Autobiographical material, continued
Number 5 and last of the current series:
February 18, 2011
Ms. Marisa Miller
Pacific Medical Centers
1200 12th Ave S
Seattle, WA 98144-2712
Dear Marisa:
One other thing, this one actually connected to PacMed via a doctor at PacMed Northgate named Beverly Strickland.
Back in 1990, I had a period that simply didn’t end. I bled and bled and bled, and got worried, so I went to the 45th Street Clinic at 1629 N 45th Street in the Wallingford Neighborhood of Seattle. I knew that the standard treatment for such things, assuming that cancer wasn’t involved, was hormone replacement therapy. But right from the first, they kept insisting that I had to have a complete ovarianhysterectomy.
Such a procedure should only be done to save lives, because the results cause real debility and mandate hormone replacement therapy anyway, to compensate for the removal of the ovaries, and those artificial hormones up one’s chances of getting cancer again, as well. Prolapse of the bladder is also a risk. So I said no - and had to say it over and over and over. I finally demanded a second opinion. They sent me to an endocrinologist - I don’t remember his name, now, nor exactly where his office was; this was 16 years ago, and some of the details have faded - and he told me, without giving me any kind of tests or a checkup, that I had to have an ovarianhysterectomy. I’d already been examined by Beverly Strickland at PacMed Northgate to see if I had cancer, and the tests came back clean (I was referred to her by the 45th Street Clinic when I demanded a second opinion, and she insisted I have the procedure, even though there wasn’t a sign of cancer. So I’d asked for an endocrinologist’s opinion, and they sent me to see that man). I said, “Since I don’t have cancer, why are you insisting I have that procedure?” He said, “Well, you’re bound to get cancer in the next five years, so you might as well have it out now.”
All the medical personnel involved in this, including that gynecologist, treated me as if I were being a very bad dog. I finally asked them, “Well, would you at least put me on hormone replacement therapy to make me stop bleeding while this gets checked out?” Reluctantly, they agreed. At which point I got the hell out of there and never went back.
I spent months bleeding and bleeding while I went to a naturopath and then people at Bastyr College, trying to get help without getting treated like dirt. Finally, somebody took pity on me and pointed me toward the UW Medical Center. They determined once and for all that I did not have cancer, and put me on hormone replacement therapy, the gold standard for a case like mine. But nobody was sure why I was having that endless period.
In 1996, I finally gave up coffee for good. When I did, the occasional bleeding and spotting that took place in spite of the hormones I was taking stopped completely. After comparing notes with a physician, it appeared that what had happened was that I’d gone through menopause in 1990. I was a heavy coffee drinker then and until I gave it up entirely, six years later, and apparently something in all that coffee kept me bleeding even though I was no longer having regular periods.
So that took care of the physical end of it. In the meantime, I discussed the whole vicious episode with my late friend Gary (the one who was harassed to death in 1995 by the landlord we both had). I thought that the people at the 45th Street Clinic and the two doctors they’d referred me to were hoping to get all that lovely Medicaid money for operating on me, and maybe kickbacks from whoever filled the prescriptions I’d have to have for the rest of my life afterwards. But Gary told me about a television documentary done about investigative reporting on “organlegging” (a term from Larry Niven’s science fiction novels, but it fits; it comes from “bootlegging,” and involves the same thing, but with organs illegally taken and sold to others) in various countries: the removal of one person’s kidneys or other organs without permission or even the knowledge of the patient, and the sale of such organs on the medical black market for extremely high prices. In particular, there were numerous cases, including some in this country, in which a woman was told she needed an ovarianhysterectomy, for whatever cause, and agreed to it. While she was under anesthetic, they also took out one of her kidneys. In every case, she was in fact quite healthy, without a sign of cancer or anything else that would have made it necessary to do an ovarianhysterectomy, and her kidney was healthy, too. The kidney was sold on the medical black market, and the woman wasn’t told about their taking it from her. Years later, she’d see a doctor who did an X-ray of her for whatever reason, and he’d ask her, “So why did you have that kidney out?” “Kidney? I never had a kidney removed!” “Oh, yes, you did - see? Here’s the X-ray.” There’ve been lawsuits over that, especially in this country, but they’ve all been settled out of court, so there wasn’t much exposure of such cases, at least initially. Anyway, Gary asked me, “Do you think that’s what they were up to?” I had no idea, but it certainly makes you think.
