We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.

A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation.   A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure.   The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading.  I was relieved. 

A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have.  There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy.  As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up.  Here’s what the device looks like:

I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans.   The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low.  I needed to talk to my doctor.  The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor.  My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give  informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.

This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response.  Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon.  It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question.  It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.

It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk.   There aren’t multiple sides to this story.  If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story.  You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is.  It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.

Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.

You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.

Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.