Tag: A Visit to the Doctor/Nurse

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Visits with the Doctor on Summer Afternoons by Ricky

By March 1968, I was fresh out of Air Force basic training and assigned to Goodfellow AFB, Texas, where I entered training to become a “radio intercept analyst.” These are the military personnel who work from remote and isolated locations, like mountain tops, listening to radio transmissions from countries to collect secret intelligence data. Of all the jobs that were available when I was still in basic training, this one seemed the most interesting and challenging.

I completed phase-one training with the highest score in my class. All thirty graduates of the class performed base details for three months while awaiting the Top Secret phase-two training to begin. I never entered the second phase of training because of a doctor; the base psychiatrist to be specific.

Some background information is needed here for clarification as the story unfolds. From the age of 10 in 1958 until I left home for college at 18 in 1966, I lived in what is now known as South Lake Tahoe. I had little to no social life outside of weekly Boy Scout meetings and periodic campouts because my ten-year younger twin brother and sister needed babysitting. Our parents were alcoholics and were mostly absent during the week until 1 or 2 AM, after the bars closed.

Consequently, I became very naïve about life in general and living in the adult world. Emotionally incomplete I was not prepared to face college away from home and continued to have no social life maintaining a hermit-like existence. As a result, I failed my first year of college and needed to join the Air Force in 1967 to avoid being drafted into the army or worse yet, the marines.

At Goodfellow AFB, I continued to be socially awkward and so rapidly developed a case of home-sickness. I requested my commander or first sergeant to let me talk to a counselor, but no appointment was ever made. During the break between classes, an investigator interviewed all of us waiting for the next phase of training to begin. His purpose was to gather enough information to complete a background check to see if we could be cleared to have access to Top Secret material.

During my interview, he asked me if I ever had any homosexual experiences. I told him that a friend and I once mutually masturbated each other when we were 16. He then asked if I had ever talked to a psychiatrist about it. I replied that, I had read such behavior was considered “normal” so I wasn’t worried about it. He inquired how I was “doing” in the military environment and I replied that I was a bit home-sick but otherwise okay. He wanted to know if I wanted to talk to someone about it and I told him that my commander or first sergeant was supposed to be getting me an appointment but nothing had occurred yet. He told me don’t worry, I will get you one. One week later I had my first appointment, not with a counselor but with the base psychiatrist.

I don’t really remember his face or specific age, but I do remember that he was not “old” or “elderly” in my point of view. That first visit took place about 2PM in his assigned offices. The female receptionist took me to an examination room, told me to undress down to my shorts, and the doctor would be with me in a few minutes. I did as she asked. The doctor came in and introduced himself and told me to sit on the exam table. He then proceeded to give me what was a common physical examination which included the “turn-your-head-and-cough” hernia check. I was too young to need a prostate check, thank goodness.

After the exam, he had me dress and meet with him in his office so we could talk about why I was there. I told him about the home-sickness and we talked for the remainder of an hour. Over the next few weeks, I met with him four or five more times. The only difference was each of those following times, the appointment was at 4:45 PM and so the receptionist would leave for the day prior to the doctor seeing me. In other words, we were alone in the building. Each time he began our sessions by giving me a complete physical exactly the same as before. I always wondered why at the time, but he was an officer and a doctor. As a doctor I didn’t question him and since I was taught to obey all officers, I didn’t question him either; I just did what I was told to do.

The very last appointment was different. It began benignly enough with the physical exam, but this time after having me stand for the hernia check he had me lay back down on the table naked (with my hands at my side) and began to ask me questions about my relationships with my relatives and friends back home; questions we had discussed in our previous meetings in his office. Partway through the questioning he began to flip my penis back and forth using his index finger. I was surprised to say the least, but as I said previously, he was a doctor and an officer so I said nothing other than to answer his questions.