Eventually I tried to get an attorney to sue the 45th Street Clinic and the others involved in that. If nothing else, I’d steadily lost a lot of blood over a period of maybe 9-10 months, and it was very debilitating. And being treated like scum by all those people wasn’t real great, either. But it turned out I couldn’t sue, because the statute of limitations, which was very short, had run out, and I wasn’t eligible for the program that the King County Bar Association had in place for people with low incomes who had suffered from medical maltreatment. All I can do is tell people about it.
This is one more instance of numerous people regarding me as a throwaway. This has gone on all my life, and I am sick unto death of it. And then there are the incompetents, doctors and others, who, apparently with good intentions, gave me the worst possible advice, the worst possible prescriptions, the worst possible treatment of any kind. Alan Greenbaum, a nurse-practitioner at King County Public Health, prescribed one extra blood-pressure medication on top of two others I was already taking to control my migraines, and it interacted with everything else I was taking in a way that damned near killed me. My kidneys and spleen were failing when Northwest Hospital caught it and yanked me off it (my kidneys and spleen returned to normal within a month or two of that). And one of the tests they ran on me to find that out was an X-ray of my colon for which I had to drink a liquid containing a dye - I swallowed the wrong way (my bad, not theirs), and couldn’t breathe, and my heart stopped, and they had to restart it (which they did, and there was nothing wrong with my heart, either). All because of one well-meaning incompetent nurse-practitioner (which is why I finally started seeing Chris Smith as my GP).
What the hell is it about me that has drawn incompetents and vicious people to me over my entire life? Is there something that was evident even when I was an infant? At the age of three weeks, my adoptive father and his friends gave me a “Thelemic baptism” and did a ritual to establish a Magickal identity between me and this entire country, so that by raising me this way or that, they could steer the direction this country would take in the future. You don’t do that to any child, whether or not Magick works! But they did. Was that all they saw me as - prey? And why? I was just three weeks old. What was there about me even then that marked me as predator-bait?
In October of 1988 I was raped and almost murdered by somebody who broke into the place where I was then living - a room in the house where Kevin Bjornson, who eventually harassed my friend to death, had his business, HydroTech, on Aurora Ave N. Years later, it became apparent that Kevin had probably hired him to do that, paying him in potent marijuana, but at the time I had no idea why the bastard broke into a house whose occupants shouldn’t have been known to him, and who was totally unfamiliar to me. On top of everything else, when it came to trying to identify him for the police, I had real problems. I can still see the bastard in my mind’s eye, but when it came to describing him, I simply couldn’t come up with the words - the predator in my unconscious mind was having fun with me again.
When my adoptive mother first kicked me out in 1960, I was temporarily placed in Los Angeles County juvenile hall, and the gynecologist who examined me as part of the intake raped me in his office. I never dared tell anyone about it - I’d never have been believed. Fortunately I didn’t get pregnant as a result of that rape, and as far as I know, he didn’t transmit an STD to me. But I wonder how many other girls there he raped under similar circumstances? Surely somebody there must have known about him. So why was he still working there?
I am sick and tired of being preyed on, and the predator that I hate the most is the one in my unconscious mind, which has done everything it could for almost 66 years to destroy me, apparently for the fun of it, with no thought that I really would be destroyed, and gone, never again available to it to have as the toy of choice to break, if it kept it up long enough. It has no more understanding of consequences of actions than the average year-old child, and maybe less. It doesn’t understand what death is. It doesn’t understand the difference between “can’t” and “won’t,” nor that between children and adults. Quite seriously, if I had a nuke to use on it, I would. (The unfortunate thing about doing such a thing is that I wouldn’t survive that to gloat, but hey, you take what you can get.)
