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I'd like to talk about 'The Technique', as I'll dub it. I had first
experienced it at a doctor's office and a few more times dealing with
doctors and their staffs, so my first impression was that it was a
technique taught at medical schools or something as it became so
common in my experiences going forward. But then, nearing the mid
nineteen nineties, I saw it from a few people who had nothing to do
with the medical community and I instead concluded it was a common
human technique. Either way, it's just
as silly.
For shy of a full year I had been seeing the specialist about my
knuckle and knee pains, now accompanied by periodic pulsing
headaches, and he had become as frustrated as I had. He had first
erroneously concluded it was Lyme Disease, but when the blood
tests had come back negative, he discontinued the antibiotics he'd
placed me on even though they had helped. He had since done x-rays
of my joints and found nothing of note about them and had just
settled into prescribing me little pills that had no effect. About
six months into seeing him, I discovered that a close relative had
recently been diagnosed with Lupus and I asked the doctor if
that might apply to me. He assured me that ''Men don't get Lupus'' so I didn't need to worry about it. With nothing else coming to
mind, his only recourse was to have me take more of the pills that
didn't work, apparently in the hope that at some point it would help. It didn't occur to him to try a different medication.
While the pain was unpleasant it didn't significantly effect my
mobility much and I just worked through it as I stocked the shelves
at the grocery store. The knuckle pain didn't get worse as I typed
in my homework or stories into the word processor, the knee pain
didn't get worse if I took long walks late at night, it just
persisted as is. I couldn't figure out what triggered the headaches,
but at least they weren't perpetual. The best thing I could do was
just to keep busy or distract myself from it. As I would often be
one of the employees stocking the shelves from a fresh truckload of
boxes in the early hours of the morning, it occurred to me to listen
to tapes of music as I worked. Though an effective distraction,
management came to me within a week to inform me I couldn't do that
as I worked, even though the store was closed and there were no
customers I needed to worry about.
And so I found myself back at the specialist's office for another
visit to see what we could do about the pain. On one of these visits
the specialist came in and asked if I wanted to tryout morphine with
a smile on his face. Assuming he was joking, I played along and
said, ''I don't think we need to worry about that yet.''
His smile was gone and he exploded with an accusatory finger, ''I
knew it! That's all you're here for!'' and he turned and fled
the room. I say fled, as that was his emotional reaction, but to be
objective, he left the room at a very brisk walk, not a run, and
slammed the door behind him. I was dumbfounded and just sat there
assuming he'd come back and I'd have my appointment. After twenty
minutes I went to the examination room door and opened it and waited
for the nurse to pass by and ask when the doctor would be coming
back. She seemed surprised and said she'd ask and I settled back
into the room. Then she came and told me that I had already seen the
doctor and my appointment was over...
Really? I thought. Was he expecting a co-pay for that?
When I walked out to the front desk, sure enough, they were
expecting a
co-payment. They also asked when the doctor wanted to see me
again, I told them I had no clue as the doctor and I hadn't discussed
my health issues at all. So they once again called to the nurse in
back and the nurse took some time to come back with the answer and it
was: I didn't need to come back. And so that ended my
relationship with the specialist and any apparent hope of ever of
addressing my joint pains. I would later hear from my mother's
primary doctor months later that the specialist had dropped me
because I had been demanding morphine from him. This was news
to me. And
this confused the primary doctor as well as I had never asked him
for morphine, either.
And that, in a nutshell, is the technique I was talking about. You
say something that you deep-down know can't be supported and you run
off before the person you said it to can respond and leave you
feeling like a fool for saying it. As I said, I've come to know this
technique well, from the position of the person being dumped on, not
the one doing the dump & flee, myself. Has this happened
to you? Do you do this yourself? Do people live their
entire lives with this as a common technique in their communication
with others? Or I should probably say, lack of communication
with others?
The first time this happened, it was perplexing and a little silly.
In three years time it would become an all too familiar experience...
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