20180501 – Monday – Doctors

20180501 – Monday – Doctors

Today has been one of the most stressful days I have had in my travels so far. Why? Because I had to visit the doctor at Morisset. 

I am terrified of doctors. doctors are usually men, and basically, I am terrified of men in authority. 

When I was a girl, maybe 2-3 years of age, my Mum told me that I began as one of those little girls who loved dolls, but then quickly changed to one of those little girls who were called “tom boys.” 

I had three brothers and my three brothers had a lot of freedom and I wanted that freedom too. The only way I could get it was to blackmail my brothers and tell them that “if you don’t take me with you, I will tell Mum what you are up to and then you won’t be able to do (whatever it was they were about to do).” 

Well that was a two-edged sword, it meant that I had to overcome the 3 years age difference between me and my youngest brother and be as good as, if not better than they were in everything, and that meant from learning French, to playing tennis, to learning 2 or 3 childhood languages including deaf and dumb and all sorts of other things to be “as good as my brothers,” so I could keep up with them.Oh, and that included playing marbles and shooting a “shanghai.” 

I spent a lot of my time on our various escapades, terrified of the things my brothers expected me to be able to do. Scared of the thrashing I would get if I did the things my brothers were going to do.

I got run over by a tram had to climb down into a mine shaft to look up and see the moon,there were so many things, that a little girl of 7 or 8 years should not be getting up to. But it gave me a sense of freedom and freedom was my most precious possession. Something that  has stayed with me my entire life. 

I look at a place like Bethsalem, a wonderful facility, probably the best facility of its kind in SA, and know I would go bananas if I were locked up in there. 

I have seen my brother who was bi-polar locked up in a mental hospital and become violent in desperation because he didn’t want to take all their medication, that they unnecessarily give just so they don’t have to work so hard.

I saw Don Strempel suffer at the Oakden facility just before it was closed down. He was powerless to prevent the dreadful things happening to him. 

My brothers ended up in the salivation Army boys home and were horribly abused while they were there.  I have fought the doctors to get my brother out of their clutches at the Northfield Mental hospital. I have seen the mental facility at the QEH hospital, were the “lost” and uncared for mental patients were kept, and fought with the doctors with help of my sister-in-law Beth O’Connor (Joseph) to get my brother out of there. Places where they put people in and throw away the key.

I know they do good stuff and what would we do without them, but I remain terrified of them. So a day filling in forms for a doctor scares me witless. 

And nurses, most are wonderful, but there is always that one who is difficult. Refusing to give birth to my second child until the nurse got my husband to come in and being told he had “gone home,” which I knew he would NEVER do. So I threw the plastic mask to the floor and broke it and screamed for my doctor until he came and took over from that nurse.

Having a nurse with a staph infection looking after my baby and my friend’s baby, whilst she was still terribly infections. My baby lived my friend’s baby died and there was no reason that it should have happened if that nurse had been prevented from handling babies in the nursery. 

In those days that hospital was closed down for 18 months while they painted right through to try to get rid of the infection. Today, staph is so rife in hospitals that they just carry on regardless.

So It is an emotional thing with me. A senseless fear, but I suffer from it. I get pains in my stomach and stress over nothing and avoid making appointments I should make. My blood pressure shoots up impossibly and when I finally am on my way home, I cry uncontrollably. 

So there you are. I almost put up a photo of me in tears, just so you know that I am not always happy. I try to be, but don’t always make it. I simply just want to run, a very long way away from the doctor.