The Nature Of Conspiracies

86

So at this point in my life, the Summer of Nineteen Ninety-one, nearing the end of my twenty-sixth year, I had survived two conspiracies out to get me. Yes, I realize that using the term 'conspiracies out to get me' is a no-no in a psychological context when discussing one's life. And yet what am I to make of it? In both cases, I hadn't suspected the machinations happening behind my back until one person too many had been roped into the 'plot'. In the case of my high school math teacher, he had been incensed by what had been going on and told me about what the school district had been doing to me behind my back and recommended I let my father know and sue the school district. In the case of my first woman doctor, she had been so enthralled by the 'plot' that she felt the need to publicly notify the county social services about it. I never suspected that there were people out to get me, I was told. Four times in fact when you toss in the time my high school friend Van confessed to me years after the fact that my final high school math teacher had rolled me out of his class by merely marking the correct answers on my math tests as 'wrong'. And the most recent example with my doctor at the Premier Medical Center telling me of the threats against Betsey for treating me.

The classic view of a conspiracy seems to go back to the assassination of Julius Caesar, where a number of underlings gather together to discuss the plans, agree on them, and then carry them out. I'm here to propose another, if not more common way, that conspiracies form. It's one guy covering his ass with friends who don't want to see him get in trouble.

Yes. It's often simply that.

In the case of my childhood years, teachers had been reporting to the school district that I stuttered and needed help. As the school district was legally bound to do so, but didn't want to spend the money, they came up with this 'test' for me. I've told this story before, but now let's see it in a new light. I was called to the nurse's office at the start of fourth grade where a group of district people were gathered around a small table. I was told to come in and sit at the table and read a page out of a book about the creation of Disney World. Being a habitual stutterer, not a nervous stutter, my mind was distracted by the strange environment and thus I didn't stutter as I read the page. The people assembled there seemed pleased and I was sent on my way while they agreed amongst themselves that I didn't need speech therapy. And I likely returned to the familiar fourth grade class room and stuttered up a storm when talking about common daily matters. The fourth grade teacher was frustrated when she heard that I wasn't going to receive speech therapy as it was obvious to her I had a problem and so the school district decided to cover their ass by having me assigned to the existing pull-out group. Even though nothing the group did, essentially play children's Scrabble a few times each week, addressed my stuttering in the least, it made the fourth grade teacher feel I was being helped and thus she never looked into whether or not I was actually being helped.

As the years went on and more teachers reported to the district that I needed speech therapy, the district would find new ways not to deal with it such as removing me from a class I was doing well at, but as 'Latin' was an elective class, taking me out of it ended the teacher's official ability to demand I get help. I grew up in this school environment with all my class mates knowing I stuttered as well as most of the on-site staff, but since a group of district officials had once heard me read a page in fourth grade without stuttering, 'Officially', I didn't stutter and thus 'didn't need help'. And yet, when my grades suffered from my problems writing by hand, it was apparently that same stuttering that was pointed to 'showing' that I was mentally challenged and that was why I was falling behind in those classes requiring the most hand written work. If my actual I.Q. score at the time refuted that assumption, then it could be easily over looked and my 'real I.Q.' presumed to be so low to the point that my high school guidance counselor wouldn't even consider me for college options despite my high academic performance of the previous years. When he discovered that my factual I.Q. was well above my presumed I.Q., rather than raising alarm bells, he just went along with the way the school district had been treating my needs in years past, unconsciously adding his own name to the list of conspirators who had been denying me my educational fulfillment in childhood. Step by step, more people were involved in the justifications for my not getting the help legally prescribed for me, and one by one the conspiracy was formed even though they would all claim that there hadn't been one since they all hadn't met in a room before hand to agree to it. They had just joined it as it went along.

