Winter Solstice ruminations:
The High Grade Chimp...
Every year, when the erstwhile ‘holiday’ season settles upon us, I find myself…like so many of us who exist on the outer-most fringes of a more conventional existence…in a particularly reflective, melancholy mood.
As a non-conventional person, I do not ‘believe’ in or subscribe to any particular religious faith. I am neither a Christian nor a Jew, a pagan nor an Islamacist. Perhaps the closest I come to anything resembling a mainstream religion is animism, in which all creatures, plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena share some sort of inexplicable but palpable spiritual connection with the planet we inhabit and the Universe at Large. But even that orientation presupposes that there is some sort of supernatural Power that animates and organizes the observable, material Universe we exist in and if there is such an all-animating Power, it’s pretty clear to me that whatever sense is to be made of it lies far beyond the ability of our rather feeble intellectual enablements to understand it.
That fact hasn’t stopped generations of us Earthlings from trying to grasp some sort of ultimate meaning that may or may not pervade it all, however. Such is the stuff of all philosophers, ‘priests’, theologians and other ‘big thinkers’ that have ever lived. A quest for the ultimate meaning of life pervades our human culture (it even provokes groups like Monty Python to make whole movies about it!).
From my viewpoint, it is all pretty much meaningless, and given that human life is short why even bother to try to figure it all out? After all, didn’t a well-known scientist once posit that ‘alien life’ (if it even exists) is probably so far advanced beyond the ability of our conventional sciences to explain and understand it that it would likely appear supernatural to us? That is true about our ability to understand a ‘God’ by several orders of magnitude, as well.
But to return to the subject I am writing about here, this time of the year (Winter Solstice) usually finds me getting at the very least a bit cranky and impatient (both with life in general and with myself). At most I tend to reflect disconsolately to the point of mild depression. It's one of my more endearing properties (spoiler alert: irony is a frequent ingredient of these paragraphs), so I am told by long-time friends (some of whom probably check the obits each day at about this time to see if I am in them and others, who are strongly inclined towards the feeling that I am Eeyore's nearest living human relative).
Very recently, I belatedly learned of the death of an individual who figured significantly in my life back in the days subsequent to my leaving the US Air Force and plunging into Berkeley’s (CA) explosively fermenting scene of the late 60s and early 70s. This individual was Dr. Walter Stullman, longtime Chief of Invasive Cardiology at Alameda County’s Highland General Hospital (located in Oakland, CA).
Walt was truly a memorable figure there, having spent nearly 43 years at Highland training scores of medical interns and residents who had come to Highland for their post-doc training. His passing in January of 2017 (from a stroke) saddened everyone who had had the privilege of knowing, associating or working with him over those decades, including myself in my capacity as Highland’s titular ‘Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator’.
That title sounds very impressive, but it was the usual case of making a silk purse out of a hog’s ear, I’m afraid, since I more or less singlehandedly ran the entire ‘sub-professional’ invasive cardiovascular and pulmonary show there at HGH entirely by myself. I was a real ‘one-man-show’ in that it was I who scrubbed in with Walt during all invasive cardiovascular procedures, setting up the cardiac cath lab for all procedures and reducing all the data derived during them.
It was a lot of work, I can assure you, since today in most hospital cardiac catheterization labs the same amount of work is typically shared among a team of at least 4-5 others. But Highland was a county facility, perennially short of funding, yet saddled with the immense responsibilities consequent to being designated a ‘teaching hospital’ (that is, authorized as a training site for new interns and physician residents) by America’s institutional medical establishment.
If any of you are familiar with other medical teaching institutions, a rough comparison can be found in Cook County Hospital of Chicago…one of the largest and most well-known treatment and training facilities to be found anywhere in America. Funded originally by generous Hill-Burton Funding and designed by architect Henry Meyers (assisted by famed woman architect Julia Morgan), Highland Hospital (ultimately to be known variously as the Alameda County Hospital and Highland General Hospital) was begun in 1921 and finished a number of years later (1925-27).
