Appointment with a neopyte stand-in

Appointment with a neophyte stand-in

Part IV of "Complaint against Dr Alpha and Dr. Beta"

On Friday, I went to Dr Beta with great fear – that he woud refuse to give a 3-month set of prescriptions, and write me up instead for 1 month only. That woud mean another TTC return trip carfare. So the first thing out of my mouth in his office: I need my prescriptions for the next 3 months. He didn't balk. Then he put me thru a number routine small procedures which, I guess, he's obligated to do as a resident.

Then the dialogue swung in another direction. And I told him explicitly that I wanted to be recorded and counted as a patient who -- when my organs (kidneys, liver, heart) began to fail or gangrene emerged in my diabetes-dermatosic legs – counted as a patient who had informed the Clinic and the Hospital that I wanted to be able to choose the hour and place of my death in order to die with dignity (I don't need a doctor present, my mother didn't either). I told him I wanted that information to be sent up the “chain of command” so I coud be counted as having made my witness and established a record. Beta barked back: “There's no place to send it.” What about Chief of Family Medicine or the Sisters of  the Council of Trent (founders of Catholic Hospital) who deal with death-facing patients all the time? Then Dr Beta recited to me the recent Ontario law against death with dignity, so it's not just in regard to the Catholic Hospital but additionally in regard to all the Christ-neutral hospitals in Toronto, de facto atheist secularist institutions. Catholic Hospitals simply do not differentiate on the death with dignity issue; they are part of the overall system established apparently by government law. In other words, Beta tried to silence me by citing the new law, and coudn't hear that I only wanted a record to be maintained of people like me, so that all hospitals can become aware of how many people will actually be calling for death with dignity in the impending future, due to the demographics of illness today with all our aging seniors. How inhospitable not to allow those who want to be counted to contribute to a statistical record? And a little later in the session, Beta turned his own hermeneutic of suspicion on me: “Why are you here?” His own sensibilities, I guess, were in full flow to protect Catholic Hospital as a Catholic institution subject to the Magisterium's “consistent ethic of life” – O, Mr Scientist, irrational emotions prevailing scientistically over the more fulsome discipline of medicine? – apparently I had suggested a thawt he had never encountered before, a truly medical-statistical thawt that didn't fit into his apparently fixated set of notions implying to him that I shoudn't be here at Nameless Clinic because I wanted to be counted as a patient who has no close relatives alive any more and will not hurt anyone by simply dieing at a moment and place of my choosing (my own home, apartment, hermit monastic anchorage).

I wasn't politicking. I belong to no organizztion. I wasn't asking for changes or violations of the Roman Catholic Magisterium's “consistent ethic of life” (why don't you ask Dr Alpha and other doctors and staff why they had mounted a display tripod, soliciting the public for donations (with a see-thru money-box) to a condom-distribution program, situating the tripod just off the reception desk with the Catholic Hospital's icon on the wall behind the reception desk as the contraception tripod's background?; Alpha, Nameless Management Committee, and other doctors all tolerated that anti-CatholicHospital display in violation of their commitment to the institution; and the tripond display with its money box stood in place for months). So, you needn't ask why I'm here, Dr Beta; ask them why they're here if they can't honour the basic rule while they're at work. The solicitation for money to the condom distribution as such didn't violate my Christian ethical thawt and moral code; it violated my sense of the Catholic Hospital's institutional religious freedom by which doctors, staff, Management Committee and Nameless Clinic are obliged to honour and follow the rules central to Catholic Church morals. I'm at the Hospital/Clinic because I think its the best Christian medical option around. But, from my stance, I'm only asking that Catholic Hospital / Nameless Clinic and you Dr Beta make sure I'm counted as seeking to impart the facts of regarding how many patients may want to be recorded as to our desire for death with dignity. I want my medical need and desire recorded and counted, because the Hospital shoud have the best statistic on hand regarding its patients with these desires. Is that so outside your rigid worldview that you can't even forward such a fact to Dr. Command, Chief of Family Medicine at Catholic Hospital? Was he so “nowhere to send” my little factoid, that you coudn't even imagine the possibility about my desire for death with dignity? I wanted to be counted among such patients as might offer such information “for the record.” My quoted phrase comes from a sermon by Father Dan Berrigan, SJ, to a large assemblage at Centennial College decades ago, his text being from Revelations 1:1-4). I want to be among those who ask to be counted at Catholic Hospital to enhance its knowledge empirically by opening a programme of counting, of statistics. I'm not trying to hurt or embarass Catholic Hospital, or trying to influence its policy -- except in regard to starting to count the vital facts of such of its patients as may come forward over time. I'm willing to be first. I just want to be counted as one who is of a different conviction as a fellow Christian, in regard to the so-called “Consistent Ethic of Life” (obedience to which is required by the Church's Magisterium), one who feels daily I am at death's door, who wants to live a flourishing life in my little anchorage until my personal kairos arrives (kidneys, liver, heart, gangrene), and who wants to be prepared and responsible when the time comes for me to go.

