During the time that my late wife, Gail, struggled for her life at the end of 2016 I had an experience with one of her doctors, now my doctor, that, in these uncertain days, has come back to disturb me and point me to reasons I should stay disturbed. It has also become a message that fits well into my mix of independent research and my desire to get to the truth concerning health narratives that seem to take precedent in our world today and that inundates this globe; narratives that challenge my trust of their sources and their motivation.
During those days and at one point, we had taken Gail to the emergency room and orders were given by the emergency room doctor that she should have a CT scan. We were there at the E.R. already under the stress of survival, taking every reasonable precaution, so, we chose the attitude to trust the process. They wheeled Gail away and what they included in the CT scan process was her consumption of contrast dye, which is typical to the expected protocol for this scan.
Within a few days, we were at the office of this particular doctor I mentioned earlier. We told him of the visit to the emergency room and of this procedure. He was incredulous that they had subjected Gail to the contrast dye as it would have been a threat to her kidneys. Now, taking a one-time risk for a potential greater good might be a reasonable medical decision in many circumstances, but her kidneys were already compromised and her fifty-plus years of diabetes should have been good reason to ride the breaks concerning the contrast dye.
Once our doctor heard of this, he stood up in that small examination room with an intentionality I will never forget. He turned around to face the wall that until those moments had been immediately behind the chair in which he sat. He then proceeded for a full ten seconds to simulate his effort to bang his head against the wall again and again. He created a clarity with this drama, not unlike the survival drama already well underway for Gail’s life, which made us understand what he thought of that medical decision.
What I realize as I consider this idea of the frustration that brings people to the metaphorical practice of headbanging is that I, and especially Gail, had already engaged in headbanging for a long time relative to medical issues. But let me say it differently. The suffering that Gail experienced through the years with diabetes, insulin injections three to five times a day, probably double that amount of finger pricks to obtain blood for testing, hundreds of distressing insulin reactions (some when she was about to speak to one of her many audiences), to say nothing of blindness that set in as early as our very first Christmas together at twenty-two years old, are their own very real forms of head-banging. As a young married woman, she would know the expanded frustration of surrendering her driver’s license, find a visual inability that prevented her from reading to her children, and struggled through the impracticality of greeting people in an unawkward manner in public (she especially hated greeting times at church services for this very reason).
Her first suspicion of medical decisions that may have initiated the head-banging included her remembrance of an “experimental drug” given her by a doctor while in elementary school. Her mother confirmed this history. Not long thereafter, at age nine, she received a Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis. Many years later even after we had our five children, she wanted to dig into the history of her medical records to discover that drug and do a further examination. We investigated enough to find out that an airplane crash in the Ozarks killed this doctor many years earlier. We aborted the mission.
The head-banging continued when a switch was made from bovine-based and pork-based insulin to synthetic insulin in the 1990’s. The transition proved difficult for Gail and if it wasn’t for our fourth-born daughter, Lydia, then age three or so, who came to my side of the bed in the middle of the night to awaken me (which she never did) that night could have been very different than it turned out to be. As a result, I discovered Gail unconscious and having a very bad reaction of some kind to the synthetic insulin. This was unusual because she always remained very aware of what was going on in her body before she incorporated the synthetic insulin. A 9-1-1 call and my carefully pouring a soft drink down her throat, much of which she actually swallowed, revived her and she came out of the stupor.
And that synthetic insulin, which she remained on for the rest of her life, came with its own side-effect warning: cancer risk. However, the cancer head-banging did not start for another twenty years when it appeared in the fall of 2016. In those moments it didn’t feel like a side-effect at all; it felt like a direct-effect.
We have for much too long treated side effects as marginal and negligible, as virtually insignificant. But you can for sure count on their inclusion in the pharmaceutical insert of your medication (not that any of us take the time to read it). Or it’s repeated at breakneck speed on a drug commercial, which is code language for “do not pay attention to this part.”
I digress.
I am leaving a great deal out of this story that ended up as thirty-eight years long, so let me assure you that I am not bitter . . . but I hope you understand—my head is sore.
The headbanging continues in my next blog as I address the present-day issues we all face.
0 Comments