Some days I wake up with a feeling of dread that can be hard to shake.  Last night I slept eight hours but woke up feeling like I’d hardly slept.  There was a feeling in an unfamiliar part of my stomach, at the base of my bladder, other places where I’d been recently poked, probed and prodded — the reminder of bad medical news and an unscheduled operation I need to set up and have soon.  My eyes took a long moment to focus, the cataracts, after years of slowly making themselves known, appear to be spoiling for a fight with an eye surgeon.  The feeling of dread became more and more palpable.  It persists as I tap these keys.  I switch from first to second person in order to pry a little emotional distance from this persistent unease in the proverbial pit of my stomach.

That feeling in the pit of your stomach is telling you the truth. Dread needs to be dealt with. In the case of medical worries, those must be put on the calendar and treated, no matter how badly many of your recent medical experiences may have gone. In the case of making a difficult case, when you have right 100% on your side, which alone gains you nothing, you must calm yourself again and address what remains to be done in the short time left before the short SOL (statute of limitations) leaves you SOL (shit out of luck).

It is not hard to recognize that having detailed concerns about mistreatment by a professional dismissed in three curt sentences by the board that oversees professional discipline, without a hearing, without access to the evidence used to dismiss the complaint, without the right to appeal, would awaken a strong feeling of injustice instilled during a traumatic upbringing.  You will not be heard,  all concerns dismissed, if you write them down your arguments will be deemed unpersuasive, there is no appeal, asshole.   Why would fighting this familiar, mind-fucking battle, in court this time, feel any different as the clock winds down and your right to contest an arbitrary and capricious summary dismissal is about to disappear forever?

Why would an office of professional discipline not take five or six unethical acts complained of into consideration before dismissing a complaint without a hearing and with no right to appeal? You tell me, judge.

Why would a parent, hours before death, tell an adult child that the abuse they subjected them to was, in a real sense, never personal?  “I’d have acted the same brutal way toward you no matter what you did, no matter who you were” said my father, in that dying man’s voice he had at the end.  The only way you get to hear something like that from an abusive parent is by remaining supremely mild and calm in the face of strong emotion.  There is rarely anything to be gained by pointing out the monstrousness of a monster.  The dread might remain, but you obtain a certain advantage over it by remaining as calm and deliberate as possible facing its cause.