Why the hell have so many people striven so hard and so long to destroy me? And why? For the fun of it? And even if I’m somehow doing something to bring that on, and have been all along, so many of those things shouldn’t be done by anyone to anyone for any reason! That isn’t just mere abuse - some of those incidents involve major felonies and things I should have been able to sue over but couldn’t, because I couldn’t find a lawyer who’d take it on contingency, or it had happened when I was a child, and there were no witnesses, etc., etc. And then there’s the question of how many other people have been treated the same way by those bastards? For example, the psychiatrist James Mott, who tried to bullyrag me into committing suicide, did the same damned thing to many of his other patients - and yet he was head of Santa Barbara County Mental Health, and stayed in that position until he retired at around age 80. And the other bastards all had numerous opportunities to do harm, too, I’m sure. And there was no way to get help, or to sue, or to get the cops to investigate any of it.
I’m not just speaking out for myself. I’m doing so on behalf of everyone else who was ever harmed by any of those people and the agencies and institutions they were part of. I am speaking out for the victims of the Okay Boys Ranch and DSHS - that scam, which was finally thoroughly investigated by undercover journalists, whose work was written up in a prize-winning series of articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times in 1989 or 1990, involved the removal by DSHS social workers of young boys from good homes and their placement in the Okay Boys Ranch, which was the local rent-a-child service for wealthy perverts in this area. When it all went public, DSHS only insisted that those people in DSHS, including one man right at the top, who were involved in it take early retirement. As far as I know, none of them have been prosecuted or sued since, though I may have missed that. I hope.
I speak for the damned - such as the children nobody cares about, the elderly people whose cries for help are never answered, the women who are used up medically and thrown away by monsters like those at the 45th Street Clinic. Please, please tell others about these things. Far from being unique, I am legion, and my agonies are those of countless people of all ages.
February 18, 2011
Ms. Marisa Miller
Pacific Medical Centers
1200 12th Ave S
Seattle, WA 98144-2712
Dear Marisa:
One other thing, this one actually connected to PacMed via a doctor at PacMed Northgate named Beverly Strickland.
Back in 1990, I had a period that simply didn’t end. I bled and bled and bled, and got worried, so I went to the 45th Street Clinic at 1629 N 45th Street in the Wallingford Neighborhood of Seattle. I knew that the standard treatment for such things, assuming that cancer wasn’t involved, was hormone replacement therapy. But right from the first, they kept insisting that I had to have a complete ovarianhysterectomy.
Such a procedure should only be done to save lives, because the results cause real debility and mandate hormone replacement therapy anyway, to compensate for the removal of the ovaries, and those artificial hormones up one’s chances of getting cancer again, as well. Prolapse of the bladder is also a risk. So I said no - and had to say it over and over and over. I finally demanded a second opinion. They sent me to an endocrinologist - I don’t remember his name, now, nor exactly where his office was; this was 16 years ago, and some of the details have faded - and he told me, without giving me any kind of tests or a checkup, that I had to have an ovarianhysterectomy. I’d already been examined by Beverly Strickland at PacMed Northgate to see if I had cancer, and the tests came back clean (I was referred to her by the 45th Street Clinic when I demanded a second opinion, and she insisted I have the procedure, even though there wasn’t a sign of cancer. So I’d asked for an endocrinologist’s opinion, and they sent me to see that man). I said, “Since I don’t have cancer, why are you insisting I have that procedure?” He said, “Well, you’re bound to get cancer in the next five years, so you might as well have it out now.”
All the medical personnel involved in this, including that gynecologist, treated me as if I were being a very bad dog. I finally asked them, “Well, would you at least put me on hormone replacement therapy to make me stop bleeding while this gets checked out?” Reluctantly, they agreed. At which point I got the hell out of there and never went back.
