New Jobs

44

As the revelations concerning my health treatment were coming to light over the period of a couple months in the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Seven, I actually had other things going on in my life. Since I no longer had a job, these things kept me from completely dwelling on the numbing medical records review...

While in the hospital for four days I borrowed a friend's laptop and worked out a format for a Doctor Who newsletter, I'm calling it 'The Doctor Who Report' for this text. After working out what each of the sections would have and creating temporary example content for it, I went to my regular copy shop and asked that they print me up a few copies that I could use as demos and also gauge the pricing for the complete issues I hoped to come. Once done, I realized I'd made a small mistake in having the whole issue printed on colored paper and concluded that the actual subscriptions would have a cover on colored paper, but the inner content would be on white for ease of reading.

As the most readily accessible people who might be interested, I called for an off monthly gathering of the local science fiction club members who might be intrigued and roped in a friend to host the gathering. There I showed the example copies I'd made and told them of the concept and goals of the fanzine, short for 'fan magazine'. Many liked it and quickly signed up for the first year's subscription and I had the minimum number of subscriptions I'd need to fund the initial issues.

After that meeting, I then created flyers for the pledge drive volunteers who had helped me during the Doctor Who pledge drive and mailed them out with the remaining example issues. It worked and I got even more subscribers and I was off to write the first full issue.

Earlier in the year I had met the show's producer, John Nathan-Turner, and he had welcomed me to submit a sample script and a collection of new story ideas, which I had completed and mailed off. For the first fictional tale to be serialized in TDWR, I picked the second Doctor Who story I had written up a few years earlier and based my sample script upon. The text was already done and I simply had to transfer it from my old TRS-80 computer floppies to IBM DOS compatible floppies so I could format the story in Microsoft Word and figure out the best segment breaks for the serialization. For the news page of the issues, I trawled for the most interesting news stories from Doctor Who magazine as well as from my meeting with John Nathan-Turner and created my own take on them. The opinion piece I had used in the example issue was for fun and I discarded it to instead jot-up a more suitable, serious piece to close out the final pages of the issue. A bit of tweaking, I then printed the seven and a quarter by eleven inch proofs on my printer and taped the appropriate pages together to create the master sheets. Once reduced by seventy-seven percent, the roughness of the dot matrix printed text would coalesce and give the issue a respectable look & feel, just shy of professionally published works, I hoped.

What crushed me when I went to pick up the first batch, though, was the price tag. It turned out that for the demo issues, since the copy store staff knew me they gave me a break on the pricing but never told me. As I had calculated the price of an annual subscription based on the cost of the demos, when they charged me full price for the complete issues I ended up shelling out about half again my own money to pay for it. As I didn't have a job, this would be impossible to maintain, but at the same time I couldn't very well go back to the subscribers and ask them to pay half again more toward their subscription, or else. It would sound like extortion. I ended up just losing the money out of my own pocket and immediately upped the subscription price listed in the future issues for renewals and new subscribers. While this would eventually help me break even, some of the initial subscribers had ponied-up for subscriptions covering a few years, so their entire subscription run would be at below cost pricing. Ignoring the problem for now, with the blessing of the comic book store owner I knew, I was able to put a few copies 'on the shelf' at his two stores to give TDWR greater exposure and bring in more people.

The first issue printed, folded, stapled and mailed solely by me, I was glad to have it out of my sight as I desperately mulled over what I was going to do for the cost of the subsequent issues...

I went to that month's meeting of the local science fiction club and at least saved myself a few dollars on postage by hand delivering some issues to the subscribing club members who showed up. The meeting was a disaster. The group had devolved into having meetings about what the meetings should be about and after nearly a year of this, they were ready to break up and dissolve. As I wasn't one of the core members, and neither were my failed Dungeons & Dragons group cohorts Rochelle & Daina, we didn't know what we could say about the problem and the meeting broke up into what was expected to be our final post meeting dinner at a local restaurant.

The mood was somber as the core members lamented the ending of the group as none of them wanted to run it anymore. Curious, I asked what was involved in running the group and they mentioned figuring out what to do with the meetings such as inviting authors to speak etc., organizing the occasional special event such as an art auction or convention to raise money, and creating and mailing monthly newsletters to the members and associated groups. The members there looked at the nicely printed copies of TDWR and then looked to me as someone who could get things done and asked if I'd like to volunteer to take over the club for a bit? I said I wouldn't be able to without help and looked to Rochelle & Daina. Rochelle flat out said she couldn't as 'she had so much else to do.' Daina, though, said she'd be willing to help as long as she wasn't directly in charge. With two new willing volunteers, the existing treasurer slash publisher of the club was willing to stay on and, as I had no other job to keep me occupied in life, I agreed.

