Fifteen months ago, I fell off a ladder and crushed my first lumbar vertebra. My internist sent me to Chris Noonan, a back surgeon. Noonan put me in a metal brace for six weeks and suggested a surgery called a kyphoplasty in which he would inject cement into the broken vertebra. I read up on kyphoplasty and found that it is of no longterm benefit, and that the cement sometimes escapes and breaks surrounding vertebra. Noonan became angry when I mentioned these things, and his anger, alongside his usual callousness and arrogance, inspired me to go to another surgeon, Jonathan Sherman. Sherman agreed with me about the kyphoplasty, and instead suggested monitoring the vertebra for further collapse. On my third visit, he announced that it had gone from 20 to 24-degrees in three months, and that a surgery called a pedicle subtraction osteotomy with thoracolumbar fusion would be necessary if it got beyond 30-degrees (in plain English, he would re-break my back and fuse four vertebra, two above the break and two below it). When I asked for further details, he refused to answer, saying that they would only upset me!
I went home and Googled the surgery and learned the following: he would cut through my belly to reach my backbone; the surgery has a 50% risk of serious complications; it would leave my entire body severely weakened; it has a very long recovery period; and it wouldn’t restore me to anything approaching normal. I also noted that it’s mostly done on people with severe scoliosis, so I questioned his competence in recommending it for a broken vertebra, and, if the surgery proved necessary, I had no thought of having it in Eugene. I then went back to my internist and asked for a referral to a surgeon in Portland at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU doctors see the worst of the worst). He said he would have recommended it if I hadn’t, so I started the four month wait to see Dr. Ahmed Raslan (pictured) in a sixteen story medical building that is just one of OHSU’s many facilities. My appointment was yesterday.
After an office exam, Raslan sent me downstairs for two X-Rays and two CAT-scans. Less than an hour later, I was back in his office. The first thing he said was that I didn’t need surgery. He then showed me how the angle of collapse is measured and said that Sherman measured it entirely wrong, but that even if he had gotten it right, I wouldn’t need such a surgery at 40-degrees much less 30, that is unless my back was so out of alignment that my head no longer rested above my hips, and even then, a lesser surgery should suffice. This was the best possible news.
I then told him that, between the pain in my back and the pain in both shoulders, I found it extremely difficult to sleep even with all the pills I take. He said he would send me to a pain specialist here in Eugene with a recommendation for pain-killing injections. I know what to anticipate because I’ve had fluoroscopically-guided injections into my neck vertebra, and they’re scary, but happy drugs make them downright enjoyable. I really like happy drugs.
When I write about my medical adventures, it is with the hope that those who are as naive as I once was will take note of the following: (a) the letters MD don’t, of themselves, mean squat, (b) half of all doctors are callous, arrogant, and incompetent, and (c) it is a serious mistake for the patient to simply sit back and trust that everything that should be done will be done, and that it will be done right. Even if your doctor is the best, many other “caregivers” will have an opportunity to maim or kill you (400,000 Americans a year die of medical errors, making it the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer).
Two of the few things that are more stressful than medical problems are medical care and, in America, the resultant insurance hassles. The more I am exposed to these things, the more I approach them with an adversarial attitude. On the downside, this sometimes makes it hard for me to hide my hostility when dealing with greed and incompetence, but on the upside, I’ve completely lost my adolescent notion that doctors are demigods. I have also learned that it’s good to have Peggy go to doctors’ appointments with me for moral support, to ask additional questions, and to remember what was said. We all like to believe that we’re strong enough to go it alone, but the truth is that having backup helps us get better care, and the stakes are too high to settle for anything less.
Peggy (who worked as an RN for three decades) says that she needs this support more than I because doctors don’t treat women, including women who are nurses, with the same respect that they treat men, so having me there makes it more likely that her thoughts, questions, and concerns will be taken seriously. There was a time when it was widely believed that the influx of women into medicine would humanize it, but it has been my experience that women doctors are as bad if not worse than men. It’s as if they had to renounce the virtues of womanhood (empathy and attentiveness) while taking on and exaggerating the weaknesses of manhood (haste, cockiness, and a contempt for weakness) in order to complete their training.
