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Sunday, December 10 I met Jim in The City and we walked around the Haight. I told him the story about the note in Don's medical file and the power-of-attorney fiasco. At one point, he said, "I may have had something to do with that, and I may not have been helpful." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Dr. Remen called me and asked me if I knew this guy named Lou who was claiming to be V's husband." "When was this?" "Very early on." "And of course, we hadn't met yet." "No. I told her I'd never heard of you." "Of course," I said. "And if she'd've asked me who Jim Sotiros was, I'd've said I'd never heard of you, either. "I knew about you," Jim said. "I later remembered Don talking about you, but that was after Dr. Remen's call. I remember he said he'd met someone and he didn't know where it was going, but it was nice." "It was nice." "He felt you both had each other and still had your freedom." "Yes, that was very important." We walked on for a bit. "So," I said eventually, "Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen didn't believe me and decided to check up on me. Too bad she didn't ask anyone who actually knew both Don and me, like my housemate or the guys at work or the entire Silicon Valley Gay Men's Chorus. But if the situation were reversed and she'd asked some of my friends who Don was, not all of them would've known. Still, she could have asked me for back-up. Or Don, for heaven's sake. He was lucid enough to be introducing me as his partner by the third week in Kentfield." We turned around and started walking back to his apartment. I told him how much difficulty I was having getting a copy of Don's power of attorney from Kentfield. "I may have to wave a lawyer at them," I said. "Why is it so hard?" "I don't know. Maybe they think they're protecting someone's private medical information, but I'm his executor for God's sake. I am Don Flint as far as the law is concerned. If that power of attorney doesn't belong to him, who does it belong to? Do you know what medical records person at Kentfield said?" "What?" "She said, 'Why don't you contact his wife, Bernice?" "What?" "That's exactly what I said. 'I'm the wife,' I told her. 'Bernice is his father's wife, his step-mother." "What a mess!" "This makes me think they didn't have a legitimate power of attorney drawn up when Don was admitted to Kentfield. I was told they did, but I wasn't allowed to see it because of that damned note. Now I think they didn't get a new one. They just used the same one they used at Santa Rosa." "What was wrong with that?" "Well, it's certainly not legal. It might be a power of attorney, but if it's a power of attorney over anyone, it's over Lee Onzel Flint, not Don Edward Flint. It has Lee's signature at the bottom and it says, 'These people have the right to access my medical records.' That's my medical records, not Don's." "But they took control over him anyway, in Santa Rosa." "Yeah. I wasn't about to butt in then, though. If I had, Don's power of attorney would have gone to his father. It did go to his father, but then he signed this bogus document that said he was giving his authority to Rachel Remen and Jnani Chapman." "I thought that was illegal." "It is. And I think both Rachel Remen and Jnani Chapman knew it was illegal, and maybe Michael Learner as well, since he's the one who faxed the phoney form down to Don's father to have him sign it. If Don had named his father as his power-of-attorney, then the only person who could change it to someone else is Don himself. His father can't do it for him." "They were never on good terms. Why did it end up with him anyway?" "If you don't have a power-of-attorney on file, the authority follows the legal notion of 'next-of-kin,' and that would be Lee. If I had acted against Remen or Jnani, Lee would have ended up making medical decisions for Don, and I didn't want that." "Good God, no. There's something seriously broken about that man." "Jerry thinks he has Alzheimer's. When he called him up to tell him Don had died, he said, 'Well, what did he die of?'" "You're kidding." "Nope. That's why Jerry thinks he has Alzheimer's. And he can't get Bernice to have him in for testing. Anyway, that would explain why he never called." "Not ever?" "Not even once. The entire time from Don's hemorrhage to his death, he never called. Of course, I didn't know it would be like that at the time, but I knew enough about their relationship that I didn't want Lee making medical decisions for Don. I don't think Lee wanted the responsibility, either. And, to tell the truth, Don had no complaints about either Rachel's or Jnani's decisions. I asked him about it often enough." "How about you?" "Well, I was pretty pissed about it when I found out, and I told Jnani so at the time. What really aggravated me was this pattern they had. They'd seize control of the treatment, like when they stopped the follow-up angiogram, but then they'd never check back to see the consequences of their actions. Forbid others to act, but then don't act yourself. That's why I blew up at at her over the phone. Rachel Remen claimed his medical power of attorney and then left town and told me she couldn't be bothered by my phone calls. So how was I to get any information? She had made herself the only source, and then made herself unavailable. I hate control like that. My blowing up at her probably didn't help things. She seems to resent men who claim to know more than she does. Do you know what she asked me when I told her I thought Don should be tested for HIV?" "What?" "She said, 'Have you considered the consequences of what might happen if it comes back positive?'" "What did she mean?" "She was afraid it might affect Don's insurability. But can you imagine somone asking a gay man such a question? A gay man living in the Bay Area, for God's sake! 