The Price of Shame

Monica Lewinsky, the onetime White House intern infatuated with Bill Clinton, has a great TED Talk called “The Price of Shame”.   In it she discusses her public shaming when details of her sexual affair with the president came out, including his semen on her blue dress, his penis in her mouth and his unlit cigar inserted tenderly into her vagina.   She was publicly humiliated and cyber-bullied as a result of these disclosures.  Her talk is excellent.

A friend of mine, also moved by her talk, tried to book her to speak at his local temple.   It turned out the temple did not have the budget to afford her speaking fee.  One of the prices of shame, apparently, if your shame has high enough public titillation value, is $20,000 to $50,000 per appearance.

I shit you not. 

Current Events

It just occurred to me that during elementary school we were regularly assigned something called Current Events as part of our homework.  The assignment was to read a newspaper or magazine article, stand in front of the small class of mostly well-to-do children (my small, boutique public school was at the time the top rated elementary school in New York City, according to my mother) and give an oral report on “current events”.

My father always took an interest in these current events assignments, often clipping out candidates from the New York Times, which he read front to back every day.  He taught me the importance of attaching the date to every artifact of “current events”.    He impressed on me that newspaper reports are the first draft of history, among the first sources historians study to get the full story many years later.   The date of an article is significant as more information becomes known and it’s sometimes fascinating to follow how a story changes over time.  

For instance, a few days ago Trump’s pick for acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, was not commonly known as the former CEO, (and apparently sole employee) of the Koch-funded (the rest of the donor list is “dark money”) Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (“FACT”), earning about $1,000,000 [1] donated by secret conservative donors in the three years preceding his appointment as AG Jeff Session’s chief of staff.   Whitaker just amended his financial disclosure form to include this income, according to recent reports. [2]   So an article written two weeks ago about possible conflicts of interest would not have included this interesting bit of conflict of interest for America’s current top law enforcement officer.

As I tapped in “current events ” in my previous post about Trump and the Muslim Brotherhood (the president is a lifelong secret member, people are saying) I flashed on myself at eight and nine years old, standing in front of the class, a thin scroll of newspaper clipping hanging from my hand, as I reported on current events.   My next thought was about the oral book reports we occasionally were called on to deliver.  

I was infatuated with baseball starting in third grade, the baseball bug bit me hard.  I studied the Hall of Fame, learned the history, memorized stats, followed the box scores in the paper every day, read many baseball biographies.  One day, in third grade,  I stood in front of my small class to deliver my report on a great biography of baseball immortal Jackie Robinson I had just read.  I was saving a big laugh line for the end, as the format called for talking about one dramatic moment in the book.   The moment I chose was when young Jackie Robinson was chased off an angry white guy’s lawn with words to the effect of “get off my property you little nigger.”  

Never having heard the word, it struck me as hilarious, easily as funny as Commie, another word I’d never been exposed to, until a friend of my mother’s described in horror one of the hate letters she got (they were proponents of school integration) that had a big red COMMIE written on the envelope (yeah, people were jerks in 1964).   For years afterwards my mother gave me shit for laughing uncontrollably every time my friend Rob or I called somebody a commie.

“Get off my property you little nigger” did not turn out to be the hilarious punchline I’d imagined it would be.  Nobody laughed, though I thought I’d delivered the line pretty well.   My teacher, Miss Mary Richert, regarded me with undisguised horror.   The little school had just been integrated that year, we had four black kids in our class, Bryan, Felice, Rani and Gayle.   Bryan was, in fact, my closest friend in third grade.   I don’t recall their reactions, odd to say.  Bryan certainly didn’t seem to hold it against me.   A week or two later our permanent record cards were being angrily amended by Miss Richert, in view of the whole class, furious that we had stayed behind in the gym to continue playing after the rest of the class marched back upstairs for math.

The notations Miss Richert wrote on our permanent record cards, Miss Richert, a teacher who clearly loved both me and Bryan, have haunted us both to this day, casting a very dark shadow over both of our lives, and I know I speak for Bryan too when I say this.

