“Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of God”
I’d attribute the quote but I don’t know where it comes from. Ok, I know where it came to me from, but I’ve never cited a wall hanging as a source before. Every other time I’ve been to the OMM office the room thermostat is at seventy five and I wait in the room for at least a half an hour. I’m sure it’s on purpose as a way of warming up muscles. I always try to figure out what exactly that fucking hanging means.
Today was an early appointment, the thermostat wasn’t even on. I dressed light for the room and the outside temp, which turned out with wind chill was a hell of a lot colder that it sounded. It rained last night and melted most of the snow. It was cold out.
Three of the other things that hang in that room are commercial art, not as cheesy as a motel, but not inspiring. The other is a fascinating beautiful photo. It’s a black and white of this guy reading in a chair, he has leaned back so the front legs of chair are high in the air and the back is against a tree. He’s wearing a loose white shirt, one leg scissored over the other in loose black pants. He is built like and looks a bit like a young Sam Sheppard. Lean, lanky, ready to conduct a symphony or wrassle a bronco. The photo is striking by any standard, but most striking is the man relaxed into the tenuous balance. It makes sense to be on the wall of an osteopathic movement manipulation room.
The opening quote doesn’t, not as best as I can reckon and I have spent at least two hours staring at it over the past three months. At the best of times Peace is profoundly the absence of conflict. In a well lit room on a quiet campus in the Midwest in late January there is no conflict. One might even suggest the benefit of faith in god is the resolution of conflict through peace. The only paraphrase I can think of where the whole thing makes sense is during a conflict that some will not live through the acceptance of god brings peace to the fearful mind. I’m not going to get into a theology argument, discussion or gentlemans pissing match. Just trying to make sense of a wall hanging.
Though, I must admit, I give the religious more benefit of the doubt than other non-religious folks might. I don’t think religion makes one prone to be cryptic just for fucks sake. I also don’t think the second anyone adds god into a wall hanging they are automatically stupid. I kind of like the idea of someone finding peace in their moment of death by whatever means necessary. I can’t imagine a way that hanging means anything less. However, absence of conflict would be a pretty nice way to go too.
I had meant to use my phone to take a picture of Sam Sheppard balance guy and Death by Conflict wall hanging. I didn’t know this was probably my last visit. I got a very professional, reasonable, medically sound brush off. He basically said “I’ve seen you several times and it doesn’t seem to help. The next step would be invasive (a strong warning against invasive for neck, less strong non committal warning regarding invasive for back). You are welcome to come back whenever you want though.”
It sounded reasonable to me and even if I was looking for an argument I couldn’t think of one. I was a bit relieved. Also bummed. This is the only guy I’ve seen on campus who I trusted completely and found competent at his job and who based his methods on medicine and talked to me like a peer instead of an errant child or soon to be ex spouse. I would have kept going if he had scheduled even though it hurts and yeah it doesn’t seem to be working, if his opinion were that it might, I’d keep going.
What scared me in a local medical politics way though, and it didn’t dawn on me until an hour or two later, his brush off speech was very similar to the written one from complex care. From complex care it was ridiculous over stated courtly manners for a clusterfuck argument that was forty five minutes of this sub-text; You can’t fire me I quit. You can’t quit I fired you. Um, that was taped too. They tell you they tape those things. You can sign or not sign the release for video, but I’m 100 percent sure they do audio anyway. It means despite the written report which sounds as professional and direct as the OMM guy, my primary probably listened to the tape or at least his attending did. I’m almost certain as complex care is run by one of the attendings from internal medicine.
So, if the attending sees two very similar reports and knows that one of them was a polite way of saying let’s be done with this cluster fuck, the assumption that the other report means the same thing … It makes me the difficult patient. Granted, an intelligent person would be wary of that assumption, and I’m not calling the attending stupid at all or even my intern, I’m just not sure that their intelligence includes any medical knowledge and I am sure that they are either under the weight of some political stone or active players. This isn’t paranoia. They’ve been trying to change my meds without offering a shred, even an invented shred, of medical proof that … hmmm, that sentence was going to get complicated. They ride me about meds and don’t offer a viable alternative or a single diagnostic that my meds are causing me harm or that removing them won’t cause me harm and they have all sorts of empirical diagnostics that there is cause for the pain. So, it’s politics; don’t prescribe drugs that are in the newspapers. I’m glad none of my pits needed a vet out here. They were in the papers too.
I don’t mean my actual dogs were in the papers, just pit bulls. As far as my meds go, I’m obviously not stumbling around stoned, stealing TVS, or whatever other bad behaviours other pit bulls on drugs are doing.
Christ I just slipped into a rant didn’t I? Fuck me, I am difficult. Thing is I’ve been trying very hard to behave.
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