Here we go again with Doctors Tales. Bit depressing this one!!

Mary used to bring me little gifts. I think I could have been the only person in her life who treated her decently. She was a sick puppy too. She had a connective tissue disorder, angina, hypertension, asthma, mild diabetes and schizophrenia. Her bedside table draw contained a mountain of pills which she ploughed through every day. 

Some people have all the luck. 

Somehow with all of her suffering, (there’s more to come), she was a smiler. Her smile transformed her. She managed to smile even though her antipsychotic medication made it difficult. She had that drug induced dead pan look most of the time. 

She was married to an alcoholic seaman. Alcohol consumed a large part of his income. She had two kids in their twenties – not sure who the father was. The boy was in jail for robbery with violence and Mary hadn’t heard from her daughter for a couple of years. 

She and her husband lived in a place unpainted for many years. The house sat at bit of an angle. The garden was full of car parts and bent car bodies. The kikuyu grass grew into and partially covered everything. A hinge on the gate was missing.  There was little left of the once white picket fence. Most of the furniture was made out of wooden box and other bits from the dump. 

“Doctor, she is having another attack can you come and see her?” It was two in the morning and it was her husband calling with a slurred voice. 

She was tight as a drum, struggling to breathe. It was another asthma attack. As I got to work, IV, drugs, oxygen, I noticed another woman in the house. I had an uncomfortable feeling and a question. Who was she? What was she doing here at here at 2am?

 I’ll come and see you first thing in the morning Mary, before surgery, to  make sure you are okay.” She thanked me. She was breathing okay now. 

When I  arrived next morning, she was alone. My curiosity had been aroused, none of my business I know but… 

“Who was that woman Mary?” I asked.  Tears began to flow. She remained silent, not able to look at me.

“Mary”

“That’s a woman he has been inviting home recently”. 

“I don’t understand Mary”. I looked at her with concern. I kind of new this was not going to be an elevating story.  

“He comes home tight as and brings her with him. He throws my nightie and things out of our bedroom and tells me to sleep in the lounge.” She paused. Silence. Sobbing. 

“They go to bed together. I can’t sleep. I hear everything they get up to”.  

“Jesus Mary, I am sorry. How do you put up with it?” I was astounded by his blatant cruelty. I was angry.  

“I don’t have any choice really. He has all the money. The house is in his name. I have nowhere to go and I am not well.  He’s been doing this kind of thing amongst other things for years after he comes back from the pub. When he is sober he is nice to me.” 

I made her a cup of coffee. She took it, lit a cigarette and stared silently at the floor.  

Her husband came back and sat down.” Get me a cup of coffee mum and fix me some breakfast”.  Nice?

Oh my god! I was angry. My blood was boiling. I felt like smashing that childish smirk off his face.  

“Do you mind leaving us for a moment”, I asked as politely as I could, through a tightness in my throat.  He got up and shambled out into the garden. He took a cloud of stale alcohol with him. His blood level was probably still up in the sky.

 “Mary we can arrange for you to go somewhere,  There are places run by women you can go to. They can look after you and help you for a while. ”  She responded as if she had not heard me. 

“Do you know doc, when he gets up in the morning, he takes her home and on the way out demands I clean the sheets she and he soiled”.  

I was speechless. I drove to my surgery with a sense of despair. Her story was gross to say the least but she was not the only patient of mine living in madness, most may be not as colourful and unbelievable.  

She like  most of them was trapped, unable to move and accept help. Unlike others she hardly ever talked about it to me. She was long suffering, and somehow in all this pain, she had a generosity of spirit. I was always willing to help Mary whatever time of day or night she called.

For years people like her live being battered with pain.  My prescription pad was useless. What good were all those pills to her?        

Commentary  

Believe it or not this story is authentic bar some painting of the picture, unusual maybe, and maybe not that unusual. The  theme certainly isn’t. 

Mary’s husband used to bring me things from Rarotonga and other places, his job took him too. He was sick too – angina,  hypertension and emphysaema. He had a pickled liver. He probably had some early dementia. 

In his own funny way he loved her. He’d talk with me about how he worried about her. Incongruent certainly but I could sense his caring and his own despair. What a mess!  

Two sad, unhappy people with a draw full of pills and puffers to keep them from dying. One could say they’d died years ago.  They were a romantic couple once, walking the beaches, hand in hand. How cruel and how self-destructive they had become. The cruelty and  destruction of these two is so glaring and unhidden. Many of us would look with disdain at their behaviour and feel condemnation.

And yet the more sophisticated of us do similar things, less gross, less easy to see, hidden, not so easy to describe and point to, no outright abuse;  just judgements, put downs, lies, denials, blaming, guilting etc; a game for domination under the guise of social norms. 

A guy came to see me today with his wife, I suggested some reading material to him. He looked to her. She got out a pencil and paper and took the list down. He always came with her. He’d refer to her when asked questions about anything. She knew what pills, when, how many and how often. No doubt she’d do the shopping too and maybe even wipe his arse.

Common and normal behaviour? Sure, “What’s wrong with that?” I  can hear some folk thinking? He was treating an intimate as a paid clerk and she’d become the CEO. He was a little boy thinking he was in charge. No please or thank you, just an expectation as of right. 

‘I have this right. She is my wife’. ‘I have to do this. He is my husband’. ‘I can treat her as a slave’. ‘It is my duty to be a slave’. Both are playing the game. It takes two to tango. I think he felt he had her doing his bidding and she felt she was in control. I’ve no idea really. I just know it’s nuts, not for me.

We harm ourselves and others when we treat the other and ourselves as just roles. There is no room for realness, intimacy, oneness. Just two actors playing games, not knowing this is what they are doing.

A gambler, a prominent member of society, and his wife were being counselled. I sat in on the session. Their finances had been arranged so he had no access to his salary or any bank accounts. She gave him a few bucks a week for smokes or whatever. 

In recent weeks he had gambled ten grand and lost it. How did he get the money?  A simple question that took about an hour to clarify. 

She’d opened a new account, put ten grand into it and given him access. On being asked why she had done this, there followed an out pouring of verbiage, of explanations and rationalisations. None of which made sense. 

The bottom line, she had given him access.  

Why? What was her motivation? What game of destruction were these two up to? Did she need a bad boy to blame and control? Did he need a stern mother to scold him? Even when the story was exposed, neither stepped up to the plate. The game would no doubt continue.

I could see the end result. A newspaper article of this man going to jail for embezzlement with a heart rending story of how he had destroyed his family and ruined his wife’s life. As the story was read in the paper, most readers would be tut tutting about this destructive man and feeling sorry for his self-  pitying partner. Like it or not she set the scene for his last gambling spree. She needed him to gamble!  

Two partners in crime, one jailed and one sympathised with? 

How we hurt and harm ourselves and others! Who me, I hear you say? No, not you of course. You are probably the rare exception, already sitting at the right hand of God.

We have all been taught the skills of manipulation, whether we play wimp or bully, it’s all part of the same game of ping pong. While we play these destructive games, we can play the innocent one, and secretly rub our hands in glee, when others agree with us that  ‘my spouse is a louse’. In some weird way we can feel power and control by being weak and twisting other people’s heart strings.

If things aren’t going well in your relationships, and if I was a gambling man, I’d bet my house that the two of you are playing a game, knowingly or not.  

 “If I do what I want, s/he will have the tension and if I do what s/he wants, I will have the tension”. This can be the basis of the game. Who will hold the tension? Instead of giving love we play tennis with a ball of tension, Forty-fifteen, game, I win, you lose. Hee Hee.