[1] New York Times and Washington Post reported the earnings at $1.2 million,   CNN put the figure at $900,000.   Either way, a comfortable three year salary for a man charged with actively opposing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

[2] CNN reported, nine days ago:

During his tenure, Whitaker was one of only two people on the payroll, and he made a total of $717,000 from 2014 to 2016. Funding for that salary and all of FACT’s work has come from mostly untraceable donors. Over a three-year period, FACT received $2.45 million in contributions, and all but about $450 of that came from a fund called DonorsTrust, according to IRS filings. Contributors to DonorsTrust are mostly anonymous, except for well-known conservative financier Charles Koch.

“In other words,” wrote the Center for Responsive Politics, “an organization ‘dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency’ gets 100 percent of its funds from a group that exists mainly as a vehicle for donors to elude transparency.”   source

yesterday’s update from CNN

The Muslim Brotherhood

The president used a throwaway line in his latest comment on the Saudi murder, in its consulate, of a Saudi journalist living in America and writing for a prestigious American newspaper, suggesting the murdered man had ties to terrorism.  POTUS engaged in his usual double-speak, claiming once again that it’s possible we will never know what happened to Jamal Khashoggi or who ordered his murder and dismemberment, no matter what the CIA learns through it’s now more than month-long investigation.  The CIA investigation indicates that Muhammad Bin Salman likely had something to do with this “tragedy”, and he very well might, OR, he might not!     

POTUS mentioned, though he didn’t say this is why the journalist deserved to be murdered, that he’d heard the dead man, Khashoggi, had been considered by the Saudis an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.   It’s possible, you dig, that he was a terrorist who advocated the murder of millions, universal Sharia law and that he hated our freedom, I’m just saying.  It’s also possible he left the consulate or started a fatal fistfight with the hit team sent to kill him and many other things are also possible and, shit, we’ll never know.   (And, it goes without saying, once more, that whatever happened to Khashoggi has nothing to do with the brutal Saudi war on the civilians of Yemen and the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis, as the world’s lying press calls it.)

My understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood (the above wikipedia link aside) is that it’s a militant fundamentalist organization that came of age in the prisons of Egypt where secular dictators imprisoned and tortured members of the radical religious right.   The Muslim Brotherhood, apparently founded in 1928, whose membership included  the military officers who overthrew Egypt’s last king in 1952, produced at least one influential writer and philosopher, Sayyyid Kutb.  I remember learning about Kutb after 9/11, though I see no mention of him in the wiki on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Kutb had apparently been horrified, when he was here as a college student after World War Two. at the materialistic, over-sexed consumer culture of America.     Returning to Egypt, he devoted himself to religious interpretation and making a political philosophy out of fundamentalist Islam.   His jihad was now to protect pious Muslims from this increasingly global corruption.    His books were influential and he was a close adviser to Gamal Abdel Nasser after Nasser took power in a military coup.  He wound up sentenced to death for his alleged role in a plot to overthrow Egyptian dictator/president Nasser, whose repeated high government job offers he had refused.  Nasser commuted Kutb’s sentence, leaving him in prison.  Years later Kutb was released, soon after arrested again, tried and hanged, this time for alleged involvement in another plot to assassinate Nasser.  The author of more than twenty influential books, Kutb wound up a martyr.

Among those influenced by Sayyid Kutb was the Egyptian political dissenter, Muslim Brotherhood member and physician Ayman Al-Zawahiri.   Al-Zawahiri also spent time in Egyptian prisons, was also tortured, was also a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood.   Later he would be second in command at Al Q’eada, sitting at the right hand of  Osama Bin Laden. [1]  He is assumed to be alive and currently commanding Al Q’eada, whose brand has taken a serious market-share hit since the killing of rock star terrorist OBL.

To my knowledge President schitt-breath is unaware of even this much history of the Islamist organization.   For his purposes it is enough to know it sounds bad, Muslim Brotherhood.   It sounds far worse than an inexperienced young medieval monarch rashly ordering the killing and dismembering of a political critic he hated — in his own consulate.  In spite of a long history of financial support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia now hates the Muslim Brotherhood [2].   Put it like this “Muslim Brotherhood” versus $450,000,000,000 from the Saudis for munitions, plus over ten million well-paying American jobs with full pension and benefits, unlimited calorie-free full-fat ice cream and plenty of great sex on demand.  USA!    USA!!!!!

 

 [1]  Recall the confusion on the lips of every talking head in America when they reported that Obama had executed Osama bin Laden, almost every one of them bungling the tongue-twister, interchanging Osama Obama Osama, Oh, mama!