It is said that men think with their penis. It is not possible for the penis to think, but I can tell you it is completely difficult for the brain to concentrate while the penis is demanding attention and more blood. By the time he asked me about my relationship with my father I was nearly brain dead for speech. My penis was only half erect and I told him that he should stop. He said, “Why?” and I replied, “Because you are beginning to turn me on.” He said, “You let me worry about that.” and continued to flip it back and forth. He suddenly switched from flipping it to masturbating it slowly, but it only got a bit more erect. By this time he was not asking any more questions. Shortly, he asked me if my penis got harder. I told him it did and he told me to make it hard. So now I became the one masturbating myself in front of him. I was so nervous that after about two minutes my penis would not get any more erect than 75% of what was possible. I stopped and told the doctor and he told me to get dressed and come to his office.

Once in his office, he wanted to know what I had meant when I said he “…was turning me on.” I explained that I only meant he was giving me an erection. He then told me he was removing me from further training because he did not think I “… could stand the strain of an isolated or remote assignment.” I was shocked and dismayed and pleaded with him not to do this; but to no avail.

Soon thereafter, I was transferred to Hurlburt Field (Eglin Auxiliary Field #9) near Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, 50-miles east of Pensacola. (This was the airfield that General Doolittle trained his pilots and aircrews for the 30-seconds over Tokyo attack during WW2.) When I left Goodfellow AFB, I just put the memory away as unimportant because I did not know or recognize that he had done something illegal and totally unethical. The rest of my life continued from that point and location, but in a different direction from what I had been expecting.

Strangely enough, in my official Air Force medical records, the only record of my appointments with the psychiatrist is of the first appointment. None of the rest are documented in my medical records and any mental health records are also missing or non-existent. It would be quite surprising, if the doctor had left a medical record of his molesting a patient.

Does anyone else have a similar experience with a military or civilian doctor?

© 24 June 2013

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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A Visit to the Doctor/Nurse by Lewis

This story is not just about one visit to a doctor or nurse. It involves multiple visits to several doctors. But it is all just one story. It does not have a happy ending. Nor does it paint a particularly flattering picture of the state of the health care industry in the U.S. today. The names of the medical professionals have been abbreviated to obscure their true identities. The source material was not my personal recollection primarily, though I was present for each of the events, but was taken from my late husband’s personal journal, written at the time of the events in question.

In the summer and fall of 2003, Laurin’s PSA level began to rise. He was 77 years old. At one point, his PSA level was measured at 19–almost double what was considered to be on the high side of normal. His doctor, Dr. S, recommended a biopsy of his prostate. On this particular visit, Dr. S. was accompanied by a young female intern, who was “shadowing” him. Dr. S. asked if it was OK if she was present for the visit. Laurin consented.

In the corner of the doctor’s office was an unusual type of lamp. It rested on the floor with a long neck that curved from vertical to horizontal and had a small, elongated but high-powered lamp on the end. I asked Dr. S. what the lamp was for. He said, “I’ll show you”. He asked Laurin to lie back on the examination table and pull down his underwear. He placed the light at the end of the lamp under Laurin’s scrotum and turned it on. With the light behind it, the scrotum became translucent. Dr. S. said, “See that? That’s water.” I could not begin to imagine what his point was.

Our next appointment was even more bizarre. It was a Monday. Apparently, Dr. S. was intending to perform the biopsy on Laurin’s prostate. However, Laurin and I were both confused on that point. Consequently, we had not done the necessary prep. In addition, Laurin (and I) had a number of concerns about possible adverse effects of the biopsy. (Biopsy of the prostate involves inserting an instrument through the anus. Triggering the device causes a hollow needle-like device to penetrate the wall of the rectum and snatch a bit of tissue from the prostate gland. If any procedure is likely to invoke queasiness in a male patient, including me, it is this one.)

Dr. S.’s response was to basically go ballistic. After assuring us that complications have arisen from less than 0.1% of such tests he added, “If you (meaning Laurin) were a 5-year-old, I would simply tell you to lie down and take it.”

Well, that was the end of our doctor-patient relationship with Dr. S. We started seeing another urologist, Dr. H. He informed us that Laurin’s PSA was at 9. No explanation was given for the apparent sudden drop. In addition, Laurin’s Gleason Score–a measure of the aggressiveness of the cancer–was 7. These numbers are borderline-positive for Stage IIa prostate cancer.