I spent months bleeding and bleeding while I went to a naturopath and then people at Bastyr College, trying to get help without getting treated like dirt. Finally, somebody took pity on me and pointed me toward the UW Medical Center. They determined once and for all that I did not have cancer, and put me on hormone replacement therapy, the gold standard for a case like mine. But nobody was sure why I was having that endless period.
In 1996, I finally gave up coffee for good. When I did, the occasional bleeding and spotting that took place in spite of the hormones I was taking stopped completely. After comparing notes with a physician, it appeared that what had happened was that I’d gone through menopause in 1990. I was a heavy coffee drinker then and until I gave it up entirely, six years later, and apparently something in all that coffee kept me bleeding even though I was no longer having regular periods.
So that took care of the physical end of it. In the meantime, I discussed the whole vicious episode with my late friend Gary (the one who was harassed to death in 1995 by the landlord we both had). I thought that the people at the 45th Street Clinic and the two doctors they’d referred me to were hoping to get all that lovely Medicaid money for operating on me, and maybe kickbacks from whoever filled the prescriptions I’d have to have for the rest of my life afterwards. But Gary told me about a television documentary done about investigative reporting on “organlegging” (a term from Larry Niven’s science fiction novels, but it fits; it comes from “bootlegging,” and involves the same thing, but with organs illegally taken and sold to others) in various countries: the removal of one person’s kidneys or other organs without permission or even the knowledge of the patient, and the sale of such organs on the medical black market for extremely high prices. In particular, there were numerous cases, including some in this country, in which a woman was told she needed an ovarianhysterectomy, for whatever cause, and agreed to it. While she was under anesthetic, they also took out one of her kidneys. In every case, she was in fact quite healthy, without a sign of cancer or anything else that would have made it necessary to do an ovarianhysterectomy, and her kidney was healthy, too. The kidney was sold on the medical black market, and the woman wasn’t told about their taking it from her. Years later, she’d see a doctor who did an X-ray of her for whatever reason, and he’d ask her, “So why did you have that kidney out?” “Kidney? I never had a kidney removed!” “Oh, yes, you did - see? Here’s the X-ray.” There’ve been lawsuits over that, especially in this country, but they’ve all been settled out of court, so there wasn’t much exposure of such cases, at least initially. Anyway, Gary asked me, “Do you think that’s what they were up to?” I had no idea, but it certainly makes you think.
Eventually I tried to get an attorney to sue the 45th Street Clinic and the others involved in that. If nothing else, I’d steadily lost a lot of blood over a period of maybe 9-10 months, and it was very debilitating. And being treated like scum by all those people wasn’t real great, either. But it turned out I couldn’t sue, because the statute of limitations, which was very short, had run out, and I wasn’t eligible for the program that the King County Bar Association had in place for people with low incomes who had suffered from medical maltreatment. All I can do is tell people about it.
This is one more instance of numerous people regarding me as a throwaway. This has gone on all my life, and I am sick unto death of it. And then there are the incompetents, doctors and others, who, apparently with good intentions, gave me the worst possible advice, the worst possible prescriptions, the worst possible treatment of any kind. Alan Greenbaum, a nurse-practitioner at King County Public Health, prescribed one extra blood-pressure medication on top of two others I was already taking to control my migraines, and it interacted with everything else I was taking in a way that damned near killed me. My kidneys and spleen were failing when Northwest Hospital caught it and yanked me off it (my kidneys and spleen returned to normal within a month or two of that). And one of the tests they ran on me to find that out was an X-ray of my colon for which I had to drink a liquid containing a dye - I swallowed the wrong way (my bad, not theirs), and couldn’t breathe, and my heart stopped, and they had to restart it (which they did, and there was nothing wrong with my heart, either). All because of one well-meaning incompetent nurse-practitioner (which is why I finally started seeing Chris Smith as my GP).