[2] wikipedia:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia helped the Brotherhood financially for “over half a century”,[23][200] but the two became estranged during the Gulf War, and enemies after the election of Mohamed Morsi. Inside the kingdom, before the crushing of the Egyptian MB, the Brotherhood was called a group whose “many quiet supporters” made it “one of the few potential threats” to the royal family’s control.[201]

Three short summaries

For those who don’t like to wade through long posts, here are capsule distillations of three recent ones I struggled to get right (and edited numerous times for clarity before and after posting):

I was hurt for weeks over an inability to salvage my oldest friendship.  I finally composed a question to put the final pieces to the troubling puzzle in my hands.   I asked the guy what my final unforgivable act was.   He told me: my wife told me you recorded our last conversation, she told me you said you were mad enough to punch me in the face, she told me you said I was a pussy and she won’t be married to anyone whose so-called friend regards him as an unmanly coward.   link

I pondered the two most common approaches to anger: getting angry and repressing anger.   I concluded that the advantage to feeling anger, and sitting with it long enough to understand why you were angry, is that it gives you the possibility of having less anger in your life.   Repressing anger cannot lead to that place.  I provided an illustration or two of each approach.    link

An aggravating medical situation persisted for an additional week as I waited for test results that would determine whether I needed to worry about late stage bladder or prostate cancer.  The cause for my aggravation turned out to be a failure of technology (Samsung phone will not display T-Mobile voicemail notifications) and poor office follow-up with the doctor.   I learned, a week belatedly, that the doctor had promptly left me a compassionate voicemail with all the info I needed, but the message was not readily available on my phone.  His staff took days to follow-up with him and I didn’t get his subsequent voicemails until days after that. Things escalated unnecessarily as I kept receiving bureaucratic stonewalling, instead of empathy and help and the doctor kept leaving me messages I didn’t get as messages from the insane patient grew increasingly hostile.   Everything was finally resolved amicably during a short talk with the doctor.   link

That post, which began with a sentence claiming “we were both right” now begins, more precisely:

A completely avoidable misunderstanding, made possible by a design flaw and human error.  The first party did exactly the right thing, the second party was continually misinformed, by day seven both parties were right to be indignant, both parties were right to think the other a complete asshole.

Sometimes things actually shake out that way.   Both parties wind up angry, and both have good reason to feel angry, based on what they are each being told about the other.  Cutting out the unreliable “middleman” is really the only way to resolve this kind of difficulty.

 

I’m Not A Baby– YOU ARE!

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There is, of course, no law, rule, custom or practice requiring senate confirmation of special counsel investigating possible fraud, corruption and other high crimes and misdemeanors.   The senate has nothing to do with it, schitt-head.  

If there was such a law, lifelong Republican Robert Mueller would have obviously been voted down 51-49 as would any so called “independent” counsel who had not given a public oath of impartiality and personal loyalty to the man being investigated (as the original framers of the constitution clearly intended it).  

The attacked representative parried the tweet neatly:

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By the way, according to the president, the jury is still out on whether Saudi crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman ordered the execution of a journalist he hated.  The CIA rushed to judgment, recently concluding, based on all available evidence, that the order came from him.  After only six weeks!   SAD!   Presumption of evidence and schitt!!!!

Writing for real

I have to consider the possibility that all this writing I do is driven by a compulsion similar to what I regard as my graphomania, a sometimes uncontrollable urge to make marks on paper.   I write that sentence not to castigate or judge myself, but to view myself for a minute as others, untroubled by a need to set their thoughts and feelings down clearly in words, must sometimes view me.  

Put it this way, you can tell a complicated story to a friend who is quite interested in what you are talking about and they will always hear you out.  That same story, set out in 1,500 words, might well be unbearable for them to read.   Why is this insane bastard sending me this long section of his obsessive personal diary?   This insane bastard sings like a bird, why doesn’t he perform in a coffee house instead of madly singing to me?    We have coffee houses and clubs for singing birds, why is this bird sitting on my shoulder and singing directly into my ear?   Ewwwww…

Years ago, when I drew a lot, everywhere, somebody sitting next to me on the subway would from time to time ask me if I could always draw.   They sometimes seemed to be looking for a tip about how to draw.   I used to tell them that I always loved to draw, though I wasn’t especially good at it when I started, though I always found it great fun.   If you love something you will keep doing it and it’s natural that you’ll get better and better.   The love of the thing will keep you delighted to do it.   The delight will keep you at it and your mastery of the thing will improve.

