Sunday, October 15, 2017

Despair, Blindness and Recuperation

Gilbert, my cockapoo dog, had hereditary glaucoma.  It presented with a red eye and pain which Dr. Douglas at Oak Animal Hospital correctly diagnosed. He lost his sight immediately in that first eye because the high pressure in the orb destroyed the sensitive optic nerve.    Dr. King of Western Canada Veterinary Eye Specialists eventually surgically removed that eye when the pressure didn’t come down with months of medication therapy.  The increased pressure in the eye was like a constant migraine for Gilbert. He slept a lot and was sad. When the eye was removed he was his old happy go lucky perky self returned.  We had the joy of this for the next few months until one day a couple of weeks back his remaining eye became red and painful.  Dr. King measured the pressure the next day. It was really high and didn’t come down with a week of therapy. He was completely blind now so we scheduled surgery which occurred last Thursday.
He was really sad. I had dropped him off in the morning at the New Westminister Western Canada Eye Specialist Surgery.  No food the night before.  Blind now , he banged into the door entering. There were several other dogs there.  Eye problems are common in dogs and especially in some breeds like pugs and cocker spaniels.  My favourite Scottish band is “Old Blind Dog” which I’d never realized highlights the problem of loss of sight in aging dogs.  I left my afternoon clinic to pick him up and bring him back. He was a bit disoriented and was able to sleep through my session with Brad. Brad and Gilbert have been friends for years so it was great that he just happened to be the patient I had to see that day. The staff at the Royal Columbia Clinic were so understanding too with Belinda and Dr. Waterson making all the right cooing caring animal love noises that made Gilbert feel safe. He was obviously scared and vulnerable.
Taking him home I saw him hesitant and anxious and confused.  He didn’t like being out in the open.  In my Miata and finally at home he was better. He hates the cone though it’s necessary to keep him from scratching out the stitches.  As the anesthesia wore off he wimpered and cried and my heart was torn out. I tried everything to get him to take the 25 mg tramadol pain kller. He’d had to have a half tab twice a day the few days before the surgery.  But he was getting wise to my evil machinations to drug him. He rejected his favourite cheese, peanut butter, and even left over steak. He’d take the food and spit out the pill.  Apparently the taste is horrid.  It was a breeze to get him to take the 250 mg Cephelexin antibiotic tablet. That’s twice a day.  I just gave him one today. To get the tramadol into him finally I found the deer heart I had frozen, microwaved it rare and slipped the pill in the red meat. He wouldn’t take any more of that dog delicacy after that but I got another in the Liver Pate Sausage which has worked since for the Cephalexin.
He cried and whimpered the first night. I’d hold him, stroke him, and he’d settle for a few minutes, then I’ d doze and wake again to his crying. I remembered my mother sitting up with me as a child when I had stomach aches.  I missed her.  I was crying in the night with Gilbert crying.  Talking to God of course. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed since my brother died, then my friend, George, and Richard and then Bill in ICU and Gilbert.  All along the government has accepted the lying false allegation of a female psychotic sociopath.  I’ve only justgot through  a year of another threatening to kill me and my dog and the College of Physicians and Surgeons with their ‘the customer is always right’ approach to complaints blaming me for upsetting the patient.  Only when he threatened to kill Justin Trudeau did the government  take me seriously about this man’s dangerousness. Most people think doctors are protected but we simply are not. The suicides of doctors and the attacks on doctors go unheard. I’m there in the middle of the night holding my crying dog fending off my own self pity and praying.  Not why Jesus?  That’s a child’s question.  But how do we carry on, Jesus?  Help me get through this. Help Gilbert please Lord.
The Jesus story tells of the Herod’s and Pilots of Government with all the cowardly beurocrats made famous at the Nuremberg trials by Arendt’s description of the ‘banality of evil’.  Our courts encourage ‘false allegations’. It’s the hallmark of aetheist leftist communist beurocracy and government.  But my dog is to me like Samson, betrayed by a woman, and his eyes torn out, blind and chained in the temple of the false god enemy.  I think of the poor guy as a part of me.  I feel I’ve attracted evil by fighting it. My last dog was murdered by drug addicts and drug dealers because I wouldn’t lie about their positive urine tests and say they were negative and that they weren’t marijuana smokers. I was working in the US at the time and government jobs required a clean urine test.  So they threatened to kill our dogs, the South African doctor and me, and then both dogs were killed.  The DEA told me my life was threatened.  I’d done the right thing but it’s always at high personal cost. I’m so upset these days seeing Justin Trudeau our lying prime minister pot head getting rich as a dope smoker and all the others who have invested in vice these days. The latest pervert was Harvey Weinstein, the love of feminists.  It’s all so troubling in the wee hours of the night unable to get a dog to take another tramadol, unable to stop my baby from fussing.