The recommended therapy for Laurin was radioactive seed implants, also known as internal radiation therapy. This involves inserting a large number of tiny pellets of a radioactive isotope, such as plutonium, into the prostate gland. In Laurin’s case, approximately 70 of these tiny pellets were placed, one-at-a-time, into his prostate by a radiological oncologist, Dr. T. The patient is given a local anesthetic and the process takes less than an hour. The after-effects are mild and short-lived. I was in the waiting room of the doctors’ clinic the entire time. Eventually, the prostate dries up–I won’t say is fried–so that it looks like a date…or raisin, I’m not sure which.

On one of the follow up visits with Dr. H., Laurin was in the examining room waiting for more than a few minutes. When Dr. H. came in, he couldn’t find some instrument that he needed and in a pique of righteous rage at the negligent nurse, with his arm swept everything on the counter onto the floor. I could hear the commotion in the waiting room. Time to look for urologist number three. (Some time later, I asked Dr. T, the radiological oncologist, who was really quite civil and was himself suffering from a rare form of bone cancer, “What is the deal with urologists, anyway?” He answered to the effect that urologists are notoriously emotional creatures, which I interpreted as, “When it comes to your dick, don’t get sick.”

Recently, medical researchers have been telling men that they should stop getting routine PSA tests if over a certain age. They tell us that a very high percentage of us will develop prostate cancer–somewhat like Alzheimer’s Disease–but that it is very slow growing and we could very well die of some other cause first. Laurin was given similar counseling by Dr. H. early on. Yet, doctors don’t put croissants on the table by not treating disease. I don’t know what Laurin’s life would have been like had he not had the internal radiation therapy. I do know what his life was like for years after the treatment, however.

Fecal incontinence, according to Dr. T., affects only about 5% of men who have had the seed implants. Just another seemingly inconsequential factor in balancing prostate cancer treatment against letting it run its course. Other friends of mine who have had surgery to remove the prostate ended up with a perforated rectum or lifelong impotence. In terms of the impact upon a man’s quality of life after age 75, I would have to say that fecal incontinence must be the worst of the three side effects. The horrors Laurin and I went through are too embarrassing and humiliating to attempt to describe here. Let me just say that they led to him having to put severe restrictions on his social life, undergoing a colostomy, and suffering the complete loss of his self esteem.

Let me end this diatribe with this caveat: the medical profession will never say “No” to a decision to fight cancer with everything you’ve got. Medical costs during the last year of life account for an enormous chunk of Medicare dollars expended. In America, we tend to believe in “fight to the last ounce of your strength” or, as Dylan Thomas wrote:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,


Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

However, if the light has faded to a dung brown, perhaps it’s dying be a blessing.

© 22 June 2013 




About the Author


I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth.

Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

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Visits to the Doctors by Phillip Hoyle

I started going again to the doctors in my late twenties when my life seemed to complicate and I had started feeling stresses of work that caused pain and left me seeking relief.

Oh, I’d been to doctors before. Surely it was a doctor who delivered me from my mother’s womb, a doctor who filled my teeth, a doctor who gave me a physical in preparation for going to scout camp, a doctor who removed my plantar warts, a doctor who checked my dislocated knee, and a doctor who examined my throat and found I had both strep infection and the kissing disease, mononucleosis. These were specialists and my visits all related to crises or organizational demands. I’d go to their sterile offices, talk to them in their white lab coats, open my mouth, drop my pants, and otherwise skirt their world of science and be properly impressed. I needed their expertise I suppose but wasn’t really all that interested in what they had to say or prescribe.

I have a close friend now and who has a different relationship with doctors, whom he visits on numerous occasions for any variety of illnesses—real and imagined. My friend sees at least one or more doctors weekly and often tells me what his cardiologist or his dermatologist or his back doctor or his general practitioner or his internalist or his surgeon or some other specialist has said about his illnesses. It seems to me that beyond his own education in business and bookkeeping he has pursued a medical education in the hallowed halls of hospitals and clinics, a constant search for remedies, medicines, and knowledge to improve his day-to-day well being and treat his several conditions.