I have often thought of this in regard to other things.   When you strike a note on a guitar, if you love the sound of the guitar, you will notice there are different ways to sound the note.   There is a great pleasure in this discovery.   If you strike the note with the soft pad of your finger the note has one sound, kind of round.   Think of the great bossa nova guitarists.   If you strike the note hard with a pick, your finger immobile on the note, you get a certain sound, you can also “attack” softly with a pick.   The kind of pick, hard or flexible, influences the sound of the note as does the gauge of the strings.   In addition to picking the note, you can hammer the note on, you can pull off to get another note.   If you fret the note below where it naturally sounds on the fretboard and bend the string up to it, you get another sound entirely, a singing sound.  You can bend the note one whole step, as blues guitarists and rock stars generally do — one distinct sound, or you can bend the note up a half step, as Django used to, a much different, and playful, sound.  There are also countless microtones you can stop on as you bend from one tone to another.   Mr. Clapton is a master of this, as is, more notably perhaps, and more masterfully, Mr. Beck,  Jeff Beck.  There is vibrato, plucking, tapping, fast picking, sliding a la glissando, harmonics, all kinds of ways to play a note.

All to say, if you love a thing, it is not work to learn more about it, to study it, to be so compelled that the thing itself is of infinite value to you.

I appreciate, more deeply than I can say, that in a robustly commercial society where all real value is monetary (and an unmonetized space, like the ad-free hold time of a business phone call, is a sadly wasted space, to those who love monetization above all else) what I have said above makes absolutely no sense.   A psychologist may agree that in terms of stress reduction, or increasing self-esteem, daily engagement in activities you do well and enjoy greatly are ‘mastery exercises’ that have mental health benefits to the individual.   Don’t found your life on them, mind you, but they have a certain value.

Found your life on your love of them at your peril, friends.   You may find yourself with excellent control of pencil, pen and brush, able to “kill an edge” with great precision in a way that will impress your friends if they are watching.   There used to be an ad on matchbooks “learn to drive the big rigs, flash a big bill-fold and impress your friends!”   If you’re doing it to impress your friends,  I completely understand.   Who am I to opine about what motivations are more noble or laudable than others?  As a teenager I deliberately set out to master a little piano, which I taught myself from what I knew on guitar, to impress girls.   It once actually worked!  She sat on my lap as I played Beatles songs with my arms around her, and the rest, a veritable magical mystery tour.

I sometimes imagine the electronic book of my life.  It would be lavishly illustrated, with some of the millions of images I continually make with no purpose except love of making the marks.  My desk is continually overflowing with them.  It is horrible in a way, this profusion of useless but largely beautiful debris.  I would select a hundred compelling images  and put them in the colorful book.  I would take a hundred pages of my best writing, maybe two hundred, place them between the pictures.   Since the technology is there, I’d add sound files, with some of the music I have come up with over the years.   You’d be happy to buy it.  You’d love it, if you were the right kind of person.

I try not to judge, though I am often unsuccessful in this.   People have very different experiences and expectations of life.  My own are eccentric in the eyes of many people, I realize that.  It comes with dancing to your own idiosyncratic rhythm section.  

I love reading well-written history books sometimes.  I love Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a masterpiece.   She writes, about the assumption, in the Jerusalem court that tried him for his enormous bureaucratic crimes,  that Eichmann was a normal middle class German of his time:

They preferred to conclude from his occasional lies that he was a liar — and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case.  Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.”  However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.”   This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.  (p.27)

As for the title of this post, real writing, at its best, makes you stop to wonder.  It changes, even for only a moment, how you think and feel and makes you consider your own life and the world around you in a different way.   It is wonderful shit.

The lesson of my father’s life

The painful regrets and too late apologies my father recited the night before he died dramatically illuminated mistakes to try to avoid in my own life.    My father had a quick wit, was sensitive, well-read, thoughtful, well-spoken.    He also saw the world as black and white, a zero-sum game that had only winners and losers.