Meyers modeled the ornate and spacious facility on the lines of old cathedrals in Mexico and sited it on the proximal end of East 14th Street. Its administration building was originally flanked by a number of equally stylized, semi-Rococo multi-storied wings that are now replaced by modern and state-of-the-art edifices. Although most of the original rambling campus is now almost unrecognizable, when the most recent acute care towers were built, the original Meyers designed administration building was kept and quake-proofed as a designated Bay Area architectural historical treasure.
Given that Oakland has such a diverse ethnic demographic (a large Black population that came to the San Francisco Bay Area for the ship-building jobs during WW2 and an equally large Hispanic community, not to mention a large Asian & SE Asian population), violence has been a day-to-day aspect of affairs in Oakland for many decades since that war. Highland Hospital was therefore directly on the firing line 24/7, with an unbelievably busy emergency and trauma department that specialised in caring for victims of gun-shot and stab-wounds, as well as violent physical battery, spousal abuse and what have you. If it involved mayhem and interpersonal criminality, Highland was usually the first stop on everyone’s list of treatment venues. With equally large and busy post-ER and critical care/trauma units, Highland was a perfect venue for training recent medical graduates on the clinical aspects of both routine and acute-care methodologies. Its residencies were approximately equal in practical application of knowledge to any of those offered by Cook County in Chicago (also one of the most violent medical treatment venues to be found anywhere in America).
Upon discharge from the Air Force medical service, I had headed for San Francisco, living briefly with two friends on the Haight-Ashbury before relocating across the Bay to Berkeley. At that time, one of the most recent physician arrivals (post-fellowship in Pulmonary Medicine) at what is now the Summit Medical Center (originally called ‘Pill Hill’, since it was occupied by three separate hospitals: Samuel Merritt Hospital, Providence Hospital and Peralta Hospital), a Jewish pulmonologist named Dr. Mitchell Tarkoff, signed an agreement with the Catholic Sisters of Providence at Providence Hospital, Oakland, to develop a new pulmonary medicine service that would include the San Francisco East Bay Area’s first respiratory therapy center. This was established in 1967 and since they were looking for respiratory therapist trainees, with my Air Force medical service just completed I was a prime candidate for the new Providence Respiratory Care Unit.
Several of my friends also signed on as respiratory trainees and over the next few years (from about 1969 through 1974 or so) we all became very close friends, indeed. One of these was a former US Marine, another was a US Army veteran who had manned a Hawk Missile Battery in South Korea, and two others were American expatriates formerly living in Mexico, all about our age.
After the respiratory therapy department was opened, Dr. Tarkoff opened up a new Pulmonary Function Lab, staffing it with a raven-haired beauty we were all (those of us who were males, of course) more-or-less in love with. She was a very high-maintenance woman, unfortunately, having suffered the trauma of losing her mother to a catastrophic fire in their home as a child and was clearly Dr. Tarkoff’s ‘favored’ staffer’, having been given the plum of being the new Pulmonary Lab’s technologist.
I should remark here that in the early hierarchies of respiratory therapy, ordinary RTs (we were actually called ‘Inhalation Therapists’) were pretty much a dime-a-dozen, having been trained off-the-street principally to give what we called IPPB (or intermittent Positive Pressure Breathing) treatments to patients on the wards. The tech who was given the Pulmonary Lab slot was a bit higher in the status hierarchy, since that person performed medical laboratory tests on pulmonary patients…the outcome of which would serve as both baseline data and a foundation for gauging the effectiveness of respiratory treatment.
IPPB is actually quite an interesting subject, since at that time it was considered ‘leading edge’ treatment for a wide variety of pulmonary complaints and was prescribed for everything from post-op status (to help prevent pneumonias among surgical recoverees) to asthmatics and COPD patients (those suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, most usually the result of heavy and sustained long-term smoking habits).