I don’t report this kind of phenomenon in my friends and acquaintances without revealing my own preoccupation with specialists for I, too, have sought knowledge from the doctors. I too have been enamored of their offerings, specialties, and diagnoses, but rather than radiologists I have visited musicologists, rather than endocrinologists I have sat at the feet of philologists, rather than chiropractologists I have preferred historiologists.

My manic phase of learning from doctors began in my late teens, reached a huge crescendo in my early thirties, and then quickly diminished (frankly a great relief to my wife at the time). My obsession slackened when I realized I had been in school for twenty-two of my thirty-three years. For more than a decade I had visited the offices, lecture halls, theaters, labs, and libraries of learning about theology, musicology, and biblioraphgy. I read dictionaries, scholarly studies, philosophies, essays, novels, short stories, periodicals, codices, and manuscripts in my pursuit of a wide variety of intellectual topics. My doctor’s names included Van Buren, Lee, Childs, Duke, and Beckelheimer, scholars who led me into the literatures of their specialties. I couldn’t read enough, hear enough, or absorb enough for years.

Finally I had had enough and nearly quite seeing them—doctors of all kinds. My decision to curtail my extravagance wasn’t because I was cured of my need to learn and know. I simply was tired of the institutions that offered the doctors’ advice—the schools with their curriculum plans, requirements, and tests. So I decided to self-medicate my need, to read on my own, to attend only seminars and workshops of interest, and eventually I gave up most of those things in order to begin writing my own essays and my own stories, a change that seems to have become my ultimate self-treatment. Forgive me if I have sinned, but for my penance just promise me not to take away my tablets, pens, or word processor.

Mea culpa.

Denver, 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot

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A Visit to the Doctor and Nurse by Michael King

I think the first time I had a severe swelling reaction was in Duluth in 1964. I woke up one morning and my face was so swollen that I couldn’t open my eyes. After a few hours the swelling subsided enough for me to go to the base medical clinic. No one knew what it was, why it was and nothing was done. The swelling went down and the mystery was unsolved.

I’m not sure how many times I had these swelling occurrences but they were always in a different part of the body.

The last one was the most dramatic. I woke up with a terrible need to urinate, a greater need than at any other time in my life. I was in terrible pain and unable to pee. My wife drove me to the emergency room. I remember the doctor stated that it was unusual for this to happen to someone so young. I was around 37 I think. My urinary track was swollen shut and my bladder was close to bursting. In another hour or so it would have. The doctor thought at first that it was an enlarged prostrate. It wasn’t. I had never had a catheter and felt totally violated as it was being inserted. The nurse appeared in front of me with a bucket and when the tube finally entered the bladder the force of the urine was too much for her bucket. It was knocked out of her hands. She was doused from head to toe and the wall and door across the room was generously sprayed.

I had to use the catheter for some days until the swelling totally subsided. The doctor was concerned that next time it could be my heart or at least a more serious place if and when I would have another swelling episode. He had no idea as to the cause.

As I have done in the past I pulled a Jimmy Carter and sat in a chair in the living room and declared that I wasn’t going to move till I had an answer as to the cause of these swelling episodes. Jimmy Carter did something similar with the Rose Garden during the Iranian hostage crisis. Almost instantly I had an answer. A memory of my ear swelling some years before when I wore a cheap earring popped into my consciousness. It was nickel plated. Therefore I must have an allergy to nickel. My dermatologist said there was no such thing as a metal allergy. I knew better and since then the medical profession acknowledges and treats metal allergies.

I eliminated all aluminum cookware, foil and used only glass, iron and stainless steel cookware, avoided restaurant food (they cook in aluminum almost exclusively). There is often nickel in aluminum products. The amount varies as aluminum is often recycled. I have not had a swelling episode since.

There were many other times I ended up in emergency rooms, but I think seeing that nurse get doused is one of my most vivid memories when it comes to a visit to a doctor and a nurse.