My one condition was that I could have four months to get a handle on things, review the current membership, organize upcoming meetings and then I'd have things rolling by springtime. As the group had already been expecting to never again have another meeting, trading that in for just a four month break seemed like a good deal to them.

Suddenly, within two month's time frame, I was now in charge of two science fiction fan groups at once! My secret reason for wanting the four month delay was so I could get the rest of my health issues cleared up and out of the way before focusing on my new group's needs.

Surely, I could get my health issues addressed by then...?

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Abandonment

43

Fueled with proof that my mother's primary care physician had been lying about some of my health issues, at least, I went to my third appointment with the psychiatric nurse prepped and ready to talk to her. But when I got there, she started off by apologizing to me for not having called me to cancel the appointment. Still, she lead me into her office and had me take a seat before closing her door and explaining.

It turned out my insurance wasn't going to cover my appointments with her as no doctor qualified in psychiatry or psychology had made the determination that I suffered from a psychological eating disorder. They didn't believe the primary care physician to be qualified to make such a determination and the original psychologist who had seen me in the hospital, while willing to not argue with the doctor's determination, wasn't willing to affirm it either. Thus, without insurance to cover my appointments to the psychiatric nurse, and knowing I didn't have a job to cover the costs, she would make this my last visit with her.

When I brought up that I had found something in my medical records when I had received my copy, she wasn't interested and just wanted to quickly get back to the topic of the previous week and why I had felt apart from my peers. ''What do you mean?'' I asked. She believed something had happened in my early teenaged years to make me feel different and instead wanting to socialize with people who were older than me, what was it? Crap. Since the previous week I had debated if this was the time in my life when I should bring up my strange puberty with someone and I honestly couldn't think of a reason why this wouldn't be an appropriate setting. Still, how do you talk about something like that? I decided to start off slowly, ''I think I was supposed to be a girl...''

''Is that why you got your ears pierced?'' she asked before I could continue.

''Wha-- No. I got them pierced because I wanted to,'' I returned.

She glanced to the clock on the wall and returned, ''You know, you probably can't even afford this appointment either. I won't charge you for today.'' With that she stood and went to the door and opened it for me.

I sat there dazed for a moment by the abrupt change, I had finally decided to talk to someone about my 'situation' and I was now being shown the door?

''I'll still have to charge you for the first two visits, but it'll be at a discounted rate as we didn't know this would happen,'' she said as she waited for me to leave.

I gathered my stuff, including the key sheets from my records that I had brought with me and left as I was told.

I got home dejected. What had been the point of all this? And what do I do now? I knew I couldn't trust my mother's primary doctor based on the records I had, but then what do I do? Search for a new doctor out of the phone book; pick a name at random?

The following day I realized that, as I had gotten a copy of my records from the hospital, perhaps I could get a copy from the primary doctor's office just to see how much of his own records were suspect. I called his receptionist and asked about it. She confirmed that there was no charge for the first copy and I asked to have one. When I went to pick it up a few days later, I thanked her for it and then went back to my car and rather than leave the parking lot to go home, I opened the envelope right there in the drivers' seat and started going through the file. Sure enough, where his own copies of the dietary survey should have been, instead there was only his narrative about what he felt the results should have been, the subnormal calorie intake, the barely adequate protein intake, etc. None of the hospital records about my stay were included in this file, again just his narrative report about how I had unknowing had three days of corn syrup mixed into my food without ill effect and how I gained weight while on the hospital monitored diet. Yet he had no lab results or copies of the weight chart in the file to back up his narratives. I realized that as I wrote stories about fictional characters, he was using my file to write fictional stories about me. Why?

Another thing that caught my eye on his visit notes was with each time I saw him about my weight loss, there was the weight as measured by his staff, but then next to it was my height. Time and again my height was whittled down a quarter of an inch in his records until, by my last visit with him, I was a couple inches shorter than when he had first started seeing me years earlier. As his staff hadn't been measuring my height with each visit, was the doctor himself doing this as a means of comforting himself that my weight loss wasn't as significant when compared to my ever shrinking height?