'Have I imagined the consequences!' What has any gay man been imagining but the consequences of such a test for the past fifteen years?" I cooled down somewhat. "Of course, she didn't know about my work with the Boulder County AIDS project back in Colorado - that I started their speakers' bureau and spent nearly that entire first year giving speeches to churches, government committees, and civic groups on the importance of avoiding stigmatizing people with AIDS. But even not knowing that, what made her think she knew more about the consequences of a positive HIV test than a gay man would? Where has she been for the past ten years?" "Is there anything you can do?" "You mean, now?" "Yeah." "Not really. There's a one-year statute of limitations on personal injury. And who's the injured party, here? Me? I have no legal standing as far as the State of California is concerned. I suppose in Chapman's case, I could bring it before the nursing board, or in Remen's, bring it to the attention of the UCSF regents. But I doubt it would do any good. After all, she is Rachel Naomi Remen, who's practically a national icon of compassionate care for the critically ill, and I'm just some disgruntled little faggot." "What about Don? You represent him now as executor of his estate." "It's true that postponing the angiogram caused him considerable anxiety. He wanted to know what was going on up there. He wanted to stop thinking of himself as a walking time bomb. But how do you prove that? Or measure it?" I sighed and tried to let go of my anger. "Besides," I said, "there were some decisions I agreed with. Like that first week in Santa Rosa. When Don's intracranial pressure started going back up, the neurosurgeon wanted to go back in and remove part of his brain to relieve the pressure. It was Dr. Remen who said, 'No, let's wait.' And they did, and the pressure went back down." "So they would have operated?" "Yes, in the right temporal-parietal area, where he'd had the bleed. Where they ended up having to operate anyway when they found the tumor." "So," Jim said, "if they had operated, they might have found the tumor then. Or maybe even removed it." "Huh," I said. "I'd never thought of that." We finished our walk, but I don't remember the rest of our conversation. I was too stunned by a hope that had never really existed. |
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Monday, December 11 |
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Tuesday, December 12 Dr. Doherty got her letter some time this weekend. She replied, via her administrative assistant, on my home answering machine today: Hi, Lou. This is Phyllis in Dr. Doherty's office. How are you?She left me the name of the Director of Medical Records and the number to call. It was the same person I had been calling without results for two weeks. The message continued: Also, Lou, Dr. Doherty said that you wrote to her, wanting to know who wrote in Don's chart that you were not to be informed of, of his, you know, of his progress or any... you know, we're not to speak to you.She closed by giving me Dr. Doherty's direct number, and then said, "Thanks, Lou. I hope you remember me, Phyllis. Thanks. Bye-bye." So, Dr. Remen says Dr. Doherty did it, and Dr. Doherty says Dr. Remen did it. I still haven't heard from Jnani. |
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Wednesday, December 13 |
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Thursday, December 14 |
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Friday, December 15 I had my last session with Scot today. It's been a help. He said he saw me more angry today that he has ever seen me. He asked if I thought my anger might be getting in the way of my grieving. It's an interesting question. I replied, "It's not just the anger or whom I'm agry at. It's the very act of being angry that feels right. Why does such a negative emotion feel so good? Why am I enjoying this sense of outrage?" Afterwards, I waited in Dr. Lane's reception area to get the results of the occult blood test. While there, I read a memoire by André Aciman called "Arbitrage" in the July 10, 2000, issue of The New Yorker. In it, Aciman describes how he felt as an exile from Egypt, and how, over time, his longing for the Egypt he left behind as a boy had a greater influence over him than the actual Egypt he was eventually able to return to. One paragraph in particular stood out for me: Egypt itself had become a metaphor. . . . I had invented another Egypt, a mirror Egypt, an Egypt that stood beyond time, because although it gave every indication of having been lost there was scant evidence that it had ever existed; it was . . . an Egypt from the past that kept intruding on the present to remind me, among so many other things, that if I loved summoning up the past more than I loved the past I summoned up, and if it was not really Egypt but remembering Egypt that I loved, this was because my trouble was no longer with Egypt but with life itself. Not knowing how to let go of things was nothing more than the mirror image of not knowing how to take them when they were offered. . . .That's the basic problem, isn't it? |
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Saturday, December 16 |
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