedure had begun, as easily can be done from her position during an inguinal hernia repair. For most of that time, it seemed clear to me that what she as doing to me was something she did all the time. She was so well practiced.
It was not during the biggest part of the laugh. It was after the peak, when the laughter of the group was subsiding, after she had regained her composure, she faked one more laugh and rocked back on her heels as though it was her laugh that caused her to rock back lifting her hands so that what she was doing would not remain hidden. I was mortified and wondered who she could want to have know about this. Then I found out.
Both she and the surgeon were married to other people, but apparently there was something going on between them because that's when the surgeon exploded. It was the surgeon's buttons she was pushing now. I already had suspected she was a button pusher because of how she had pushed mine. Pushing his moved it beyond suspicion.
And so I learned that when a surgeon explodes in a jealous rage and beats you until you have life-ruining injuries, the other people in the operating room do not stop him. They don't call security. And they don't report it. I also learned that afterwards no one else in medicine will treat such injuries lest the diagnoses be used in a complaint or a grievance that could hurt a colleague. They don't tell you they won't treat it. They just don't.
I lost the next decade to being a fulltime seeker of treatment and then a defender of the lawsuits brought to shut me up. The nurse who started the whole thing got rich by suing me. That's a person with no empathy and no remorse. That's the definition of a psychopath. According to people who study that field, psychopaths have an 80% recidivism rate.
You, as a patient, need to be worried about the people like that who are in medicine, but no one can warn you about them. I cannot warn you about her. One of her best friends is a lawyer with a reputation for being unprofessional and unscrupulous. The least vulgar thing I ever heard any other lawyer say about him is, "He's a piece of work, isn't he?" He told my lawyers to tell me that he took this personally and vowed to maintain a vendetta against me for the rest of my life. So she pushed his buttons too. And pushed her husbands buttons. It appears that her husband is the one who signed up my email address at hundreds of penis enlargement sites.
I don't know where to start the artwork about any of them. I have enough trouble inventing reasons to keep breathing, let alone create art. If breathing didn't happen naturally, I would let it stop.
That is what their system is set up to do to the patients they injure. Between the threats and punishments, injured patients do not warn you about a nurse who is a career sex predator and a surgeon who, if you say the wrong thing on his operating table, will ruin your life. Since no one gets to learn the lessons that victims learn, only victims know important parts of the basic understanding about medicine necessary to know to make it safe for patients, things about which the medical community is resolutely in denial. So when a victim is asked to explain what happened, being required to explain it in three sentences is like trying to explain algebra in three sentences to people who cannot count - something else they don't do in medicine, by the way. They do not keep an accurate count of how many of their patients are worse off after what was done to them in medicine, intentionally or not. How could they count it when they refuse to make a record in the first place?
Once they injure someone in medicine, whether accidentally or intentionally, the first priority of the entire medical community is to make sure no one finds out, no matter what they have to do to patients to arrange that. Your untreated injures become inoperable scar tissue. Your career falls apart. Your wife cannot stand the trauma of the second lawsuit and leaves. The nurse's lawyer nearly gets you put in jail. And your primary care physician is so dedicated to making sure that that no one listens to you and has told so many people not to treat you that you have trouble getting attention for routine maladies.
That's not what they think they are doing. Their belief in themselves and each other is so great that they do not believe they injure patients, so they believe in their hearts that any patient with iatrogenic injuries must be falsely blaming a colleague and must be stopped. When they deny injured patients care, fail to report adverse events, falsify records and lie under oath, they believe they are doing the right thing. Try to find someone in medicine who does not believe him or herself to be "one of the good ones." Silence is complicity and those "good ones" would not even put in the record that I had injures let alone how I got them.
So when the police finally looked into it, they reported back that there was nothing in the record about it. Does someone think criminals make public records of their crimes? The surgeon told the police that he had a witness who would testify that nothing happened. His witness was the nurse who started the whole thing. The police already had been told she had caused the assault. But the police didn't want to do this job and said that was enough to close the case.
The state medical board investigator could not even learn who was in the operating room in order to identify the witnesses. The hospital would not tell him who they were. He didn't try to find out beyond asking if they would tell him. And they wouldn't. If they had, it only would have made waves where he works. He asked who the witnesses were only because I demanded that he find out. They said they didn't know and he left. But, of course, they knew.
I wish this were the only time I or anyone known to me had to learn these lessons. Unfortunately, I've seen worse. And there are public examples.
Meanwhile patient safety advocates worry about mere errors. And imagine they can persuade or educate caregivers into being compassionate, caregivers who already believe themselves to be that. Other advocates want to pass laws requiring caregivers to report accurately, like the law requiring that in the state where this happened to me. Where is lucidity? Lost in the silence of those who cannot speak, those who will not report, and those who do not investigate.
There is a National Task Force on Violence Against Healthcare Providers, but no such entity trying to protect patients. There is no one on the side of injured patients. So health care professionals can prey on them in all the ways they do, not only with impunity, but with a culture that enables them to believe they don't.
The characters in my art don't smile much anymore.