Such, too, had my medical care been denied me. The first doctor to address my declining adult health, the joint doctor, rather than admit to himself that he didn't have a clue what was causing it, he imagined me to be a morphine addict trying to trick him into giving me my next fix. Even though I had never had any morphine in my life, that fact wasn't going to stand in his way of dropping me as his patient based on that unsubstantiated theory. When my mother's primary care doctor 'performed a physical on me' and apparently lost his mind as a result, he entered a world where I couldn't have any real health issues to the point that he was discarding any test result or records that didn't confirm his imaginings. He then comforted himself by creating narrative reports detailing what he had wanted those test results to have said. When I then went to the local gastroenterologist, Dr. Tanaka, about my weight loss, despite having two objective tests showing I had a fat malabsorbtion problem in his hands, he didn't want to face that his colleagues could have been wrong about me and concluded that the test results must be false, coming up with at least one theory as to how I might have tampered with the tests. If anyone questioned his conclusion to ignore said results, he could have easily pointed to one doctor who was claiming I couldn't possibly have had real medical issues and another doctor who had labeled me as a faker of health problems. To each console their consciences, they could discuss me amongst themselves creating new imagined 'insights' as to why I should be ignored and denigrated by medical circles.

Talking to one or more of these past doctors, my first woman doctor, rather than confirm for herself the basis for these stories, felt so compelled by them that she willingly added her name to the 'conspiracy out to get me' by writing a letter notifying the county's social services office that I was, not that she had heard, I was a lifelong welfare fraud and I had seen dozens of doctors who all agreed on this, though when she was under oath she suddenly couldn't remember the name of a single one of them. Still, one by one, as each medical professional found it easier to believe the false stories about me rather than look into my health issues, they each unconsciously added their names to the group denying me medical care over a period of years. After all, they were just supporting their peers, whereas I was not one of them. Any medical professional who did take my health issues seriously was a threat to this group and their imagined authority over the facts of my medical history. These threats needed to be either coerced into adding their name to the 'conspiracy', or rejected from the medical community in order to keep what it wanted to believe about me pure from any contradictory findings.

While not as quickly run out of the state as Betsey was, the neurologist who discovered my bulging spinal disc, Dr. Robins, and the neuro-psychologist who had affirmed my first stroke and the impact of my health issues on my cognitive scores, Dr. Maverick, were eventually gone from the city within a few years. In the case of Dr. Maverick she was later found verbally denying her written findings supporting me and settled into a new practice elsewhere in the state.

What do you think of this alternative theory of how conspiracies form?

Does it seem plausible to you? Can you think of other examples from your own life or the lives of people you know?

Have you ever added your own name?

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Run Out Of Town

85

Two months after my doctor at the community health clinic, Betsey, had placed me on antibiotics, I had started to dramatically improve and I returned to Denver's Premier Medical Center to pick up my three month supply of fat enzymes. While there I noted the improvement in my condition and the reason, and my doctor there told his supervisor and apparently all hell broke loose. It was at my subsequent visit to PMC three months later that I found this out as my doctor there, whose only contact with my health care was to copy a prescription note during the past year so their pharmacy would supply the fat enzymes to me, sheepishly spilled the beans as to what had happened.

It had been the general medical consensus in Colorado over the past three & a half years that my health concerns should not be addressed. Reasons for this were wild and varied when I would hear about them. Most, if not all, of the reasons were not based on reality, but on the ego of the imaginative doctors involved. The one medical doctor who had taken my health issues seriously three years earlier, Dr. Smith, had been run out of the state. In part it was because he was one of our state's first practitioners of 'Clinical Ecology', a field with the focus that many of our health problems were due to allergens and intolerances in our daily environment. Even though, in practice, he was little more than a souped-up allergist, it was a new concept that the Colorado Medical Community didn't want to see take root. As a result, Dr. Smith's existence in Colorado had been controversial but after he treated me and confirmed that some of my medical concerns were based in reality, the medical community had to get rid of him less some more respected doctors who had been poo-pooing my health concerns might have their competence questioned. So three months after treating me, Dr. Smith decided he had to leave the state rather than fight to retain his medical license in Colorado.

For the next year & a half, the medical community of Colorado was happy as my health concerns were once again being ignored and thus their reputations were not being brought into question while they, in turn, continued to trash my own. Even Betsey had spent her first year with me by ignoring my health concerns to the point of sending me to a psychologist to address a bulging spinal disc. Why had she bucked the establishment and prescribed me antibiotics in the Fall of Nineteen Ninety? Had she begun to have some doubts of her own? Had my single appointment with her since seeing Jude, my new counselor, made the difference with my using the comforting & pondering tone I learned from him when discussing my health issues with her? Had he called her up and vouched for me after his discovery that my fears of being persecuted by the medical community had turned out to be true? Or had it simply been a case that she truly thought my headache that Fall really was a sinus infection which required an atypical treatment of five hundred milligrams of Cephalexin four times a day for a whole month? Then to be extended for a second and third month despite the fact that it wasn't addressing the headache pain itself?