Several technological developments of the 40s/early 50s had given rise to what in two different iterations of the IPPB concept were (commonly) called the ‘Bird machine’ and the 'Bennett valve’). Both involved cycled breathing that was initiated with use of a mouthpiece and both achieved the same therapeutic results, more or less. When a patient initially inhaled on one of these machines, the device would cycle on, literally forcing air into his lungs with positive pressure. One of the chief benefits of this was that nebulized medication (brochodilating or saline solution) could thereby be delivered to the smallest branches of the lung’s alveoli (the small gas-exchange units of the lung), thereby helping dilate congested airways.
The Bird machine was the product of Dr. Forrest Bird’s medical genius. Bird’s innovative and diverse inventions are today best known by the public as lawn watering devices (the ‘Rain-Bird’ watering system), but back in the late 40s and early 50s, his brilliant medical designs were in the forefront of pulmonary medicine and his line of medical ventilators (Mark-7 and so forth) were used in hospital ERs and clinics in respiratory applications for decades.
The so-called Bennett Valve originated in a mid-40s design for military aviators’ breathing systems, since at altitudes of 35 thousand feet or so, positive pressure was required to deliver oxygen to an aviator’s lungs in sufficient concentration to help sustain life. From its origin as an aviation regulator design in 1945, the Bennett Valve device was soon applied to clinical medicine purposes and this was introduced as the Bennett TV-2P IPPB clinical breathing machine. Newer models of each machine followed and by 1960, IPPB was a standard (and very lucrative) therapeutic modality used in nearly all hospitals.
After a while, Mitch Tarkoff expanded his pulmonary laboratory and I had the opportunity to train as a pulmonary function technologist. In this I was joined by an eccentric former medical school student named Gene Genther and also a former NASA bio-satellite technologist named…almost unbelievably…’George George’.
The previously mentioned ‘raven-haired beauty’ who had formerly occupied the pulmonary lab exclusively now found herself sharing ‘her’ lab with us, something that she greatly resented (so we found out), but I remained there in the Providence Pulmonary Lab, soaking up knowledge and training until I heard of a unique position opening up at Highland General Hospital, not far from Providence.
There, a part-time student named Dave was working for Walter Stullman (Chief of Invasive Cardiology, already mentioned) as a sort of cardiac cath lab ‘Igor’ and word was that he wanted to go back to his studies at UC Berkeley full-time. This sounded like a fantastic opportunity to me, since the Providence pulmonary lab was by now a seething pit of jealous resentment, passive-aggressiveness, clashing personalities and unfulfilling colleagial loyalties.
Dave at Highland filled me in on the Highland Hospital situation, telling me that with a bit of additional training, I could take over his slot as Stullman’s ‘Igor’ quite easily. This was the beginning of a prolonged number of years at Highland that are certainly memorable for many reasons.
First, it opened up a whole new area of professional work for me, that of invasive cardiovascular technology, since we routinely performed cardiac catheterisations on patients, pulmonary angiograms and electrophysiological studies (more about that later) at Highland. But interestingly enough, I learned that I would be ‘shared’ by both the Chief of Invasive Cardiology (Dr. Stullman) and the Chief of Pulmonary Medicine (Dr. Herbert Schub). In this arrangement I’d be simultaneously operating Highland’s pulmonary function lab AND cardiology’s cardiac catherisations, on an ‘as they occurred’ basis. The hospital’s cost-analysis determination was that, aside from keeping me busier than a one-legged German Schuhplattler dancer, both requirements by cardiology and pulmonary medicine could be covered by one salaried position (me).
The pulmonary medicine part of the operation involved performing all of the hospital’s pulmonary function diagnostic testing and all of the diagnostic fiberoptic brochcoscopies (a procedure whereby a flexible, multi-channel polymer-coated tube was inserted either orally or nasally into the lungs, so that images and photographs of sites being investigated could be recorded on camera). This last application was conducted both on outpatients and on ward patients, since the apparatus was portable and could be rather easily wheeled around to the various intensive care units, the ER or ordinary floor clinics as required.