I came away yesterday feeling that, although the pain is as bad ever, the road has become a lot smoother. Now, I’m just mad at that Sherman idiot for causing me so much unnecessarily anxiety.
I’ve never known a Christian who obeyed this commandment. How, then, do they explain their disobedience? They say:
(1) Jesus just meant that everyone should be kind to everyone else. (2) I’m saved by faith rather than by works, so I will get into heaven even if I don’t obey every last commandment. (3) Christ meant this as a goal to work toward rather than something that we had to accomplish. (4) I have a family to support, but once the kids get through college, I should be able to help other people more. (5) God only gives wealth to those whom please him, so if I were to help the needy, I would be thwarting God by helping people who don’t deserve it. (6) God only requires me to tithe; beyond that I can do whatever I want with my money. (7) By neighbor, Christ meant those with whom I come in personal contact, and since I live in a good neighborhood, I don’t run into poor people everyday like those who live in poor neighborhoods. (8) Christ was only talking to those who wanted to be perfect rather than to every single Christian. (9) I’m under no obligation to love wicked people like Snowbrush because their hatred of God has made them into demons. (10) “In the present world, I am aware that if I have to survive I should go by the dictum - A SLAP FOR A SLAP, AN EYE FOR AN EYE OR A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH. Otherwise people will crush me to death.” [a comment to my last post]
Such efforts to rationalize disobedience to a straightforward commandment that allows no exceptions reminds me of a video I saw last night in which a Moslem scholar claimed that when Allah commanded Moslems to kill nonbelievers that he didn’t mean that they should kill nonbelievers. Perhaps, but how is it that the creator of galaxies is such a failed communicator that he can’t make his wishes clear to a primitive species in the hinterlands of the Milky Way, the result being that millions of us have been neglected, ostracized, disowned, imprisoned, tortured, boiled, stoned, burned, beheaded, and otherwise abused by people who mistakenly thought they were serving God?
But back to Jesus’ words, when he said to love your neighbor as yourself, did he mean it or not? If you think he didn’t, you have an excuse for not loving complete strangers as much as you love yourself, but if you take him at his word, how is it that you are living in a spacious house, driving a late model car, buying gifts for people who don’t have room for what they already own, and watching lowlife morons make fools of themselves on a 42-inch TV, instead of using your money to buy food, clothing, and medical care for the poor? Thus have I stated my main objection to your religion, namely that it’s a sham, an attempt to feel good rather than to be good, a way to infuse your life with meaning, stability, and hope by imagining that you are under the care of a deity who created galaxies beyond number only to descend to a primitive Iron Age country on earth to die as a sacrifice to himself for your sins.
Yet, I have more sympathy for you than you might imagine because Christ was a hypocrite who laid a burden upon you that he couldn’t bear. If he had loved others as he loved himself, he wouldn’t have repeatedly and viciously denounced them as fools and snakes, or ordered working men to abandon their families and follow him around the desert, or condemned those who didn’t believe he was God to eternal misery in a place that he wouldn’t want to go. These were not the actions of a loving man, yet he expects you to be loving, and when you fail—as you must fail everyday that you live—you beat your chest, call yourself a miserable sinner, and beg a dead man to forgive you. It’s not atheists who are blind; it’s you.
But, as I am often asked, why do I care? I care because religion is surely the most divisive force on earth. If the difference between belief versus non-belief was like that of tea versus coffee, or if I could see that religion does the good it claims to do, I might never write of it again, but the fact is that I watch the news, and I read a newspaper* devoted to the coercive side of religion, so I care deeply and I hate deeply. Some readers say that I care too much, that I should simply let it go rather than to be made miserable by it, but I enjoy writing about religion. If I wanted a cause that would make me miserable, I would choose animal welfare because seeing the abuse and neglect that my species inflicts upon helpless cats and dogs might very well push me over the edge. By comparison, religion is a piece of cake. Besides, I know more about it than most and have seriously reflected upon it longer than most, so I have a lot to say. Most critical writings about religion disappoint me, and it is my sincere hope that I have a unique contribution to make.
*Freethought Today
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