I had another surgery yesterday. It was pretty minor, but I was down all day yesterday. Expected recovery time is 3 weeks, but, as one of my tattoo artists once said, I heal like Wolverine. So I expect to be mostly fine by the end of the week. It's a neat trick, until my body is trying to push out stitches that were supposed to dissolve or doing some other medically unexpected nonsense.
It was my first surgery in the #Netherlands. Some things were pretty consistent with my experiences in the US. The first medical assistant wrecked one of my veins before calling over a phlebotomist to put in my IV somewhere else. I've had that happen a bunch of times in the US, so familiar and annoying.
The medication was different. They gave me an infusion of paracetamol to start and added mild opiate after. I was prescribed Tramadol, but told to only take it for severe pain and to primarily use paracetamol. I wasn't given a ramp down, they told me that if I used it appropriately I wouldn't need a ramp down plan.
This is probably the biggest difference. For a similar type (but perhaps more major) surgery in the US, I was given dilaudid and told to take it on a regular schedule, ramping down by only taking it when pain was too much. I think I took it for the first day or two at half the prescribed dose and then stopped.
The big thing I reflected on in recovery was how I was an object not a participant in both systems.
When I was in the hospital for the gunshot wound, I was given ketamine along with the opiates to see if they could reduce the dosage. I was in a university hospital, so it was an experiment. (I'm actually fine with that element of being an object. The experiment was unpleasant at first but turned out fine. I helped provide good data with minimal impact to me. I'm actually fine that they did this without my consent.)
In the hospital, for extreme pain, they give you a button that dispenses opiates. There's a light. When you hit the button the light goes off. You can only hit it again when the light comes on.
Before ketamine I'd basically be hitting the pain button as soon as the light would come on. When they first put me on ketamine they lowered my base dose of opiates. I was hallucinating and in all consuming pain. As soon as they took the tube out I was screaming. But once I had a base level of pain killers, I didn't need anything extra.
There was still a lot of pain, but instead of being overwhelmed by it I could interrogate it. With the ketamine it was really easy to do a pain meditation where I followed the pain through my nervous system to the source and listened to the pain. I could feel my body healing and the pain was telling me how. It ceased to be something I wanted to avoid and became something I could use to ground and calm myself.
Because I already had experience with meditation, I was able to become an active participant in my healing instead of an object of the medical system. This wasn't at all intentional or even actively supported. I don't even think the medical staff had any idea or would have been able to conceptualize it within their framework of understanding.
Sitting in the recovery room yesterday, I thought about how a small dose of a psychedelic and guided meditation could probably have been enough to not have needed opiates at all. But more than that, that approach would have included me as a participant in the healing process rather than just an object to be acted on, to be operated on and medicated then returned home. But I'm excluded from my healing process because I'm not a medical professional. I can't suggest what approach they should take, even though I have experience with what works because I live in this body and am definitely an expert in it.
There's an unfortunate connection between "alternative medicine," which can be (and often is) rooted in an anti-science or pseudoscience, and the type of participatory healing approach I'm talking about. I think there's room to disentangle the dehumanization of medicalization and the science of medicine. I can feel there's room for participatory healing practice to be integrated into medical settings, to produce better outcomes.
But I'm not a #healer, so I'm not going to propose a solution. But I am curious what #healers do think, both those from traditional and from modern backgrounds. I'm also curious if other folks who've been in the medical system have similar feelings and experiences, or other takes.
What would a humanized medical system look like?
What participatory medical traditions exist?
How could participatory healing be integrated in to a western medical system?
#medical #MedicalSystem #hospital #Netherland
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