© 24 May 2013

About
the Author

I go by the drag name, Queen Anne Tique. My real name is Michael King. I am a gay activist who finally came out of the closet at age 70. I live with my lover, Merlyn, in downtown Denver, Colorado. I was married twice, have 3 daughters, 5 grandchildren and a great grandson. Besides volunteering at the GLBT Center and doing the SAGE activities,” Telling your Story”,” Men’s Coffee” and the “Open Art Studio”. I am active in Prime Timers and Front Rangers. I now get to do many of the activities that I had hoped to do when I retired; traveling, writing, painting, doing sculpture, cooking and drag.

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A Visiting Doctor by Gillian

Yes, I’m going back to the days when rather than you visiting the doctor, he, or very occasionally, she, came to visit you. Doctors of those days tend to suffer from a certain type-casting. In the old Western movies they are usually gruff, monosyllabic, and the town doctor frequently doubles as the town drunk. In British period pieces, the village doctor tends to be gruff, monosyllabic, usually Scottish, and enjoying a dram, or two, or three, of an evening beside the smoky fire.
My grandmother had fallen into something between a deep sleep and a coma, so my dad walked to the nearest pub where he borrowed the phone to call Dr. MacElroy. Now those of you who have paid attention have met my paternal grandmother before, and will remember that there was no love lost between my grandmother and my mother and me, or even my father, her own son. She showed none of us any affection. All I ever learned from her, as the dog and cat learned even faster than I did, was to stay a walking cane’s length away or I would get a whack from that cane apparently just on principle; I didn’t actually have to do anything to deserve it.

Enter the gruff, monosyllabic and very Scottish Dr. MacElroy, breezing up in his brand-new Austin-Healey Sprite, a zippy little sports car from which my father had great difficulty diverting his hungry gaze. The good doctor shuffled his way up the dark staircase to Grandma’s bedroom, and shortly shuffled his way back down again.

“Aye, she’s deeead.”

All three of us started in surprise and involuntarily glanced up at the ceiling through which sounds somewhere between labored breathing and snores issued.

Doctor MacElroy harrumphed into his scraggly moustache.
“ No’ now!” He glared at us irritably. “But she’ll no’ make it tae the kirk o’ Sunday.”

Seeing that I, in the few years I had so far inhabited this world, had never known my grandmother to go to church on Sunday or any other day, I didn’t find this assertion earth-shaking.

The next day he appeared again, skidding to a halt in a spray of gravel, his brisk driving the very antithesis of his slow, shuffling gait, not to mention his slow, shuffling personality. Again he huffed and puffed his way upstairs and down, only to declare,

“Aye, it’s o’er.”

Not one of us was fooled into looking up towards the stentorian snoring this time, and he departed in another shower of gravel.

The next day when he arrived, all was silent above the living room.

“Aye,” he muttered on descending the stairs, and helped himself to a seat at the dining table in order to complete the death certificate. Over three days and three visits he had spoken a grand total of twenty words. I guess stereotypes are born and thrive simply because so many people really fit them, and Dr. MacElroy certainly fit the bill. I can never know whether he sipped a few shots of single malt by the fire on a winter’s evening, but as perfect as he was in every other way, how could he not?

Denver, 2013

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Visiting the Doctor by Nicholas

I like my doctor. I believe that if you do not like your doctor, you should get a new doctor. It’s a very personal relationship but I do not want my doctor to be my friend. He or she has to know a lot or maybe even everything about me, but my doctor also has to be a scientist who might someday give me some bad news, bad news that I am better off knowing. So you see there’s intimacy involved but not a buddy kind of intimacy.

I used to prefer women doctors but then I had one for a while at Kaiser whom I didn’t like and then I found a male doctor whom I did like so I don’t care anymore about the gender of my doctor. The last woman doctor I had possessed all the traits that I used to identify with not liking in men doctors. She was abrupt, arrogant, and not very communicative. One visit we were dealing with high blood pressure and she just handed me a pill and a glass of water. I had to ask what it was and what I was supposed to do with it. Then she prescribed a medication that was totally wrong for me. It took months but I finally got her to come around to prescribing a better medication that does work for me. I pushed the issue because I got some good advice from friends who were doctors themselves.