It was now clear why Betsey had gone into a flurry of having my medical concerns looked into by other doctors at the start of the year, as I now knew she had been threatened by the medical establishment of Colorado once they knew she was treating me seriously. And while two of the consults had affirmed my health concerns in the neurological area, the gastroenterologist review of my intestinal issues had found nothing. Was it because the problem could not be found now that I had been on four months worth of antibiotics? One thing we did notice was that if the antibiotics were discontinued, my intestinal problems began to return. So Betsey had concluded to keep me on a maintenance dose indefinitely to allow my continued improvement.

After I had been told about this behind the scenes threatening of her by the medical establishment, I asked her about it at my next appointment and while she confirmed it had taken place, she really didn't want to get into the details of it as she felt medical community politics was not something a patient should have to deal with. By the following month she told me she would be leaving the state to establish her own practice in Kansas. When I asked if it was due to the medical community politics, she confirmed it was. She had wanted me to be transferred to a new doctor just starting at the clinic and gave me his name, but told me that the head of the clinic had vetoed that decision insisting that he, himself, would take over my continuing care. As she felt the head of the clinic wasn't going to be a good choice for me, she was giving me the new doctor's name as there was nothing stopping me from making an appointment directly with him to continue my care. I thanked her for the thought, and kept the name of the new doctor in mind, but told her I would like to see the head of the clinic just to hear from him personally. She understood.

While I had nothing to speak of to thank her with, I did know she was also a fan of 'The Other Show' I liked and had written speculative scripts for, so I printed up two more copies of my latest scripts. I returned to the office the following week, her last, and I offered her the copies in thanks and hoped she enjoyed them and wished her well on her new practice. She thanked me for them and we exchanged a hug.

The following month I returned for my appointment with the head of the clinic. By this point I had over eight months of training by my counselor, Jude, as how to handle emotionally troubled people and that knowledge came in very handy. When the head doctor of the clinic came into the exam room he was all shrieking and yelling, pacing the floor as he did so without even seeming to think of sitting down. He called me many names, disparaged my character, and let me know he knew I had been faking all of my health problems these past many years, regardless of what the neurological consultants had found. Rather than being sucked into his emotional outburst, I sat calmly in place and just observed his behavior and once he was finally done I simply, gently asked, ''Does this mean you won't be renewing my antibiotics for this month?''

His energy having been spent from his tirade, he scoffed and then went to the counter and pulled out a pad and his pen. He threw the renewal prescription slip at me and left the room. On my way out, I scheduled my monthly follow-up appointment with the new doctor who had joined the clinic.

I had met a member of the beast which had been disparaging me over the past three & a half years behind my back and found that, other than bluster and hatred, there was little else there...

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Reducing My 'Jobs'

84

At the start of Nineteen Ninety-One, with my returning health and my new lease on life, I could see myself returning to the work force and, thus, would not have the same amount of time to devote to running the science fiction club as I had during the previous three years. As a coincidence, we were having an organizational meeting for the club so it seemed like the perfect time to mention it. What could possibly go wrong?

I hosted the gathering at my apartment in January and spent some time cleaning up the place to make it as presentable as possible for the largest group of visitors I would ever have there: Elizabeth, the last remaining original core member who had acted as my fount of wisdom about how the club could be run and what could be done with it, Suzi, the former founder of the now defunct writers' group and current desktop publisher of the club's monthly two-sheet, Daina, the editor of the club's fiction quarterly 'zine and author visit coordinator. And then there was me, the head of the club, acting treasurer, non-author event coordinator, and all around text contributor to all of our publications. As it turned out, Elizabeth brought another friend with her as he was curious about it and what we did.

As we gathered in my little living room area and drinks were handed out, there was a happy atmosphere and given the modest success of the art auction the previous year and the club's overall improvement in reputation and notoriety, the general expectation was we might be organizing a full out science fiction convention this year to take place early in the next year. I was game for that and the other people there were willing to explore that next step, too.