What the hell is it about me that has drawn incompetents and vicious people to me over my entire life? Is there something that was evident even when I was an infant? At the age of three weeks, my adoptive father and his friends gave me a “Thelemic baptism” and did a ritual to establish a Magickal identity between me and this entire country, so that by raising me this way or that, they could steer the direction this country would take in the future. You don’t do that to any child, whether or not Magick works! But they did. Was that all they saw me as - prey? And why? I was just three weeks old. What was there about me even then that marked me as predator-bait?
In October of 1988 I was raped and almost murdered by somebody who broke into the place where I was then living - a room in the house where Kevin Bjornson, who eventually harassed my friend to death, had his business, HydroTech, on Aurora Ave N. Years later, it became apparent that Kevin had probably hired him to do that, paying him in potent marijuana, but at the time I had no idea why the bastard broke into a house whose occupants shouldn’t have been known to him, and who was totally unfamiliar to me. On top of everything else, when it came to trying to identify him for the police, I had real problems. I can still see the bastard in my mind’s eye, but when it came to describing him, I simply couldn’t come up with the words - the predator in my unconscious mind was having fun with me again.
When my adoptive mother first kicked me out in 1960, I was temporarily placed in Los Angeles County juvenile hall, and the gynecologist who examined me as part of the intake raped me in his office. I never dared tell anyone about it - I’d never have been believed. Fortunately I didn’t get pregnant as a result of that rape, and as far as I know, he didn’t transmit an STD to me. But I wonder how many other girls there he raped under similar circumstances? Surely somebody there must have known about him. So why was he still working there?
I am sick and tired of being preyed on, and the predator that I hate the most is the one in my unconscious mind, which has done everything it could for almost 66 years to destroy me, apparently for the fun of it, with no thought that I really would be destroyed, and gone, never again available to it to have as the toy of choice to break, if it kept it up long enough. It has no more understanding of consequences of actions than the average year-old child, and maybe less. It doesn’t understand what death is. It doesn’t understand the difference between “can’t” and “won’t,” nor that between children and adults. Quite seriously, if I had a nuke to use on it, I would. (The unfortunate thing about doing such a thing is that I wouldn’t survive that to gloat, but hey, you take what you can get.)
Why the hell have so many people striven so hard and so long to destroy me? And why? For the fun of it? And even if I’m somehow doing something to bring that on, and have been all along, so many of those things shouldn’t be done by anyone to anyone for any reason! That isn’t just mere abuse - some of those incidents involve major felonies and things I should have been able to sue over but couldn’t, because I couldn’t find a lawyer who’d take it on contingency, or it had happened when I was a child, and there were no witnesses, etc., etc. And then there’s the question of how many other people have been treated the same way by those bastards? For example, the psychiatrist James Mott, who tried to bullyrag me into committing suicide, did the same damned thing to many of his other patients - and yet he was head of Santa Barbara County Mental Health, and stayed in that position until he retired at around age 80. And the other bastards all had numerous opportunities to do harm, too, I’m sure. And there was no way to get help, or to sue, or to get the cops to investigate any of it.
I’m not just speaking out for myself. I’m doing so on behalf of everyone else who was ever harmed by any of those people and the agencies and institutions they were part of. I am speaking out for the victims of the Okay Boys Ranch and DSHS - that scam, which was finally thoroughly investigated by undercover journalists, whose work was written up in a prize-winning series of articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times in 1989 or 1990, involved the removal by DSHS social workers of young boys from good homes and their placement in the Okay Boys Ranch, which was the local rent-a-child service for wealthy perverts in this area. When it all went public, DSHS only insisted that those people in DSHS, including one man right at the top, who were involved in it take early retirement. As far as I know, none of them have been prosecuted or sued since, though I may have missed that. I hope.
I speak for the damned - such as the children nobody cares about, the elderly people whose cries for help are never answered, the women who are used up medically and thrown away by monsters like those at the 45th Street Clinic. Please, please tell others about these things. Far from being unique, I am legion, and my agonies are those of countless people of all ages.