At least I didn’t think of killing him.  I have treated so many mothers who after nights of sick babies have thought that.I’ve never judged.  Gilbert’s been my reason for living.  With all the government hatred of doctors and me in particular I’ve felt this overwhelming urge at times to ‘identify with the aggressor’.  Anything to end the suffering and humiliation.  I have done my best devoted myself to doing what is right and yet I’m never perfect enough. I loved reading the American Specialist College report saying that Government and Insurance Companies demand 90 minutes of activities for every 15 minutes of patient visit before the patient has even stated their complaint. And I’ve chosen, as a Christian , as ugly as Christians are considered today,  to work in the area of ‘greatest need’ with the ‘sickest people’  where the patients and doctors are stigmatized together and the government creates most of the problems for both.  Everywhere I look there are strutting Eva Brawns finding fault and being critics and demanding more and more limelight , resources and money while in the front lines there’s never another pair of hands.
And here I am facing another night without sleep, after thousands of nights not sleeping for patients and strangers, and I’m unable to help my dog any more than I was able to help my brother and my friends.  I really wasn’t a very good son either because my Father and Mother deserved so much better. I was such a sucker for the shallow when I was young. I thought Pierre Trudeau was so smart and sexy until I was much older and realized how right my parents had been about what a terrible wasteful bully of Prime Minister he’d been. We used to argue over the dinner table. Dad and Mom didn’t like the drinking and drugging either.  I realize now they wondered where they’d gone wrong. Mom was Irish and blamed herself for all the wrongs and sickness of her children but never took credit for their success.  I think that if I was a better Christian or a deeper Yogi I could have healed my dog’s sight. I trusted the Vets and wonder if I’d stopped my work and devoted myself to only him maybe I could have found a cure. I felt that with my brother too that I should focus solely on his illness. Yet I’d told my ex wife I could treat her and her depression and addiction alone or I could go to work with hundreds of others but I couldn’t do both. She wanted all of me and was always angry that I wouldn’t bring her more drugs, that she had to go out and get her own and that we tried to interfere with her addiction.  I find treating addiction the greatest challenge of my career. Everyone hates you. The patients, the families, and the government but there’s the drug pushers and candy men like Trudeau and everyone loves them. I was a bar tender and I was so loved by my customers back then.  I hold my dog and calm him in the night crying and thinking about Jesus.  Jesus suffers with us. On the cross with the liars and the thieves.  I’m not alone with my dog.
We come through the night and I go to work and don’t make a mistake. The College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Lawyers and the Premier and the Prime Minister and the patients demand absolute perfection from the doctor. One mistake and I’m punished for years.  I must smile always too.  I’m judged most on customer service. It’s better to cut off the wrong leg than God forbid ‘emotionally abuse’ someone.  I stopped a doctor and nurse killing patients and have never been forgiven. They were important people.  It’s okay to police nobodies. I’m a scapegoat and a jay walker whose crimes allow countless beurocratic police to avoid bothering the Hitlers and Stalin’s, the Kim Jong Un’s of the world. Hillary Clinton got away with Benghazi, there’s Hanoi Jane, and yet we all know that some woman claimed to remember that Trump groped her 40 years before.
I left Gilbert at home feeling guilty and alone.  I’m thankful Laura, his other love was coming over later.  When I got back I took him for another walk. He balks at everything. It’s terrible to see.  I remember my Dad going blind and my mother going deaf.  Losses sap the confidence.  I just got hearing aids and a few years back after a year of sinusitis lost a lot of my sense of smell.  The tuberculosis medication I took after getting TB working on the northern Canada Indian reserves might have contributed. A year of dangerous antibiotic treatment and they still say I don’t care. I’ll never be as good enough and perfect as a beurocrat or Prime Minister.  So many people are above the law but we’re all caught in God’s law.  Life and death and for a few of us taxes.  There’s all those Liberals with off shore accounts and French Canadian corporations with government bail outs and the good honest criminals like Mafia and Tong.    I was just thankful I didn’t get AIDS when I was treating the AIDs dementia patients getting spit on by them.  I preferred the fellows threatening me with guns and knives wanting drugs.  I ‘m terrified of the unseen like death.  I’m so depressed and crying, walking my dog feeling his fear and not being able to do anything for him. He startles at the slightest sounds.  I’m ridiculous as a man. Only women can show their feelings in Canada. They lied and told me it would be good if we were vulnerable but that just let the lizards get ahead while we pointed to the vulnerable bits where they hit us again and again.