Also discussed were our options for rounding up subsequent local author short stories now that our main source of fiction from the writers' group was drying up as it had disbanded. Three of us there had been the main contributors to the Quarterly, anyhow, so it was simply a question of finding a little bit of additional material to fill the rest of the issues over the course of the year. Perhaps we could get some of our author contacts to donate a story or two for us? Often authors are cranking out more stories than they can sell and might be willing to allow us to publish one of their more obscure short works in return for bringing attention to their current work and upcoming books. Also, we could host a fiction writing competition in town and recruit new local want to be science fiction & fantasy writers, as part of the competition we would feature their work in the Quarterly. This idea also went over well and since I had hosted a fiction page on Jeff's online site in the early Nineteen Eighties, I knew there were always a number of budding writers wanting to have their work featured somewhere.

There was a discussion of our meeting place problem. As the Savings & Loan bank we had the meetings at for the prior five years had gone out of business as part of the national savings & loan crisis of the late nineteen eighties, the community room that they offered had gone away with it. After finding a temporary home to host the art auction, I had called everywhere I could think of in search of a new meeting place but the free ones no longer existed as the tax break for them had been discontinued. Finally, I had found a meeting room at the local Community College we could use, the only problem with it was the complex was at the extreme south end of town. Though our original meeting place had been at the south end of town as well, having to take the interstate highway for two additional exits was, as it turned out, a bridge too far for a number of the club members and attendance had fallen by about twenty percent. Also, unlike the previous space, this new room was filled with tables facing a desk without us having the moveable walls to disguise the empty half of the room; the energy level of the meetings had declined and the best trick we could figure was to take the chairs behind the back tables out of the room to at least force the remaining attendees to sit more closely to the visiting guest. Everyone agreed we needed a better meeting place, but none of us had a clue where else to look for one.

As an associated side note, there was a beautiful little log cabin in the center of town that had been unoccupied for years as I had seen it time and again as one of my regular buses drove passed it. I had actually taken the step of going to the county office to look up who owned it and wrote them a letter asking about the property and offering to clean up & maintain the grounds if, in return, we could use it once a month as our meeting place. My letter went unanswered and that property has remained largely untouched in the decades since. A bit of a shame really as it is a great looking little cabin.

With all the other official topics discussed and put aside, I then broached the subject of my dramatic regaining of my health and my expectation that I would reduce my role in the club as I pursued work opportunities as the year progressed. Rather than happy faces at the news of my health returning, I instead found faces of dismay and concern. I assured them I would be remaining with the club and helping to manage it, it was just that I would find a new general manager for it. Nothing to worry about...!

Within two weeks after the meeting ended, Elizabeth cut all contact with the club. She said it seemed like a good time to leave as the club had reached a high, but I suspected she feared being the one fingered as the new general manager or at least having to help more as I began to do less. Two months later Suzi pulled out, too, returning the job of publishing the club's monthly two-sheet back to my lap as well as the other bits she did for us. With the loss of them, more of our contributing writers were gone from the group and thus sources of material for the Quarterly. Daina & I faced the prospect of either having to write twice as much to fill the gap while pursuing new submissions, or close down the quarterly 'zine all together. With regret, we mutually agreed we couldn't handle that additional load and used the last stories left over from the defunct writers' group to fill the final issue, though it was still a few pages short which we disguised by printing its final cover on thick card stock.

While my goal was to reduce my workload with the club, I was now handling far more of it and to compensate, we reduced the number of meetings for the year as well as abandoned any thought of organizing a convention. I finally found a new guy to head the club and even wrote and co-produced our first television advertisement using him to round up new members. But it turned out while he liked the idea of 'being in charge of the club', he really didn't have the energy level or interest in helping to keep it going. After Daina and I organized the first few meetings of his year to give him time to organize the next few, he dropped all contact with us. By the Summer of Nineteen Ninety-Two the club was truly over, even if not on paper.

It took me two times to learn this lesson during my life: While no one would ever think I would make a good leader given my stuttering, once I was in charge of something I somehow made people feel comfortable helping out. But once I would step aside, all those same people would flee in short order. Somehow they liked helping me out more than working for the cause. I've since had on my 'To Do List' figuring out how to lead something and then transition away from it without it falling apart...

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A New Lease On Life

83

Imagine being half asleep for years and then one day you were fully awake. Ultimately I can never adequately describe what a huge difference it made suddenly having unfettered nutrients going to my brain and body after years of emaciation.