Even a Catholic Hospital shoud be able to count such people as may indicate to it that they want to go on record as such with the Hospital. And believe me when I prognosticate our number will increase at all hospitals in Toronto, including Catholic Hospital. As the demographics of people either suffering or life-fatigued from being wharehoused in monotonous 'care' facilities (like my amputee cousin Anna Marie, like her mother my aunt Margaret who meekly lived on and on in the same Catholic nursing home in misery until she was in her Nineties); the number of these dear Catholic relatives and of Catholics generally, increases daily as does the number of those who want to go in their own time and place, rather than falling into the hands of the “care givers;” these numbers will surely increase. Every Catholic Hospital shoud be aware of this trend among its patients, even its own Catholic patients (I'm Protestant Christian and follow the Protestant public philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, rather than that of StThomas/Aristotle whose reductionistic metaphysics of the biotistic kind is at the root of the “consistent ethic of life”). I've worked out my own ethics of death with dignity on the basis of taking responsiblity for my own end. This ain't easy in practice because I'd need pills as well as a plastic bag to follow in my Christian family tradition. But I haven't asked Catholic Hospital or Nameless Clinic or you, Dr Beta or your supervisor Dr Alpha, to supply the pills I will need. I don't want to have anything to do with violation of the Hospital's sphere sovereignty (Dooyeweerd) or its moral code.  Does asking to count noses on a life-and-death issue really count as a violation of the Hospital's integrity?

Altho in my imagination I have constructed “Dr Beta” as a fervent Catholic who is obedient to the Magisterium on the issue of death with dignity, or simply perhaps just an institutional loyalist, it doesn't matter what his own religious presuppositions and ethics are – except as he plays them out on me with his impertinent question. As the Catholic Health Association (USA) says, “Men and women of any or no faith who are willing to serve with us in a manner faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church are welcomed to join us as colleagues and employees” (Quoted by Dr Stanley Carlson-Thies, Institutional Religious Freedom Association, in Engage mag, “Religious Liberties – Which Religious Organizations Count as Religious?” http://www.fed-soc.org/doclib/20120806_CarlsonThiesEngage13.2.pdf?utm_source=Oct+11,+2012+eNews&utm_campaign=Oct.+11,+2012+eNews&utm_medium=email

That does not preclude anyone – Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Atheist, etc -- from helping to place on the Clinic and Hospital record my desire for death with dignity when the time comes. I am a patient. Catholic Hospital falls under the rubric attributed to the late Archbishop James Cardinal Hickey (Washington DC), in regard to other-than-Catholic patients like me: “We serve [them] not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.” So, I am a patient at Catholic Hospital's Nameless Clinic not because I'm Catholic but because the Catholic Hospital's medical community is Catholic; and I, as a Protestant Non-Church Christian, rejoice in my relation to this Hospital and this Clinic – whether individuals like Dr Beta are Catholic, or not. In any case, no one shoud imply about me, with a misbegotten question, that I don't belong at Catholic Hospital's Nameless Clinic because I'm not Catholic and don't follow the Magisterium's “consistent ethic of life.”

Beta's question needs to be questioned regarding its own presuppositions – why woud a resident at a Catholic hospital ask a patient “Why are you here?” after I announced at the start of our dialogue that I was there to get my prescriptions for the next three months. Why didn't this satisfy you, Dr Beta? Why did you go fishing for a deeper motive that you projected as sinister apparently, a sinister motive simply because I asked in the Berrigan manner that I be recorded and counted, to help provde Catholic Hospital with statistics that will help it keep its own medical philosophy intact and functional into the future when Toronto will see a huge growth, including among Catholics, in the number of people who want to be recorded and counted as seeking death with dignity. I have tried to be forthcoming in answer to Dr Beta's impertinence, his question which a doctor shoud never be asking at Nameless. I'll answer here systematically on three levels:

1.) I've been a patient at Nameless Clinic for many years; and it is on a direct TTC streetcar route so that I don't have to pay for taxies nor walk much (I'm not so steady on my feet in my old age) and I don't have to wait in the bitter cold or the boiling heat with the mentioned transportation connection, while also I don't have to use the subway;

2.) When I first came to Nameless Clinic, I thawt it was a place that welcomed “hard cases” and that I woud get more than scientistic-technocratic industrial-relations Taylorism, but I now realize that the University of Toronto sets the tone in these matters and it does not, nor does Catholic medical training (incorporated into U of T Medical School), require preparation in critical approaches to medical philosophy and medical ethics of our future doctors, no matter where they end up in the Toronto and Ontario systems. In its place, the only approach they get at present apparently is behaviourism (how to manipulate patients, Dr Alpha's forte it seems); that fits with scientism, technocratism, and Taylorism. For what it's worth, I'm very much for the existence and public-support of Catholic Hospitals and their potential for medical hospitality. So far, I feel I have been seriously short-shrifted by Dr Alpha and Dr Beta, but for different reasons than that motivating my medical community of doctors/patients in a Catholic Hospital setting, against which community (tho I have been ex-communicated and exiled)  I have no objections, only praise to God — despite Dr Alpha and his minion Dr Beta.

— end of part IV — continued in Part V "Poverty, the name is illness"