It did, however, involve a considerable of work, since in addition to setting up for the procedures, I had to take care of all the post-procedural sterilization of equipment and in those days (I refer to the early 80s), AIDS was just presenting itself as an almost totally unknown and little understood, but potentially frightening health ailment.
Since almost every other patient being seen at Highland was actively using (or had regularly used) abusive substances such as heroin, secondary adverse health effects were almost a given (systemic infections, heart vegetations, etc.), and AIDS loomed as a truly scary threat to medical personnel treating these patients. At that time, modes of HIV transmission were not at all fully understood. Could merely breathing into a spirometer (a device used to measure pulmonary volumes) contaminate the device? We didn’t know. What sort of decontamination was required? Again, no immediate answers presented themselves in the literature. And since a spirometer (at least back then) was a large, heavy and cumbersome instrument consisting of an inverted bell immersed in a container of water, what steps were necessary to insure against this sort of patient cross-contamination? It was all a pressing mystery at that time, with potentially dire consequences.
Further, part of my duties in pulmonary medicine consisted of doing both arterial and venous blood gas analysis, which involved inserting an 18-gauge needle into a patient’s brachial (or radial) artery and withdrawing a certain number of ccs of blood for gas analysis (P02/PCO2/pH, bicarbonate, etc,). This presented a considerable hazard to those of us charged with drawing bloods in that a good number of our patients were Alameda County prisoners, brought out from the county’s Santa Rita Facility, for specialized medical studies and treatment. I well recall that nearly all of them had the sort of linearly knotted strings of healed puncture sites on their arms that were indicative of hard-core, main-line substance abusers. Brrr. Even with double-glove technique, the risk of accidental puncture by a contaminated needle was extraordinarily high!
Finally, a certain number of diagnostic lab reagent assays were also required in the course of cardiac catherisations, so all in all, I had my work MORE than cut out for me.
It’s probably hard to visualize the setting as I've painted it here and the instrumentation involved in all these tasks, but the cardiac cath lab at Highland was at that time in the basement of the new wing and the pulmonary lab (where blood gas analysis was performed) was located on the 2nd floor. Considerable time was wasted shuttling up and down when studies required these specialized lab assays be done, obviously. So rampant was substance abuse that we would frequently find patients shooting-up as they sat on the edge of their beds. All of this was quite sobering for a young man of my ‘proper’ upbringing, needless to say.
As the pulmonary and cardiology ‘Igor’, I was also responsible for working with the house interns and residents, helping them become acquainted with these aspects of invasive cardiovascular diagnostics and pulmonary medicine procedures, and providing proctoring in the technological applications of cardiological and pulmonary medical diagnosis & treatment.
Although the work was extremely challenging and demanding, at the same time I was relatively young and charged up with both energy and attitude. Concurrently, it was hard to be unmindful of the extremely difficult and even more demanding circumstances endured by the post-doc residents I was working with, especially by the brand-new interns (first year residency, right out of medical school) when they rotated through pulmonary and cardiovascular medicine departments. To say they were subjected to truly exhausting schedules is understating things by an order of magnitude. Almost without exception they worked 16 hour days and 80 hour weeks at the very least, during their internship phase! It was truly brutal!
[Interestingly enough (and speaking of exhaustive intern schedules), if I may be permitted a brief tangential remark or two here, there is a rather excellent book that first came out in 2009, written by a cardiologist named Dr. Sandeep Jauhar that gives a penetrating look at this exhaustive rite of passage that new MD grads must undergo. The title of the book is ‘Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation’ and I highly recommend it both to those in the medical professions and to the layman.
Dr. Jauhar went on, after surviving his own internship and subsequent residencies and fellowships, to become an outstanding cardiovascular practitioner and his experiences and observations are greatly informative and entertaining, since he also has (in addition to his MD) a PhD in physics and minor studies in journalism. Another wonderful and equally commendable book of his is titled ‘Heart: A History’.]
