Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Defeat of Empathy

Julia has been helping me pro bono for several months now as I try to get my emergency medical visa and navigate the beaurocracies of the public health care system.

She is Argentine with a soft-spoken demeanor but she doesn’t take no for an answer.

A day before Christmas Eve during one of Cristina’s populist faux holidays, I was scheduled to meet for the first time with the surgeons who will be cutting me open in a few weeks. The surgery will take place at a hospital new to me and my friends who have been helping me.

Kate Sedgwick had already shown up that morning for the consultation and Julia was running late (I told you she was Argentine!). During holidays, certain staff positions at city-run institutions get filled by temps who often don’t know what the hell they are doing or where they are. When Kate checked in with reception that day, the young woman at the desk informed her there was no record of my appointment and that, in any case, the surgeons weren’t there.

Kate’s a formidable woman herself  but was unable to make headway with the confused and incalcitrant temporary worker.

By the time Julia showed up, Kate was pissed off and I was discouraged. This was the next big step in my treatment, it was just before a week of holidays and we felt like we’d be foiled by incompetence.

Enter: Julia.

Despite her track record in aggressively getting things done, her style is low-key but persistent. Within a couple minutes of first talking to the receptionist, she’d discovered where the surgeons were hiding and we were off. Without her, I wouldn’t have been able to set up my next appointment (I also wouldn’t have gotten finger-fucked by an aggressive, bearish intern). I wouldn’t have been able to enter the system at all. It would have been back to Marie Curie to get them to make another phone call, to set up another consultation, make the trek back to this surgical hospital and hope for the best that they can work me in.

(My last round of treatment included both radiation and chemotherapy. The goal was to shrink the tumors and then take them out. But first, to determine whether any of that worked, I have to get an MRI. The order to get my MRI is still being held hostage by Conyers Thompson along with all my other papers, appointment slips, patient cards and previous MRIs and tomographies.)

So, last week watching petite Julia confront towering Conyers Thompson on the sidewalk outside the Montevideo flat, I had some hope that I would get my stuff back. But, she failed. He glared at her with those half-crazed eyes of his, which anyone who’s seen him mad or manic would be familiar with,  told her that my need for my medical records was merely “psychosomatic,”  turned on his heel with his little dog Tim on a leash and stalked off.

Coming back to me, she didn’t just look discouraged, she looked defeated, deflated, beaten. It hurt to see her that way.

Now, despite her dedication and  hard work, Julia is without sentiment. She busts balls with the best of them, makes jokes about my cancer and colostomy and tells me that she doesn’t feel sorry for me, that she doesn’t see how that would help.

Fairly unsentimental myself, her attitude is a tonic for the greeting-card well-wishes I sometimes get from all sides. It reminds me that I’m not going to get through this thing with words or happy thoughts, but with hard work and resilience, like every other endeavor in life.

Still, later that evening, she looked lost and tired as we began to think about eating something.

She stopped in the middle of the room, stumbled a bit and paused.

“In my whole life,” she said, “I’ve never known anyone to do anything so mean.”

Reprieve

Conyers called Julia tonight and after a lot of  “poor me” bellyaching about the “harassment” we put him through yesterday, all of it on the advisement of the police,  he put forward that the best way to resolve this was to sit down and work it out.  He was willing to withdraw the denuncia against me — which, by the way, is a direct attempt to interfere with my getting the emergency medical visa — and come to terms.

Really? All this just occurred to you?

Julia doesn’t trust him.

I can’t say I do either, not after realizing that locking me out had been planned extensively beforehand. Along with some Oscar-level acting in the days prior — which I can say I’m pretty familiar with myself — he’d made sure I was out of the house on an Art Walk, even going so far as to tell me that two friends of a friend would be coming and they wanted to do it that day and no other (they, whoever they were, didn’t show up), and finally insuring that I would be far away from Montevideo when the chain was put on the door, separating me from my possessions, what little cash I have left and over a year’s worth of work by both me and my friends  — documents associated with and essential to my cancer treatment including tomographies, two MRIs, one of which is worth over USD $500 paid for through donations and loans.

If he’s been harassed, what’s been done to me and my friends?