After that doctor, I found a really good doc at Kaiser who was very friendly and communicative. He was a gay doctor, of course, and though I insist on being out to any doctor I meet, his being gay made things easier. He also could practice medicine by phone and email without office visits because Kaiser had a system set up to do that. One time I came home from travelling in Europe with a nasty intestinal bug. I described the symptoms to him and he said it sounded like a pretty common problem and I could either do lab tests to determine the precise bug or he could give me a prescription to treat it. I said, in my misery, just treat it. The treatment worked.

But then I changed health insurance plans and had to find a new doctor. I got some referrals from the GLBT Center’s list of gay-friendly providers and set up an appointment. I had some questions and wanted to talk to my doctor candidates to get to know them before I signed on for any treatment. I found a doctor who was easy going and friendly. I told him I was gay and I told him I had a partner whom I expected would be included in any medical issues. He had no problem with that.

I’ve since grown to like and trust my doctor. He doesn’t over treat problems and I am learning from him when to panic and when to just take some aspirin or a nap. He has a casual style I like. When I see him about some problem, he always asks me how big a deal it is, how much something is interfering with my life. There are always treatments doctors can order up, but do you really need or want them? For example, my doctor sent me to a physical therapist to help me through a knee problem instead of to a surgeon for replacement.

Given my own medical history—which is pretty minor—and having lived through the AIDS epidemic with friends and having a husband with a very complicated and ongoing medical condition, I have learned a lot about dealing with doctors and nurses. Here are some tips:

* Nurses are your friends. Do not abuse them, don’t ever get rude or annoyed even when they do things you don’t like. They might know more about you than you do and can really help.

* Do ask, do tell. Tell your doctor everything, ask about everything. Doctors really are people too though they might think they are gods.

* For god’s sake, come out if you haven’t already. Being lesbian or gay is just not the big deal it used to be. You don’t want the closet to interfere with your care and who gets to be with you in difficult times. Jamie and I were even in a hospital in Colorado Springs recently and he introduced me as his husband and I was not denied any access to him in the ER. Boy, did that surprise me. I was still relieved to get out of there.

* Give people a chance to do the right thing. One time we were talking with a nurse in a hospital, telling her our story and she told us about her lesbian sister. She also told us about the discrimination she’s experienced as a Japanese-American.

Going to the doctor can be frightening and worrisome but it doesn’t have to be. But you have to take charge.

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

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Biography of a Disabled Couple/A Visit to the Doctor or Nurse by Louis

(1) In addition to the LGBT community, another biological minority consists of the disabled population. There was even a national social movement that resulted in the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). The activists even created a new sociology called the sociology of disability that promoted the idea that “disability” is only a relative term since disabled people would not actually be disabled if their social environment was structured better to fill their needs.

(2) In 1971 I did volunteer work in Goldwater Memorial Hospital, on Roosevelt Island which, back then, was an odd park-like island with two hospitals, Goldwater Memorial and Byrde S. Memorial Hospital. Goldwater was designed to serve the needs of severely disabled patients. Byrde S. Coler was a hospice hospital for the terminally ill. The island was located across the East River facing the upper east side of Manhattan.

(3) As a volunteer I met a young woman who was dependent on an iron lung to breathe. Let us call her RG. RG was one of the first candidates to try and survive by breathing with what was then newly developed breathing equipment using a mouthpiece connected to an air pump. That was significant progress for her.

(4) RG told me that about five years previously she was a senior in a Catholic Nurse Training School. She was assigned to various hospitals as a nurse’s aide. She met and fell in love with a medical student, an Irishman. He was about a year away from becoming a medical physician. I saw pictures of the fiancés later. She was very beautiful, and he was very handsome like one of the Kennedy’s.

(5) RG must have picked up some kind of disease in one of the hospitals; as a senior, she started to feel weak and tired all the time. She told her doctor. Time passed, and her symptoms worsened, eventually she could not get up out of bed in the morning. She started to have difficulty breathing. She had to be hospitalized.

(6) When the med student fiancé saw what was happening to her, he left her.