i pray the St. Patrick’s Breastplate prayer for us, Christ above, Christ below, Christ beside, Christ in front, Christ Behind, - I beg for protection for us both. I pray he gets well. I don’t know what I will do with another love gone. I remember that Peter and Gordon song, “I don’t want to live in a world without love.” My ex wives hated me for leaving them.  Ironically the one who left me remains friendly.  But the following ones ended in loveless addicted rages dominated by angry insane drunken mother’s in laws.  I think of karma and blame and keep coming back to how if I’d been a better person and followed the rules and turned a blind eye to the killing by my superiors and shut the fuck up and not fought city hall and maybe just agreed and been pleasant with everyone and done as I was told , maybe my dog wouldn’t be blind. I used to think it was because I drank and smoked dope too much one year, a year sailing, a year after decades of service and duty and dealing with disease and death, a year I thought I’d have a break but there’s no break.  Justin Trudeau’s today offering me marijuana and euthanasia.  He’s on the wrong side of history. The youth today want fentanyl.  Trudeaus still the gateway to the abyss.
His father made having babies too expensive and everyone got abortions instead. Mortgentaller the greatest butcher of Canada got the Order of Canada for killing Catholic and Christian babies.  Pierre Trudeau ruined the Canadian economy and made it such that only the rich and immigrants and those single mothers in the government harem had children. Others were forced to work when they’d have gladly had children and lived a life like Sophie, Justin Trudeau’s wife with her palace life and nannies and her feminist husband.  I’m old today and I am offered marijuana and euthanasia. They’re even denying the old and dying opiates unless they want to go to the free heroin injection sites. It’s a theatre of the absurd.  Waiting for Godot.
I am so happy when my dog pees.  The fear post surgery is dehydration. It’s so hard to get him to drink.. I was worried he might need an IV.  I had to drag him to keep him moving. He put his butt down and wanted to die and saw me as so unkind.   I was so horrible so unhappy dragging the little guy.  Meanwhile there’s a whole lot of people phoning the SPCA to report my Cruelty to Animals. They don’t really care about him.  They weren’t up all night when he had his other eye removed  or this last night. They’re just seeing this big ugly old white guy dragging a little dog with a cone on his head and it’s so terrible that horrid man doing that to that little dog.  But he’s moving. He’d rather lie down in a corner and die. I want to lie down in a corner and die. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to turn on the news. I want to sail away into a hurricane and spend another month at sea alone fighting cold and high winds and leaks and navigating against currents and winds and living.  This is Chinese Water Torture.  More and more taxes and everything costs more and more and everyone hates and scorns and complains and there’s never enough because all the money goes to Media and Senators and Sports and War. The Security Council of the UN is simply the principle arms dealers of the world. We’re living in the perpetual war that Marx wanted.  We’re never going to see a worker’s paradise. Arjuna and Krishna knew this.  There will always be war and Canada is an arms dealer protected by the greatest country in history, the American Empire.  And everyone lives a lie.
My dog wants to curl up and die and I want to curl up and die and realize how much I depended on his daily joy because now I can hardly carry on.  I know parents don’t suicide like single people. I know that families that stay together are the most successful.  I know that if I’d been a better husband my marriage might have lasted. I I know all the mental health statitistics. I go to church and meetings and pray and meditate but nothing I do prepares me for my dog inconsolably  crying in wee hours of the night.
Laura arrives and we’ve come through the storm.  He’s in despair the rest of day but obviously is better lying on the couch between us.  At night she’s up half the night and I’m up half the night.  But the tide is turning. He had a poop at night. Such a good sign.  I want to dance and shout hallelujah. I was dragging him about  3 am because he was crying so loud.  But he peed some more. When he returned he drank more water.  In the morning he perked up when another dog went by on . He’s trusting me and doesn’t need to be dragged but prances high stepping behind me.