“That’s not really how it is, Elie,” he told me in that weak dead man’s voice the last night of his life.  “I wish I’d been able to see the many gradations and colors of the world,  I think now how much richer my life would have been…”

As he was leaving the world he regretted his maniacal focus on being a “winner”, a silly abstraction in a game that everyone, in the end, must lose by giving up life, consciousness, all possessions.  Being a winner to my father meant never tolerating disrespect, and, more precisely, never losing an argument.   He was a strong, confident debater, even if he reflexively exerted this well-exercised power on his young children.   He deeply regretted this lifelong mistake and the merciless burdens it placed on his children, expressing his sorrow in a weak voice about sixteen hours before he breathed his last breath.

He came by his obsession with winning honestly, early in his life, but I think the word ‘winning’ is more properly rendered ‘surviving’ or ‘maintaining integrity’.   He’d been born in desperate poverty, raised by a cruel, violent, religious mother and a father of few words whose main concern was not getting beaten any more.   My father told me that he and his little brother were earmarked as classic losers, the sons of a brain damaged man, from day one.  Their future was decided by their uncle and his brilliant son and daughter — the Widem boys would go to trade school, learn to work sheet metal.   They were fit for nothing higher, in the opinion of the people in charge of the family.    Both made it to college, graduate school and the middle class, in spite of the odds against them.

 The fear and the indignities of their childhood never left them.  It didn’t help, of course, that all but a couple of their many aunts and uncles were slaughtered in a Belarusian hamlet that was wiped off the world map forever.  

“Elie, not to be a prick or anything,” said the skeleton of my father from his grave in Cortlandt, New York, “but didn’t you recently write over a thousand pages about my life already?   Presumably there were lessons in there too, I mean, in a sense, wasn’t that why you started the process in the first place?”    

Yes, of course.   My focus today is a little different, though.    

“Not seeing the sad parallels between my essentially solitary life and your own?   Locked in an endless battle to be conclusively right, in spite of your dedication to non-harm, or what did that little Indian guy who slept naked with his naked teenaged nieces to show he could overcome lust call it– ahimsa.   You know, you can be absolutely right and at the same time blind to the effect your insistence on being right has on others.”    

Jesus, dad, you’re reading my mind.   What I’m thinking about glancing from the computer screen to the window out into the grey afternoon, are the choices we make, how we use our time.   Not everyone is wired to think deeply on the things that vex them.    

“Well, I had a large part in wiring your brain that way, providing endless vexations for a small boy with a curious, nimble mind to brood upon.   Your imagination is a blessing and a curse.   Imagine less, sometimes you’re better off.   Look, clearly, you’re imagining these words of mine now, I am now but a long-time skeleton, a literary conceit, and maybe, at this point, also a tired one.   A rubber crutch, if you will.”

Funny as a rubber crutch, the jokes that killed vaudeville… 

“Yeah, listen, Elie, you write everyday but nobody is all that interested until a book or an article comes out of it.  Nobody you know is capable of being interested in that ton of verbiage you produce, even if most of it is well-written, even if some of it is genuinely insightful.    As that alcoholic dispatcher at Prometheus used to sympathetically tell you all the time, whenever you complained —  ‘nobody cares, nobody cares.’  

“A writer writes not for the handful of readers he or she knows, they write for people they don’t know, and they get paid to do it.  You grasp this, and yet, you are constantly disappointed that nobody you know gives a shit.  Nobody you know gives a shit, only you can care about this uncontrollably prolific output.   Trust me on this.  Get some of your writing in print and they will be very happy to be happy for you, even read it.  Were they not all happy for you when you got a few words published and paid for?”

Yes, they were unanimously happy for me, every one of them.    They read each of those hamfistedly edited thousand word pieces, loved ’em.

“I know what sent you to the keyboard to write this today.   You’re wrestling with a need to be right that suddenly seems to you uncannily like my need to be right, a need you correctly condemn as primitive and conflict-producing.   The need to be right is deeply human, it’s also at the root of most human conflict.   Most people when they begin fighting with an old friend, have the same fight a few times, conclude the other person is not worth fighting with and walk away.   The person who keeps fighting is an unreasonable jerk, not a friend.  Done.  

