Last week I talked about what happened to a patient who was bullied and belittled by a care professional, and how important it is to stand up for ourselves. Standing up for ourselves often means protecting the others who come behind.
This week, I want to talk about a likely offhand comment made by the writer at the end of the article about how he could find the humor and ridiculousness given enough time and distance from the incident. I found no humor in it. What I heard was a guy who was still emotionally scarred by a terribly humiliating (and unnecessary) event minimizing the effect it had in him.
I think we have all had moments like these, moments that still make our ears burn and cause an unpleasant shudder. They often happen when we are kids or young adults, and they affect us in ways that we don’t understand without therapy or considerable self-reflection.
I’ve had a few of these defining moments. The one that stands out the most is when my up-until-then best friend dropped me as a friend because staying back a year to recover from meningitis put me a grade behind her and I physically and figuratively couldn’t keep up.
This person and I were so close we shared a crib when our families visited each other. We were at every birthday, went to school together, slept over. You get the idea. I know my parents talked to her parents about her suddenly cutting me out, but they were not responsive to the issue. I just had to deal with the loss. There was nothing any of us could do, either to change the behavior or to change my situation.
The effect was profound. Before then – around second grade – I had been an open, trusting kid, just like any kid growing up in a sheltered Midwestern town where people didn’t lock doors and kids ran freely through their neighbors’ houses. (It wasn’t all ideal – a bunch of us sued the school system for discrimination the next year – but I was eight.) I never gave anyone the benefit of the doubt again. I started hiding who I was, and made sure anyone I thought could be a friend had hung on long enough to get past my walls. They had to prove themselves to me before they can be considered a friend. Still do. I met the friend I’ve known for the least amount of time nearly a decade ago.
I’m not saying that the subject of the article shouldn’t have moved on, but to dismiss it as funny now without exploring the greater effect it had on him is missing a big part of why the care professional’s behavior was not ok.
As I mentioned last week, the author of the article calls the episode the loneliest moment of his life as a young chronic patient. Something that serious does not deserve to be minimized by being categorized as funny. The hurt deserves to be acknowledged, turned over, and understood by a victim sympathetic to his own trauma.
I think that sometimes we chronic and autoimmune patients compensate for our physical weakness by pounding anything perceived as emotional weakness out of our psyches. Do you know how much energy that takes? To lock it away and hold it there? So not worth it.
But we do it, and sometimes we make me mad.