Fourth Form of Madness

I am currently studying a sociology unit that studies how the concept of health and illness in society is constructed.  There was much ummming and arhing on my part whether I should go back to study this semester as I have a fair bit on in my life this year and I am still working with the death of my father last year.  As soon as I picked up my book to start the course, I knew I had made the right decision to return.  As I began my first article to review and analyse I felt that oh so joyous rush of passion fill my being and I knew  for me, at this moment, my return to sociology/philosophy was the best decision in terms of my wellbeing I could have made. To others it may have looked like adding another thing to my long list of things to do but to me it was returning home to a love that nurtures and inspires me and in a way rejuvenates all in life around me.

I find it ironic that my first unit back is one that so heavily focuses on the dominance of the biomedical (modern medicine) perspective and questions it authority.  I feel like I have spent most of last year fighting with modern medical establishments so it’s nice to read about it for a change 🙂  When going through traumatic and highly emotional situations, it is always rather interesting to be clear about what roles people naturally fall back into to play.  I don’t mean this disrespectfully but we all have patterns that we easily fall into when faced with adversity.  The role is easy for us, allows us to almost go on auto-pilot as other parts of ourselves that we perhaps don’t want to examine, retreat into the safety and the focus that the role demands.  When I look throughout the duration of my father’s illness, which pretty much required him to stay in hospital for the whole time, my role I slipped immediately into was that of “justice fighter”.  I’ve done it since as long as I can remember, my first external reaction is never sadness, fear or bewilderment.  My first reaction is always anger at some perceived injustice before me and action as to how I am going to put this right because it is the right thing to do.  But then anger is so much easier to handle than grief.

So there I am in the mist of medical madnesses.  I am in good company, my mother’s role in situations like this is to switch into “polly anna” externally positive as  everything is going to be all right in the end and my brother’s is the “martyrdom”.  I love them both very deeply (them and their roles they switch into) and they all serve their purpose in that crazy situation we were in.  For example, I would never have been able to deal with getting my father back to hospital after it became clear after only two weeks after coming out of hospital that the tumour they had removed from his spine, had grown back.  The pain no longer made it an option to be at home and it was my mother and brother that struggled to get my father, a then screaming and trembling man, into the car to start the 1.5 hr journey.  And then sit with him in the car for the next 4 hours as the hospital tried to get him out of the car but couldn’t due to the extreme pain.  It would have been my style however to then scream at the hospital for not thinking it a good idea to send an ambulance to go get a person that was essentially from that point on a paraplegic and never got out of bed for the remainder of his life.

My father was transferred to a different hospital under the guise of “better rehabilitation facilities” that both my brother and I were not pleased with.  When it became clear our fears were justified, when after 4 weeks no one had bothered to advise my mother was going on with my father’s condition even though she was in his room for 8 hours or more every day – my “justice fighter” role stepped up again.   This time I was joined by my brother, who through his work with children living with cancer, had also had contact with the hospital they were sending my father to and he didn’t feel the hospital was the best communicator either.  I had worked there many years ago and still shutter at the mentioning of it’s name.  It is the most sterile, disempowering and unwelcoming environment for people that are not well that one could possibly find.  I don’t want anyone going there let alone my father.

So off I went.  First I was ignored and had to keep phoning.  Then when they did call they treated with me a mocking, condescending tone.  Then when I started talking legal action for asking my father to make medical decisions on his behalf when he was no longer sound of mind (he was on such high levels of morphine based drugs that he was no longer always lucid and he was also off his bi-polar medication) and not bothering to consult his legal guardians, they started to fight me.  The fact that they said he was sound of mind concerned me the most, as for the last week before this my brother, mother and I had all been playing along with his illusion of being on a cruise ship in the Bahamas with him (an illusion of his we were more than happy to perpetuate).  This clearly told us how much time they were spending talking with my father.

Instead of speaking to my mother about what was going on with my father, the doctor went straight in and told my father that I had objected to his treatment which upset my father greatly.  Hello my name is “rage”.  I still can not comprehend this display of insensitivity and total lack of compassion for my father.  The whole discussion was about trying to open communication, to my mother mainly as she was becoming stressed and sick about not knowing what was going on.  The medic powers to be flatly refused to do it. Even better they chose to display their “power” by upsetting an already sick and traumatised man.  I won’t say we won as this whole situation is not early about winning and losing but about dignity and caring but he did get shifted back to his hospital of choice before he died and we were all very grateful for that.

So back to the present,  I embark on this journey into this new unit with much interest and passion and reflection.  I embrace the life experiences that I have just moved through and hold them to the “knowledge’ that I am now learning in a formal setting and compare if art truly does reflect life or whether truly there is no imitation of life to be had.