“You don’t do this, though, do you?   You’re always looking for some kind of deeper principle about the way friends should treat each other, why this person is not a friend but a deluded, clueless antagonist.   You write thousands of words about it, like you’re insane.  You think you are working out some dark puzzle about human nature, but, seriously, Elie, what the fuck?”

That is what I am wrestling with, all of the above.   If we are to live principled lives, isn’t it necessary to clearly understand the principles we live by?

“That depends on how many angels are dancing on the head of a particular metaphysical pin.  Yes, you’ve come to the same conclusions about particular people that I did when I was alive.   We disagreed about my need to condemn and walk away from them, and years later you came to the same conclusion I did.  So what?   Why should this concern you?   The old lady who constantly lied, taught her daughter to lie, who in turn taught her son and insane daughter to lie— where is the mystery in any of that?  The woman who did not know how to not fight kept irrationally fighting with you?   Quelle surprise, monsieur!   as we used to say in Peekskill.  What is this sudden torment today?”

I want to nail the lids on the coffins of a trio of glowering vampires.  

“God bless you, then, son, that’s what you do with vampire coffins.   Why even agonize a second about taking a stake to the undead?   Take a hammer, or a rock, and nail that shit closed, bang! done, next case!    Lights, camera, action!  Enough with the Hamlet routine– be done.”

The chill that is making the trees outside this window tremble creeps into this room.  The fading light outside a premonition, touching me lightly with Isaac Babel’s cold, dead fingers.    The imperative keeps goading me — to find a resting place for my thoughts.

In fairness to POTUS

The president once again displays that he is at least as non-partisan, fair-minded and democratically inclined as his recent Supreme Court pick, Justice Kavanaugh.  If you need proof of this, look no further than his latest prophecy:

Trump tweet.JPG

The wags on the internet are saying the only university that might study this would be Trump University.   Fake news fucks…

On a more serious note, who on earth is Peter S, and why are those vicious crooks defending him?  Sounds sinister indeed!

A Modern Tragedy

A completely avoidable misunderstanding, made possible by a design flaw and human error.  The first party did exactly the right thing, the second party was continually misinformed, by day seven both parties were right to be indignant, both parties were right to think the other a complete asshole.  It took seven days for these things to shake out, once the truth became clear, and it is a modern tragedy completely of the digital age.  The whole ugly thing could have been avoided, but for a failure of technology (and, failing that, human follow-up).

When I was fifty my mother and Sekhnet ganged up on me to make me buy private health insurance [1].   One of the first doctors I saw was wiry a young urologist who introduced himself, with a firm handshake, as Matt.   He looked at my records, smiled and said “fifty years young.”   He was probably thirty-one at the time.   Matt was very good about returning an email.   If I had a concern or question I had his return email within a very short time.   This alert responsiveness to a patient’s concerns is an excellent trait in a caregiver.

Five weeks ago I had a single two-day incident of gross hematuria, blood in the urine (with clot).   The second day I painlessly passed a soft blood clot half the size of a Q-tip and that was the end of the bloody urine.   I went to Matt’s office and had a CAT scan and blood and urine tests at the end of October.   My last test was a cystoscopy (google it) on November 8, when I would also get the other test results and some medical insight, but the cystoscopy had to be postponed at the last minute, for a legitimate, unforeseeable reason.   My new test was scheduled for a month later.   I wanted to know the results of the CT scan and other tests, to know if those tests had ruled out the possibility the hematuria was a final symptom of late stage bladder or prostate cancer.

When the cystoscopy was rescheduled I called to ask Matt the results of the previous tests.  His receptionist told me he’d get right back to me.  When I didn’t hear back, I called the following day and the receptionist expressed surprise, told me she’d given him the message, that he was very good about getting back to patients.   I called back twice more over the next few days and on day four I asked for Matt’s email address to follow up (my last email to him was maybe ten years back and they’ve changed email addresses).  I was told they don’t give out personal email addresses for doctors.  I persisted and was reluctantly given the email address of  the director of the urology office.  She would forward the message to Matt, which was better than nothing.  I sent a detailed email.  I knew once Matt read the email he’d get right back to me.

On the fifth day, still having heard nothing, I was connected to the director of urologic delay who told me she wouldn’t be able to forward the email to him until two days later, when he was physically in the office.   This was some kind of semi-rational but inviolable protocol at the corporation that employs Matt.   When she told me this I restrained a snarl and told her to keep in mind that the next step for me, if I didn’t hear back two days later, was filing an ethics complaint.