Nevertheless, I’m anxious for this to be over, to move on with my life and to return this blog to being about fighting cancer and not about fighting Conyers.

We’ll see what happens next week.

Sociopath Strikes Again!

The Argentine cops at the police station have been sympathetic but told us there was nothing that they could do to help me get my stuff. Argentine law is not based on English Common Law so verbal agreements are not binding. Eveything has to be written down. In triplicate. If not, it is not legal.

So my verbal, gentlemen’s agreement with Conyers is meaningless. Expats take heed.

The cops at the station suggested we find Conyers and call 911 to bring the beat cops and they would talk to him to try to convince him to at least release my medical history and my MRIs and hopefully the money I left in the flat.

We tried that, twice, but Conyers refused to show himself, instead sending lackeys to intervene and finally refusing to answer the doorbell. That obnoxious dog of his answered though.

After the cops left the first time and the coast was clear, Vero cornered him on the street as he was supervising the locks being changed for the building where I used to live. She tried to persuade him to do the right thing but he stated that my need to get my medical records and MRIs back was “psychosomatic,” whatever that might mean in this context. Why don’t we put the question of how important those records are to my oncologists and surgeons? That’s something I will have to do in the next week.

I know I’ll never see a dime from him at this point. He owes EVERYONE, including USD $5000 to his lawyers. He confessed that to Vero and me as we stood next to him on a bench on Avenida de Mayo, shouting at each other in the rain.

Why does he owe so much to his lawyers? Because he’s been defending himself from 3 other lawsuits from disgruntled former employees and associates, that I know of.

Does anyone out there believe there won’t be more?

 

Locked Out

In retaliation for writing the truth about him on this blog and elsewhere,  Conyers Thompson has locked me out of the flat.

What is in my room?

All my clothes except what is on my back and feet.

Money.

Debit card.

Colostomy bags, cancer drugs and other stuff I need to survive.

He will not let me back  in to get my stuff.

This is his idea of payback. Pretty effective, no?

 

The Result of Panic

Looks like I did not read the electric bill very closely.  It was pointed out to me today that the name on the bill was not Conyers Thompson but rather that of whoever owned the bakery downstairs.

I assumed it was Conyers bill because he had warned me earlier in the week to expect a cut-off notice.  So, there is a big bill out there somewhere and it still has not been paid.

Still, I was in error.

 

Cut-Off

On Saturday the portero delivered a cut-off notice from the electric company. The guy who owns the building I live in, the guy who owes me a little over USD $2000, hasn’t paid the electric bill here for 12 months, which coincides with my first month out of the hospital after my first two surgeries.

The total owed is ARS $4880, or about USD $1100. Needless to say, I guess, but that was news to me.

This is in addition to the building expenses bill he received last week which is almost as much.

I’m not going to comment on what all that says about Conyers except that he seemed unconcerned. “Add it to the list,” he said to me on the phone and asked when I would be getting my disability certificate from the government so that he could get a discount. He hasn’t even come by to pick up the bill itself.

What this means for me is that I will be living in a building without electricity beginning on Tuesday. No doubt the other utilities will be cut off soon, as well.

What Is

It might be a conceit, but I have the feeling that other than soldiers and health care professionals, the gay men and lesbians of my generation and older have seen more death than your average person.

So, we look at it differently than most.

I’ve sat at the bedside of men, who were not necessarily my friends, who no longer looked how they did when I first met them. And maybe they’d said some things in ACT UP meetings that I disagreed with politically. Disagreed with very strongly. Maybe I didn’t even really like them.

But they were shells by the time we said goodbye.

And they were my comrades.

Guys I’d shouted “ACT UP! FIGHT BACK!” next to as we took over the streets, guys with whom I’d faced down cops in rubber gloves on horseback, guys I’d danced to “We Are Family” with after we’d shut down downtown Chicago and finally forced the opening of the AIDS ward of Cook County Hospital.

We’d made the fight to stay alive not just personal but political. Not a sacrifice but a re-imagining of what bodies mean and could do in the world. We changed things.

For me, that’s love.


From Zócalo Public Sphere:

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.