He did retain a blood test report from years earlier that caught my eye. It was a comprehensive one where many items had been checked. All were within normal ranges but what caught my eye was that it showed the normal ranges for both men and women under each result. While my numbers were to one side or the other of the normal ranges for men, most all of them were dead center when compared to the normal range numbers for women... What did that mean, if anything? I spent another moment relooking through those pages just to make sure I was reading them correctly and I felt sure I was.

Then I reached the end of the file and there was a report from the psychiatric nurse, dated the same day as our last appointment. Apparently she had used the time after having me leave early to write up this report for the doctor and of the things noted were how I called myself 'an oddball' which was the exact opposite of what I had said, but also how I was suffering from 'a complete psychotic break from reality'. Was I?

If anything, the objective hospital records and test results conformed with my own experiences while it was the doctor's narratives which bore little relation to reality.

When I got home, I called up the psychiatric nurse's answering machine and told her that I had gotten a copy of her report and asked if I could talk to her about it. To my surprise, she called back before the end of the day and said we could and made an appointment with me in two weeks as she would be away for a bit. But the day before that appointment, she called me back to cancel. She told me that she had been pressured to write the report by the primary doctor and, upon reflection, had decided not to support it. When I asked her about the 'a complete psychotic break from reality' line, she said she had been asked by the primary doctor to put that into the report to ''help me''. How could that help me? I asked and she returned that the doctor didn't think I could get disability benefits based on the medical findings. Disability benefits? Yes, hadn't I filed for Social Security Disability? No.

There was a silent moment on her end of the line before she answered, Well it really doesn't matter as she wasn't supporting the report anyway. I asked if she could write me a letter stating that for my records. She said she would and then told me that, if I wanted, I could go to the community mental health clinic for follow-up visits as they had a sliding scale for low income people. I thanked her for calling me back and for the letter to come.

No such letter ever came.

After another week of considering my predicament, no health, no job, no doctor I could trust, I decided to look into signing-up for Social Security Disability. When they asked which doctors they could contact for my medical records, I told them I already had a copy and provided them the test results, the hospital records, everything I had collected except for the doctor narratives and the psychiatric nurse report. If I was going to be qualified for Social Security Disability payments, I wanted it to be based on the facts...

Not on the primary doctor's fantasies.

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Psychiatric Nursing

42

The psychiatric nurse's office was part of a small Victorian style house that had been subdivided into offices, all in the psychiatry/psychology theme. Walking down the short hall, beyond the right angled stairs, I saw a door to one professional's office at the front of the building, his name on a plate outside the closed doors, further down the first floor hallway was a door with her name on a metal plate. I made the mistake of knocking on her door; she was finishing an appointment and had to explain to me that I was to sit in the waiting area and stay until she opened the door and called for me. Without a receptionist or apparent sign, I wondered how I was to have known this.

The waiting area was likely the former dining room of the house with the coat closet underneath the stairs, turned into a coffee nook, and the kitchen was just beyond the the waiting area as I discovered when a professional entered from there on his way to his own office. The chairs of the waiting area all coincidentally faced the door to the psychiatric nurse's office so I had little choice but to sit and face it. So I wouldn't look too eager when she opened the door, I decided to 'rest my eyes'.

A few minutes later the nurse I'll call 'Samantha' opened her door and ushered me into her office. I wondered how the previous client had left without me seeing them and later learned that clients left ten minutes before the hour and she had just been finishing her notes on the client, not that they were still with her when I knocked. Her office was apparently the one time family room of the house, it was spacious and divided by the furniture into two sections, one with couch and chairs for counseling, and one with desk and cabinets to serve as her office space. She was probably about fifteen years older than me and pointed me to the couch. I chose to sit in the middle and she organized her stuff, then settled into one of the facing chairs.

She asked why I was here and I told her I thought she knew as I hadn't been told. This stumped her a bit as this was apparently a routine opening line for her first appointments to get the conversation going, not stopped. Instead she had to refer to her notes for a bit and then told me that I was here to be counseled for my eating disorder. Eating disorder? I asked. Yes, that I had some problem with eating food and she was going to help me understand what it was and get beyond it. I wasn't sure how, but I was willing to see.

So you aren't comfortable eating food? She asked. I told her I was very comfortable eating food. But you just don't eat enough? ''According to the hospital's paperwork I eat an average of three thousand calories a day,'' I returned, a fresh fact I had gotten from my appointment with the hospital's dietician. How is that possible? This question confused me for a bit and I tentatively answered, ''By getting it and eating it?'' No, she clarified, how is it possible I lose weight if I had really been eating that much per day? ''I don't know. That's why I went to the doctor about it a year ago and repeatedly since.'' Do you throw up your food after you eat it? ''No, if anything I'm more likely to have the runs after I eat.'' So you use laxatives? ''No.''

