Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Locked In

My psychiatrist yesterday (- still today for me again - but I really tried to sleep this time. Maybe Geodon isn't the culprit)...anyway, he reminded me that I haven't seen my regular doctor (my AIDS doctor) in a long time, now. June apparently by my last bloodwork date, although I have had more bloodwork for clinical trials since then that I didn't call to get the results from.

I called to make an appointment with her today - my Ward 86 AIDS doctor (- nurse practitioner), Catherine, and the receptionist said I couldn't see her till January 7. (Catherine, works in clinics in Uganda and Senegal, which is part of why I like her as my practitioner, even though she is not very available. I've gone to her for about ten years? The receptionist said "January 7," like I would be upset about that. But I don't really care. I like talking to her, Catherine, about her work, but our doctor/patient relationship is very casual. She asks me how I am. I say fine. We do my bloodwork. (Most of the time our relationship is casual - She is the one who had me 5150-ed to the locked up emergency psychiatric unit last November. Taken over in the back of police car, after consensus and sign-off from a social worker summoned down the hall. No one to go home to take care of my sick cat, when I wasn't let out. I became so tragically destroyed about Animal Control going to get my sick cat, with the keys they had taken from me along with writing instruments and all sharp objects - that my brother was notified as an emergency contact, and he and his wife came all the way from Arlington, Texas to cat sit. And my regular Santa Rosa Cat sitter came to her vet clinic in San Francisco to get lessons on her kidney failure fluid infusions. He had been too squeamish before this - my - emergency to stick the needle in that deep. Scruff is scruff.

They all made keys for each other, for my apartment. It was at a time when I did not trust anyone in my building, or city, to have an emergency key, including the landlords, and I believed that the woman on the first flour who was eventually evicted for the terrorist death threats, had access to all my things, no matter how many times KD paid for the locks on my door to be changed to console me.

I really do now from sanity believe my neighbor woman really wasn't just studying the trash, as she's said. She really did get the spare key on the nail by the door without me noticing and made a copy, and returned the original, and had access to all my private things for a long period of time. She lived in the downstairs front apartment, the gatekeeper, and knew all the patterns of my (and all our) comings and goings - to know when she'd have free time to herself in my space during the day - just to learn every quirky trait and legality about me to hit me with later, sometimes mysteriously, coyly, with expanses of unexplained space for a paranoid imagination, and then sometimes she'd hit me inside out with gouging specifics like some terrible angel of retribution on high to purify me of every minute, gross hypocracy and failing. Every scrap.

There is no other way to explain how she could have known all she eventually knew about my whole life and history. She told me once she was being stalked, and I said ,"Why?" And she said, "I don't know." I said, "Is it because they want something form you? She said, "No." I said, "Is it because you've done some thing to them ?" She said, "Oh, no" shaking her head effusively. I said, "Is it to put you in your place?" She looked me straight on and said, "Yes."

There weren't many people in the building during the day to notice her comings and goings, and there are always the unused back stairs, if there were people.

When the landlord Mr.Quan, became scared of her too, he told me to tell her she was not to come above her first floor. She had no business above the first floor. When kind of law is that?
He thought I should tell her because i was her only friend, which I supposed he inferred from the fact that my whole existence was tuned to appeasing her because she had threatened to drop off my sick cat in Mission Dolores Park and to hope for the best that someone would find and care for her.

I was not the person to ask to tell her what to do. It was the only time in my life I know I had the capacity to kill somebody. If she was going to hurt my cat or abandon her. If I had known it was coming, I would have been capable. That doesn't mean I would have, but grace was in the doubt. I couldn't know she would hurt her or abandon her until she would have, and by then, hurting Arlene, the neighbor, the gatekeeper, would no longer be relevant at all.


This is not what I was going to write today. I was going to write that although I can't see my practitioner, Catherine till January 7, I should at least call her for a blood panel requisition so I can just go show up, whenever, drop in, to get my blood drawn to see what my T-cells and viral load are up to. (There's no stress about that. It only matters if my viral load is in the hundred thousands or something - in which case my present meds are no longer worth taking, and probably haven't been in awhile. In which case there would definitely be stress about what to do next.) Treatment options limited still, for me, taken what I've taken. My cuffs to the city and its trials.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

ramram

+PHc said...

touche