Haiku for the week

Dreaming, awake merge;

Memory given a good stir;

Thoughts combine oddly.

Jeez, I'm ill at the moment - and, if not quite hallucinating, often on the cusp. I've been wracked by some kind of food-poisoning bug for nearly a week now: unable to process any food at all (I attempted a handful of dried fruit for breakfast a few days ago, but it passed through 36 hours later, completely undigested); dehydrated, malnourished, intermittently feverish, and sleeping very poorly. I am quite enjoying the trippiness of some of my 'dreams', but this is inadequate compensation for being unable to do anything else.

I fear I have reached the point of having to go to see a doctor.

And I really HATE having to go to see a doctor. Doctors, I suspect, were at least partly responsible for the death of my father. They were almost entirely responsible for the avoidable death of my elder brother. And when I have myself fallen under their power, I have suffered protracted spells of miserable, unnecessary, and ultimately fruitless investigation ("We haven't got a clue what this is, but let's just run a dozen or so tests for really rare and improbable cancers just to be on the safe side, eh?").

It's not that I hate doctors per se. Most doctors, I believe, are decently earnest about wanting to help people. And a small percentage of them are thoroughly competent. And, heck, some of my best friends are doctors (it's an inescapable side-effect of a university education; well, at least if you go to a university like Oxford, which has a] one of the best medical schools in the country and b] a collegiate system which mingles students from all disciplines in small, tight-knit communities).

But they do tend to suffer from a god-complex (all professional advice-givers do, but doctors are the worst - it's that sense of holding the power of life and death over people that does it). And this is reinforced by the attitude of their patients, who are mostly elaborately deferential when seeking their help, and exaggeratedly grateful afterwards, regardless of whether that help has been efficacious or not. It seems to me that in our modern world there is a widely embraced collective delusion that our medical knowledge is approaching close to perfection, that doctors can now recognise and cure every possible disease. Of course, they can't. A great number of ailments, perhaps the majority, are still a bit of a mystery.

Doctors find their self-worth validated, and give satisfaction to most of their patients, primarily through dealing with that great mass of diseases which are essentially trivial, will resolve of their own accord sooner or later, and can be readily palliated by self-medication. I don't like to waste my time or theirs by consulting them over problems of that nature.

And I am nervous of entrusting myself to them with an illness that might possibly belong to that smaller but very scary group of diseases that rarely resolve spontaneously and are potentially life-threatening or seriously debilitating.... because my experience (perhaps untypical, unlucky, I admit) has been that 70% or 80% of the time they can't do anything for you.

I don't hate doctors individually. But I am extremely wary of them as a profession. And I do HATE the idea of having to go to see one.

I really hope my stomach starts working again soon.

[As it happens, I've already had to go and see a doctor once in the last month or so. About 5 or 6 weeks ago, a rambunctious and imbecilic Young American made what he characterised as a playful attempt to grab my testicles. (Really! In what 'culture', anywhere on Earth, is that a socially excusable behaviour - even as teenage horseplay??!!) In fact, he delivered such a vicious straight-fingered karate blow to my left nut that he nearly tore its suspensory ligament. The pain was not actually that intense, but it has been insistent and lingering: it's still causing me some distress now. Moreover, I gather that this kind of blunt trauma is occasionally implicated in triggering testicular cancer... And I am perhaps excessively susceptible to paranoia about that kind of thing, as I've suffered a number of previous cancer scares (though all of them, mercifully, came to nought). So, the last month or so has been a time of considerable discomfort and anxiety for me. And I suspect all that stress has depleted my immune system, such that what should have been a trivial, shrug-it-off-in-a-day-or-two kind of stomach infection has been able to dig in for a long campaign.]