It was clear she was starting to get frustrated and decided to skip talking about eating at all. She instead asked me the general placement questions of where I was born, did I have siblings, parents? What brought me to Colorado? Etc. These questions I was able to answer to her satisfaction and I guess her goal was to loosen me up so she could return to the subject of my 'psychological eating disorder'. ''Is that what the psychologist at the hospital concluded?'' I asked her. No, he hadn't thought I had one, but the primary doctor had concluded that there was no other explanation for my weight loss and so he had made that diagnosis. ''So he overruled the psychologist's findings in his own field?''

I seemed to have a knack for asking questions that aren't supposed to be asked, I guessed, as her ire began to well. That's not how it works, she explained, once the doctor had ruled out any medical cause for my weight loss, then the psychologist acquiesced to his findings and had been the one to recommend her as the person to provide routine counseling about the issue. ''Hum,'' I replied.

Our time was up and the next appointment details were worked out.

On the second appointment, I was sure just to arrive and take a seat in the waiting area after looking at the offerings in the coffee nook. It turned out they did have a few packets of hot chocolate mix and so I made myself a cup using the coffee to mix it with. It reminded me of my early years working at the branch grocery store where my mother and the meat cutter were the first in the store and would keep cups of coffee next to them as they worked. I had tried some myself on the days I had tagged along with my mother, but didn't like it. Mother had recommended trying it with cream and sugar, but I still didn't like it and asked if I could get a cartoon of chocolate milk instead from the dairy display case. She said I could and then about halfway done with it, it occurred to me to mix it with the coffee and sure enough, I really liked that combination. ''That's called mocha,'' my mother explained to me when I told her of my discovery and I made sure to have it for all my subsequent Saturdays joining her to the branch grocery store.

Samantha called me into her office and I once again settled down in the center of the couch and she took the other chair facing the couch. I was curious as to the change of chair, she simply mentioned that she changed which chair she took from time to time.

She opened this session by telling me how she was treating a patient going through multiple sclerosis and she had the problem that when she was done with the sessions, she would suddenly feel like she had the multiple sclerosis symptoms herself. I listened and nodded, unclear why she was telling me this, I assumed it was just to get the conversation going. After a pause, perhaps expecting me to say something back, she told me that she had reviewed the psychologist's report and concluded that we'd use it as a starting point rather than talking about my weight loss. So she asked me about my relationship to other children when I was young and I mentioned that my relationships seemed fine and that I even had friends of both sexes which, in retrospect, seemed unusual. But she didn't think so as often times boys and girls played together in their earliest years. Did I consider myself 'an Oddball' as a child? It wasn't a term I was familiar with and I had to ask her what it meant. Once she told me I said I didn't think so, that while of course my stuttering did make me stand out among my classmates, I never really avoided them because of it.

Then we reached the topic of my teenage years and how I had told the psychologist that I felt separated from my peers and started socializing with adults at that point. I agreed and mentioned how it was a case of my peers were more interested in girls, and my friends who were girls started to avoid me, I guessed because they didn't want anyone to suspect I was 'their boyfriend'. So, since I had other interests such as computers and science fiction, it seemed natural just to socialize with the people who were interested in that stuff, it happened to be people who were older. So I stopped seeing my school friends then? No, I still saw them every day and occasionally did some stuff with them socially if it didn't involve the dating scene. So you weren't interested in dating? Nope. Why do you think that was? I momentarily thought of mentioning my 'situation' to her but just wasn't brave enough and instead just shrugged my shoulders.

Our time was up and we affirmed the next appointment.

Between that appointment and my final one with her, I received my copy of the hospital records. There was the dietary survey report which I already had a copy of, its final pages ironically noting that I needed to reduce my calorie intake lest I gain too much weight. Also included were the nurses' notes from my four day stay at the hospital and, to my surprise, the doctor had flat out lied to me about my weight having gone up during my stay as the weight measurements of the day I got in versus the day I left revealed I had lost two and a half pounds during the four days, not gained anything. The C.T. scan revealed no brain abnormalities that would explain my weight loss and the lab review of my stools during my stay revealed undigested food mater was coming out my hindquarters. To me, this very clearly proved that something was, physically, not working properly between the time food entered my stomach until it left the other end.

With this information in my mind, I decided I finally had something I wanted to talk to the psychological nurse about.

But other matters came up, instead...

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