Although the physical and mental challenges at Highland Hospital were fraught with arduous and almost unimaginable (to the casual reader) responsibilities, looking back on it all I have to admit that it was by and large both an exciting and a tremendously valuable learning experience, for nowhere in the medical world does one pick up on vital knowledge and experiences faster than in an acute-care, active trauma center and teaching hospital.
By the time I had been at Highland for a couple of years, I caught Walt referring to me as his ‘high-grade chimp’, an apparent allusion (all in good humor) to my lack of formal academic credentials in either pulmonary or cardiovascular medicine. Instead of merely being a simple ‘Igor’, however, I was at least deemed trainable by Walt, since chimpanzees are certainly capable of achieving a reasonably high level of task proficiency…as long as there are plenty of bananas available as rewards! After several more years of service as Walt’s high-grade chimp, I actually came to regard that appellation as a sort of blunt compliment, since I certainly did not have a degree in applied physiology at that time! Today, I look back on that (recently provoked to reexamine those years by Walt’s untimely death) with no small amount for affection, for Walt was truly a very formidable presence at Highland and well-loved by just about everyone…patients, house staff and residents…who came into contact with him or under his ministrations during his 43 years of dedicated service with Highland.
A curious sidelight to all the foregoing (and one that still haunts me) centers on the fact that I belonged (until recently and certainly well-after I came back from the Middle East about 10 years after I left Highland) to a historical reenactment group that specialized in portraying the lives of a typical German World War 2 Luftwaffe reconnaissance unit during the North African Campaign. Although we were flying ¾ scale replicas of the excellent Fieseler Fi156 ‘Storch’ light VSTOL observation aircraft at various airshows [note: this is an amazing aircraft than can land in only 50 feet and take off in 75; it was designed in 1931.] and attempting to convey the rigors of fighting that war on the German side to the public, it was often hard to reconcile this with the fact of Germany’s involvement in the persecution of the Jews by Hitler’s National Socialists.
I well recall an occasion when at one such airshow we were at down in Southern California (Chino 'Planes of Fame'), a woman came up to us with her two young daughters and pointedly asked us about this. She had been wearing a Star of David on a chain around her neck, so it was fairly obvious that she was Jewish and the thought of what sort of heated dialogue might ensue put the wind up several of us.
Of course, we never discussed anything even remotely political about our work with the public, since we were solely and exclusively interested in portraying only the day-to-day rigors of fighting a losing war on the side of Germany’s Luftwaffe forces (a slant that isn’t often discussed or even considered by historians these days, amidst all the recurrent obsessiveness with the Jewish Shoah, or Holocaust). We were understandably a bit chary of engaging in a colloquy that we felt sure would be somewhat vitriolic, at the very least.
To her good credit, however, she listened patiently and with forbearance as we discussed our intent and purposes and we ended the encounter on a high note. The harsh reaction we had anticipated was nowhere evident, much to our vast relief!
This incident leads me back to my time spent at Highland. It is no secret that, by and large, any study of race/religion and cultural achievement will quickly demonstrate that the Jewish people as a whole are extremely bright, well-educated and academically motivated to achieve high levels of professional competence in their lives. It is therefore no mistake that great numbers of doctors and lawyers are Jewish, for these are areas of professional work that can demand substantial application of those qualities. Jewish families are therefore typically full of doctors and lawyers.
And of course, following this logic, a fair number of both the house staff and the intern/residents at Highland were Jewish. Given my relatively naïve state of awareness at that time, this fact didn’t dawn on me at all back then. Yet both my Chiefs at Highland were Jewish, as well. In Walt’s case, he took extraordinary pride in his Jewish cultural heritage (so the official obituaries inform us). As a man and as a doctor, there was no limit to his genuine interest in helping others…something that was quite apparent to me. A truly selfless individual if ever I met one, and also possessed of a hugely droll sense of humor, as well, Walter Stullman was an exceptional human being and a truly great physician.