(7) RG’s condition worsened. Naturally she became depressed. She gradually lost control of most all her muscles. She was hospitalized long-term at New York Hospital. Once, she was about to die when a physician at NY Hospital prescribed a massive dose of a combination of steroids and antibiotics This treatment worked somewhat. It arrested the progress of the disease but unfortunately, it did not undo the damage.

(8) RG’s diagnosis was listed as “polymyositis”, POLIO, but the name of the disease only described the symptoms, Polymyositis, = weakness in many muscles. Her condition was stabilized, however. No doctor ever isolated the cause of her muscular dysfunction, like a germ or virus: no known etiology.

(9) To accommodate her, a large van was purchased and adapted, in which she could travel in her motorized wheelchair. RG still had some feeble strength in her arms and hands so that she could push a sensitive switch on her motorized wheelchair, giving her mobility.

(10) To fight her depression, a trip was arranged to Lourdes, France. RG later wrote that her visit to Lourdes was uplifting. She saw other disabled people. She did not recover physically, but she writes that she came to accept herself more, she forgave her fiancé who disappeared when her condition worsened.

(11) RG is now 70 years old, and her spirits are good. She still goes to the hospital, Long Island University Hospital, about twice a month. She is dependent on 3 home attendants 24 hours a day.

(12) In 1973, thanks to the intervention of a politically influential doctor, Dr. A., RG went to Burke Rehab Center where a medical expert in prosthetic devices tried and failed to construct an “ecto-skeleton” to enhance the strength in her arms and legs. RG told Dr. A. she wanted to go to Fordham University and earn a Masters Degree in Social Work. She was accepted at Fordham in Bronx, NY. It was an adventure for her to be driven in her enormous van from Astoria, NY, to Fordham University for evening classes. I helped her with the typing and editing of her papers, but, basically, on her own, she finally received her Masters Degree and became a licensed social work counselor.

(13) To back-track a bit, while at the Burke Rehab Center, RG met FM, who suffered from severe ataxia due to lithium poisoning. FM was from nearby White Plains, about 3o miles north of New York City. FM had earned an engineering degree from McGill University in Canada, had met the “perfect” girl there, and she loved him, and they planned to get married. Then she got sick and died. FM got very depressed, went for psychiatric help. The psychiatrist prescribed lithium treatments, which, in those days, was the preferred method of treating depression. The dosages were too high, however. FM got deathly sick, had to be hospitalized. He was diagnosed with blood poisoning. The levels of lithium were toxic. FM lost his ability to walk, has to use wheelchair to move about. His speech is slurred. His hands shake so much, he really cannot write anymore. His vision is somewhat impaired. After his condition was stabilized, FM was sent to Burke Rehabilitation Center for rehabilitation where he met and befriended RG. FM was then sent to Goldwater Memorial Hospital.

(14) While at Goldwater Hospital, RG and FM asked for assistance to live independently in the community. RG and FM got married spiritually if not legally, and they rented two apartments in the same building in Astoria, NY. After about ten years there, they purchased a home in Whitestone in a very nice neighborhood. And they lived happily ever after.

(15) Currently, FM is trying to graduate from wheelchair to walking with walker, and, to improve his vision, he is exercising with specialized charts and playing the mind-improving games of lumosity.com. FM is also better able to eat his own food as opposed to being fed.

(16) Once a year RG gives talks at seminars at Long Island University School of Nursing. Both RG and FM are interested in liberal politics.

© 22 June 2013 



About the Author 


I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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A Visit to the Doctor/Nurse by Pat Gourley

“The responsibility of the nurse is not to make people well, or to prevent their getting sick, but to assist people to recognize the power that is within them to move to higher levels of consciousness.”

Margaret A. Newman, Health as Expanding Consciousness, 1994.
There are fresh flowers daily, AIDS Grove in Golden Gate Park
Photo by Author

I would have thought that after forty years in health care and thirty-five of them as an R.N. I could write on this in my sleep. That proved not to be the case.