It was a long day.  I barbecued steaks and he ate a whole one himself cut in bits and hand fed Laura and me.   I’m afraid of the future. More dying to come.  He may be through this storm but how long can we live. I’m in ‘acceptance’.  I’m in ‘surrender’.  I’m praying and just figuring everyone is doing their best. If the government folk could do what Einstein did they’d not be playing police for the the UN warlords.  I like George Carlin saying ‘they own us’. All the talk of slavery and it not about now. Richard says, “It’s like I’m here in today struggling to get ahead and get by and everyone I meet is saying that I’m supposed to give them stuff for free because of something that happened before they were even alive’.  I can’t blame them for wanting it or taking it.   I just don’t ever see them giving up anything to those beneath them in these ‘generational’ arguments.  It’s all about who sets the ‘terms of reference’.
I’m not that good a manager. My father had a hundred and fifty men working under him and I don’t feel I”m very good at taking care of my dog.  Everyone claims they’re just following the rules. Dad was different. He was a real leader, respected and admired. Not many like that these days.  Mostly the leaders lead from behind.  We laughed because Dad was never in his suit but always in work clothes down with the men getting dirty and taking risks.  Todays’ leaders shoot you in the back, throw you under the bus.  They’re effete school boys who come with a brand name.  They disparage the old. I worry about us getting older.
Everyone has been so supportive with Gilbert.  Friends have come by and asked how we’re doing. I’m always stiff upper lip.  I liked that Dave and Emory his dog , Gilbert’s friend, showed concern. He understands. Most do.  We’re all , everyone I know at least, working stiffs, middle class or lower, getting by, being abused and disparaged by the elites and caring for family while doing more and more work for less and less.  There’s no room for sick dogs , sick children, sick old people. All they get is marijuana and euthanasia.
I liked reading a book, My Dog Is Blind, by Nicole Horsky.  A book anyone could read. Not too heavy on information but useful and reassuring . I liked that she said only one person asked why I didn’t put the dog down. Everyone else was supportive. No one has asked or suggested I put Gilbert down. I thought of it.  We’re living in a throw away consumer society.  The government is savaging the old.  Pensions after years of work are less than refugee’s scab voter pay.  Only the rich get medical care they need because the middle class and poor get waitlists instead.  I liked my patient who said how sorry he was to hear Gilbert was okay after surgery. He’d said how if he had a dog being so poor he’d not have been able to afford that and the dog would have had to be put down.  I’ve always worked and learned young to save and even in siege and war have tried to put some aside for rainy days, and now see the government stealing even that like the English stole the potatoes of the Irish and Scots.  I am thankful I could pay for the surgery.  I would have had a child but the woman aborted my baby. I would have adopted but I didn’t want the government living in my home.  The women I knew had lost their children to political correctness. As many children the kiddy police have saved the abuse of parents and families here is as great.  I  worked in the area and saw the utter disdain and abuse of children of the vulnerable by the courts, not because the children were at risk but because the parents were different and not politically correct . Even having a dog is frightening in Canada with everyone watching everyone and everyone having an opinion. In communist countries it’s always like living in an old Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie and these busy body government agent politically correct folk coming out without any risk to themselves to report and judge their neighbors.  They can smash your windows if a dog is inside panting. I can’t be a man in this country without being condemned and now I’m an old white man long past his due date with an old blind dog.
But he’s better today. He slept through the night. He’s peed today. No poop yet but he took the antibiotic in the liver worst.  Laura has been here and she’s been reassuring.
I know it’s a storm. I’ve been in hurricanes and survived typhoons.  It’s weird watching trees fly over your head.  This too will pass. I’m crazy enough when I’m nearly dying, when people have been shooting at my house, and gangs have been facing me with chains and knives.  I escaped from a group of Muslim men who robbed me and were screaming ‘Kill the Infidel”.  I escaped from a drunk Indian shooting at me screaming ‘Kill the Whitey’.  The acute stuff is easy. The slow chronic stuff like blindness and pain and life are harder. I’m older and it’s harder to deny death. One of the greatest books of all time was  the psychiatrist, Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death”.
This is just normal life. Gilbert’s better.  This too will pass.  The cone comes off in 8 days.   I'm grateful for the life that Gilbert and I have shared. I'm grateful for the excellent surgery. I'm thankful for Laura, George and friends.
Intergalactic Space Aliens will finally arrive. They're all look like unicorns and leprechauns.  God is good.




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