In the late afternoon of the day the email was supposed to have been forwarded to Matt I found the number for the Patient Services Administration.   The woman I spoke to placed me on a long hold to speak to the urology department.   I hung up and waited for her return call, which came a few minutes later.   I was promised a call from her supervisor, probably the following day.    A few minutes later I got a call from Matt’s receptionist, telling me the doctor wanted to speak to me.   She put me on hold.  After a minute or two on hold I hung up.  Matt called back, but his number kept coming up “Scam Likely” on my phone and I ignored the first couple of calls.  Thankfully, he persisted.  

He was plainly aggrieved, since he had already done exactly what any patient would have wanted him to.  He didn’t know what was the matter with me, why I was threatening an ethics complaint.  An ethics complaint, seriously?   He told me he’d left me at least four messages since day five, the first time he’d heard that I’d called.  He had all the date and time stamps of his calls on his phone, in case I needed proof that he’d called me numerous times.   He then made an excellent, very cogent argument defending his behavior and questioning mine.  

I told him I’d had only one missed call from “private”, early in the morning of day five, but no message.   I get notifications of missed calls and I’d had only that one.   He told me that I need to learn to use my phone, because he’d left at least four voicemails.   He told me I should perhaps get a “second opinion” from another urologist.   He was clearly hurt and pissed, felt unfairly attacked.  We patched things up, he told me the tests had come back fine, gave me his email address (in violation of hospital policy, he noted), and we said goodbye.

There is a known issue with voicemail on my phone that is now also known to me.  It is known to Samsung, who makes my Galaxy S-8 phone, and known to T-Mobile, the company that provides my cell phone service.   It is impossible to get notification of new voicemails, somehow.   Frustrating, yes, and there are youTube videos and user forums about it, but nobody, including the tech experts at either company has a solution.   I spent almost two hours with experts at both companies and searching the web.   You can’t fucking do it.   Unless you periodically check for voicemail you have no way of knowing if you have any new messages or not.   I didn’t fully grasp this until Matt chided me for not retrieving his several messages.  I rarely check voicemail, most of them left by robots, because people who need to reach me send a text, an email or a WhatsApp and I get right back to them.

I went through my mostly robotic voicemails and found his first, not from five days after the postponed cystoscopy, as he’d told me, but from the moment I was supposed to have been having the procedure, less than half an hour after I spoke to his receptionist. He informed me that the CAT scan was fine, the urine cell test showed nothing suspicious, that to be thorough he needed to take a two minute peek into my bladder, but that there was nothing to worry about.   He said he knows how anxiety producing this kind of thing can be but that I should be reassured that the tests had all come back fine and there was no likelihood of a worst case scenario.

Now, a full week later, he was peeved because an insane patient, probably driven mad by unwarranted anxiety, kept calling, sent a controlled but clearly angry email and was escalating things in the bureaucracy and threatening to put him in front of an ethics board.    I was peeved because I kept being told that the doctor had my message and that I simply had to put my thumb back up my ass and continue waiting for his call.  

He was right to be peeved, since not only had he done nothing wrong, he had done the very thing you want your doctor to do, and he’d been compassionate in his message as well.   I was right to be peeved, because as far as I was being told by his staff, Matt was now simply acting like the bureaucratic, liability alert, ass-covering institution he works for and there was nothing I could do about it, except to stop bothering them.   Nobody I spoke to apparently even bothered to follow up with him until day five.  If his receptionist had talked to him the first time I called back, he would have told her to have the patient check his voicemail.  And — done.  I’d have left him a thank you note.  As it is I sent him an email clarifying and apologizing, though, based on what I was told every time I called his office, I hardly knew what else I could have done, given the information I was getting.

A modern day tragedy, seriously.   Each of us assumed the ubiquitous technology was working as designed, each of us assumed the other was acting badly.   The only saving grace that kept things from getting really ugly is that the doctor I was dealing with is a mensch, something that I also strive to be.

 

[1]  It was fairly expensive, even at the discounted rate for my low income, and my premiums increased by 10% to 20% every year, doubling within a few years.    I pay much, much less now under the Affordable Care Act.