Looking back on my own considerable number of visits to a nurse or doctor and the many thousands of interactions I have had where I was the nurse I do think the most satisfying and hopefully successful interactions were those that could be characterized as a partnership.
The realization, that I suppose was forced on me through my own HIV infection and then being in a caring capacity for many dying from AIDS, was that we, the medical establishment, were essentially helpless to make it all better. Our role seemed to be postponing and ameliorating the inevitable. This could obviously get very depressing in a hurry and I was occasionally asked over my 20 years of direct HIV care why I hadn’t “burned out.” I guess I never had a very good answer for that but looking back then and now I think I never felt that way, certainly not for very long.

Even in an AIDS clinic I was able to find joy in my work. On my best days I think it can be summed up with another quote from Newman: “The joy of nursing lies in being fully present with the clients in the disorganization and uncertainty of their lives – an unconditional acceptance of the unpredictable, paradoxical nature of life.” In other words always be aware that shit happens to everyone sooner or later. My own personal description of confronting this reality goes something like this. “Hey, we are all in this together and its always going to be messy, whether we are talking about the secret sauce from that Big Mac dripping down our chins or the drainage coming out of our private parts.”

A totally anecdotal observation on my part, and one certainly not applicable to all, is that hospice and oncology nurses tend to hang in there for a long time whereas ICU and ER folks tend to come and go much more quickly. Maybe that is why you see so many young ones in the urgent care settings and a lot more grey hair on those hanging your chemo. Perhaps this is due to a relationship in one setting predicated on a lot of adrenalin and the “I am here to save you” mentality while the other being more of a partnership that involves mutual problem solving around the issue for the day. Or perhaps it just takes a few decades to learn the art of compassionate communication?

I certainly am not suggesting that if you go to an ER with crushing chest pain that you should first insist on a mutual dialogue to outline a plan of care before they reach for the nitroglycerin. Give the providers all the pertinent information they ask for and then let them do their thing and hopefully they won’t have to reach for the paddles.

A key realization I came to some decades back, and I relate it to a combination of ICU nursing and the books of a physician named Larry Dossey, was that you really cannot as a provider and also as a patient view illness as bad or a failure. Margaret Newman, the nursing theorist quoted above, also planted the seeds for this in my nursing school years. I think it was Dossey who brought to my attention that health and illness are really two sides of the same coin; you cannot have the realization of one without the other.

It is, I think, when either or both the provider and the patient, perhaps even just subliminally, have the idea that someone has fucked-up that the real trouble starts. This leads to judgment and defensiveness and not an honest sharing of all the gory details that are often a part of everyone’s life. I am not implying that we don’t often make impertinent choices that have consequences, but that should not compromise the reality of the here and now and certainly does not need to define how we and our nurse or doctor will address the problem on the table at that moment. Those of us repetitive sinners can take some, rather sick I suppose, solace from the fact that a whole bunch of bad stuff happens even to those who are always doing it the “right way.”

What I think Newman was referring to as “moving to higher levels of consciousness” is realizing that we do not need to make so many impertinent choices.

As a patient if you have a truly nonjudgmental provider, not always easy to find, there is absolutely nothing you can tell them that will shock or if it does it will be only a transient reaction that is soon put into appropriate perspective. All the cards need to be on the table or an effective plan for addressing the issue at hand is often needlessly delayed. When honesty is involved many fewer mistakes get made in deciding on any intervention.

An example of this I heard once was, “I think I got this hepatitis from a bad lime in my drink at the Triangle,” when much more helpful information would have been, “Do you think maybe I got this from licking butt at the baths a couple weeks ago?” I have countless examples of this sort of magical thinking handed to me perhaps in an attempt to either not shock me or make me not think less of the person. Happily over the years of building trust with many of my clients we were able to dispense with the bullshit and cut to the chase, almost always facilitating a better outcome.

If we as both patients and providers could approach each encounter as an endeavor at caring for the soul everyone would be much better off. I’d close with another quote this one from Thomas Moore and his 1992 book Care of the Soul:

“Care of the soul… isn’t about curing, fixing, changing, adjusting or making healthy…. It doesn’t look to the future for an ideal, trouble free existence. Rather, it remains patiently in the present, close to life as it presents itself day by day….”

Gourley 6/23/2013

About the Author

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.