While I had muddled through two scripts for 'the other science fiction television show' that I liked in the previous year and a half, my mind was now on fire with two new ideas to type up and I roared through them and was shocked by how easy they were to write and how satisfying they felt. Daina and a couple of other friends were willing test readers and gave me high marks for both of them and the scripts were soon off to my agent who was equally positive about them. She felt they were a step up from my previous effort and was eager to send them in for consideration.

After the past year of running errands with Daina and going on hikes with her patiently waiting for my uncertain shuffle as I trailed behind her, now I was unintentionally leaving her in the dust as I walked at my full stride for the first time in likely five years. On our hikes I was wanting to jog up and down the path ahead of her while she preferred to walk. With my sense of balance restored, I would delight in standing on one foot indefinitely as I waited for her to catch up to me on the trails.

My adrenal glands were back, too, as I soon discovered every time my apartment door bell rang and I was jolted by the unexpected sound. I would have to take a moment to calm down from the burst of adrenaline before answering the door. And even though I knew it was likely to happen before I reached the door, the second ring of the bell equally shot me to the ceiling. With Daina, I asked her not to ring a second time, in the case of strangers I was out of luck and just had to live with it for the next few months until I had become reaccustomed to the door bell ringing.

Also returning with a vengeance, was my stuttering. In the later years of my emaciated mind, my subconscious often forgot that I stuttered. Now it assured I would never forget it ever again as I found myself stuttering with seemingly every single word. I had to revisit all of the tricks I had learned in my childhood years and then assure I didn't develop any physical ticks as a part of using them. As Medicare covered speech therapy regardless of my stuttering being a preexisting condition, I tried to make an appointment with the speech therapist I had first seen for two sessions in Nineteen Eighty-Five, as I had gained so much from such a brief time with her. Unfortunately she was gone and they had a different therapist in her place. I decided to see her expecting the same level of skill and insight only to find that she had a completely different approach to stuttering problems. She didn't seem to have any interest into what caused stuttering, and of the variations thereof, and just used the same method for all-comers without variation. Her course of treatment was to have her patients cold call unsuspecting businesses on the phone and ask unnecessary questions about their stock.

Stuttering on the phone to people who aren't expecting it is always the worst experience. At least in person you can roll your eyes and shrug your shoulders to let the clerk know you are sorry about the speech impediment until you finally get out the words you need. Even calling people who know you and are aware of your stuttering is so much easier because they know to be patient and wait it out. The most frustrating times are when people try to 'help you' by guessing what it is you are trying to say, then not only are you trapped still trying to say what you wanted, you also have to now say that their guess wasn't what you were trying to say on top of it, adding irritation to both sides. And so this new therapist's method of 'helping people' overcome their stuttering by calling unsuspecting businesses and asking them random questions, while they were likely trying to help other customers in the store, came across as a humiliation experiment intended to make one's stuttering even worse. Her broad smile during these calls didn't help dissuade that feeling and I soon dropped her and returned to coping with my stuttering on my own.

The physical therapy for my pinched spinal nerves provided a chance to ensure my quick weight gain didn't go straight to my belly as they had me work out on various training machines while the staff watched. Curiously, I slowly gained an audience with my repeated sessions as more and more of the staff felt the need to watch me using the machines. One time a male staff member came into the work room and saw me twisting and turning as I built up my core and I overheard him tell my physical therapist I couldn't be doing that because I would hurt myself, but she assured him that, in my case, I was able to move my body that way without problems. While I don't know what they were referring to, I did remember a time in one of my college science classes when the teacher told us that men and women have differing mobility talents that the other sex didn't. His example was to place a chair on the floor next to a wall. He asked for volunteers from the students, one a man and the other a woman, and first had the woman bend over while standing next to the chair until she was at a right angle with the top of her head touching the wall. Then she was to pick up the chair and stand up. She did, but when the male student tried he couldn't, even though he was deemed to be stronger than her. He could pick up the chair, but its slight weight made it impossible for him to straighten up to a standing position as he held it. When I got home that night after class, I tried that experiment for myself and found I could pick up the chair and straighten up without a problem. At the time I didn't think much of it, but now these years later, hearing the male physical therapist whispering in shock about my mobility range, I wondered if I was unwittingly showing off a woman's ability to twist and turn even though I was deemed to be male...?

In the previous years, I found I hadn't needed to worry about my mixed-sex issue for myself as I thought I wasn't going to live much longer anyhow. Now that I realized, if I was going to live a full life span, I would have no choice but to address it.

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