Coincidentally, at about the same time I developed a romantic interest in one of the interns who came to me on the periodic rotation through the services. This particular person (let’s call her ‘Lin’) was Chinese (not Chinese-American) as I later came to find out and a woman who had come to this country illegally as a so-called ‘paper-daughter’. She was a graduate of a highly regarded university back in New York and had completed medical studies at Peter Bent Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
[Note: ‘Paper sons’ and ‘paper daughters’ were a result of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act, originating in 1882 and reaffirmed in subsequent decades, that attempted to limit the number of Asians immigrating to the United States. Under this scheme, a totally unrelated Chinese person would claim to be directly related to a ‘relative’ living in the US already…thus permitting them evade the laws and to enter the country.]
In addition to being an extremely bright woman, she was also an extremely attractive person as well (slender, Asian and with long dark hair…a combination in women that I am hopelessly addicted to) and I quickly found myself smitten, although I couldn’t help but ruminate adversely on my own academic status in comparison to hers. I was about as far from MD status as the man on the moon, but she seemed to find me interesting, so I pursued her on and off the campus. We soon became ‘an item’, as they say.
She originally lived with a Japanese-American intern roommate in San Francisco in the early part of her internship, so I soon found myself making my own ‘house-calls’ to her place as our association blossomed. It wasn’t long after this, however, that I seemed to sense a bit of vaguely discernible bias by her roommate and her closer associate intern friends over the fact that I wasn’t also a doctor. In fact, the Japanese-American roommate was going out with a White intern also, but he had an MD degree, built his own computers (this was in the early 80s) and I did not.
Despite our closeness (and the fact that we moved into a house she bought very near Highland), this vague feeling of not-quite fitting into her doctor crowd continued to make itself felt and I should have known that whatever seemed to develop between us, it had little chance of maturing into a realistic, long-term commitment. But of course, I was in love! Very much in love.
For her part, she had told me that my erstwhile (non-MD) status really didn’t matter to her, but I soon came to find out that this wasn’t quite completely true. Several of her friends (also interns & residents) were Jewish (of course) and one unhappy circumstance around Halloween seems to have hardened up that palpable resistance to our being together.
The Highland interns and residents were having a Halloween party at about this time and, as someone with German ancestry and a strong interest in history, I decided to come to their party as a Luftwaffe pilot, complete with parachute (try dancing at a Halloween party with a 35 pound parachute strapped to your ass!). Viewed now in retrospect, I can see this was a screamingly insensitive error on my part, but one of her close friends in particular (a Jewish woman) seems to have reacted somewhat vehemently to my gaffe on that occasion and thereafter I am sure she began to ply my paramour with poisonous insinuations and aspersions, for the rift between her and I began to widen. It was a very, very uncomfortable situation, but a vague one that I really couldn't understand or put my finger on.
Thus, I remained naïvely unaware of any deeper currents, again given my relatively insensitive awarenesses about Jews, their biases and their reactiveness to perceived discrimination. At any rate, in 1983 (or thereabouts) and out of the blue, the love of my life suddenly went off with a young law student at UC Berkeley (whom she had hired to do odd jobs around the house) for a long weekend in Carmel.
This despite the fact that we were living together in her home and there had been no previous discussion of any kind about splitting up. In fact, being a rather modest person whose tatty swimming suit looked like an old cut-off dress, a few weeks prior I had presented Lin with a sleek emerald green tank-suit that looked just smashing on her. But given her modesty, she never wore it and it ‘lived’ in the drawer in our bedroom, completely unused.
Claiming she wanted to go off for the weekend with some friends (it was Berkeley in the 70s and I truly believed that these ‘friends’ were girl friends at the hospital), one Saturday she took our VW camper van and left. What surprised me was the fact that she also took that emerald green tank-suit that she never wore with her! That was an extremely strange deal, I mused, but waited until she came back to ask her about this.
Upon her return, it all came out. She had gone to Carmel with this law student cum handyman and apparently cared to impress him so much that she wore MY suit for HIM at the beach. Naturally, given her comely attributes, she would have looked ravishing! And that is apparently exactly what happen on that weekend: consensual ravishment! To say I was absolutely crushed by this is considerably understating things, and in fact even today, some 35 years after all this took place, it still affects me deeply to have been so utterly betrayed by someone I very deeply and unreservedly loved.
In the course of trying to figure out what went wrong, some years afterwards, I think that she had been focused on adhering to a tight life schedule, since she was an exceptionally ‘organised’ person. Mindful of the woman’s biological clock, she wanted marriage, a family and a career early in life, and coming from my background…one in which I had been cautioned that marriage is a VERY serious thing to not undertake lightly…I was in no hurry to marry and have children until we had been going together for a while. After all, my father had not married till his 60s and fostered a child when he was in his 70s (true)! What a remarkable contrast between our two outlooks! This law student/handyman whom she had hired to work on her house was good-looking, had a potentially excellent career ahead of him as an attorney and everyone generally agrees that doctor/lawyer pairs are ‘power couples’. It seems to have been a ruthless but seamless slam-dunk on her part, but one that was emotionally crippling to sensitive little old me!
At such moments I have to stop and remind myself that life is never fair and bad things frequently do happen to good people who do not deserve them. This apparently was one of those ‘bad things’ and I like to kid myself that I am one of those ‘good people’. In response to this betrayal, I quickly moved out, ruefully leaving them to develop whatever bond they had established behind my back.
Lin subsequently graduated from her medical residencies and married the law student. They have two daughters, one an adopted Chinese girl, and Lin has recently retired after more than 3 decades of successful professional practice as an internal medicine/family care MD in a Bay Area HMO.
Lin never did give me a reason for her deciding to do all this and that fact has made it emotionally difficult to bring closure to that part of my life. It certainly hasn’t helped my opinion of attorneys and lawyers, of course.
Part of this morose and melancholy reflecting at holiday time is the thought that due to my relative unawareness of the ‘Jewish’ aspects of the closed circles of association at Highland Hospital and the question of exactly how much I contributed to my own ‘crash & burn’ situation with Lin, I am still haunted by all this.
Of course, the most direct result of this crash of the only really important romance I had experienced to date was that I subsequently joined the ‘foreign legion’ in a sense (by accepting a contract to work for the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Saudi Arabia), a catalyst that opened up a whole new (and immensely rich) period of my life. Undertaken as a means of tempering the grief I was laboring under, it was probably the best decision I ever made. But that is a whole different story.
I may be a difficult person to love and probably also have difficulty ‘loving’ as well, being a would-be, pseudo-intellectual, a highly protective individual with a far too ‘serious’ and socially critical personality by nature. Naturally, dwelling on these unknowns and whatever irreconcilable circumstances may have contributed to this unhappy circumstance doesn’t help with regards to staving off my annual depression and melancholia at this time of the year. In fact, it’s almost become a Christmas tradition with me, LoL.
Thinking about all this again (likely for at least the 100th time) prompts me to wish I were off, alone somewhere, perhaps walking in the woods with snow falling gently everywhere on a dense forest of verdant green firs. What more perfect setting with which to underscore the bitter disappointments that many of us still are unable to put to rest as the end of life draws near? Bitter cold and staggering natural beauty certainly help take the sting out of the less happy afflictions of life, so I have found.
Holidays are notorious for engendering such sad memories as this, aren’t they? Of course, if I were a conventionally social and religiously inclined person, I’d probably ask someone in the congregation to simply to pass the nearest vessel of red wine, since in addition to being a Christian sacrament, wine is (so I am told) also God’s way of soothing hurt feelings and disappointments (a natural anaesthetic, if one wishes to put a medical spin on things). But it may also be subtle quantum evidence that God is a woman and if that’s the case, all of us men are doomed!
Happy Winter Solstice 2018 (note: Irony is implicit throughout, here. Professional pessimist. Kids, do NOT try on this outlook at home!).
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