What I was told
I was a patient myself. I was going to the emergency room two or three times a day. My anxiety was through the roof, my blood pressure was up, and I hurt all over, all the time.
Every visit ended the same way. I was handed another prescription. Then another one after that. Nobody sat down with me and went through what I was already taking, and nobody asked what my days were actually like.
I did what I was told. I took what I was given. And I kept getting worse.
Eighteen pills
So I sat down and did my own research on the eighteen pills I was on. I read about the side effects of every single one of them, one at a time, and I wrote it down where I could see it.
That was the day I understood something nobody had told me. In my own judgment, those eighteen pills were not helping me. They were ending me.
I am not a doctor and I am not telling you this as one. I am a man who was on eighteen pills, and I read the label.
The little bottles
There were small bottles they told me about, for my eyes, to prevent conditions like cataracts. What I understood from what I was told was that they came close to a thousand dollars.
I could not get past that. Close to a thousand dollars for the little bottles, and I had to ask myself who that was really for.
I am telling you what I was told and what I understood from it. That is all this is.
What do you mean, let's try this one
A doctor says, let’s try this medication. It sounds like nothing. It is not nothing.
The question nobody asks out loud is whether the doctor would take it himself. Whether it is being tried on one person, or on everybody who walks through the door. Whether anybody checked first whether it could harm me, before it was put in my hand.
I have asked that question in the room. You can feel the air change when a man asks it. Nobody expects the veteran to ask.
The way I see it, they expect the veteran to stay quiet and take what he is given. Sign here, take this, come back in three months. That is what I came to believe, from my own experience, and I am giving it to you as my belief and nobody else’s.
I am not telling anybody to stop anything, and I am not telling anybody to refuse anything. That is between a man and his own doctor. What I am saying is that a man is allowed to ask the question.
The merry-go-round
In my experience, this is how it goes. You get treated for one thing, and then something else appears that needs treating. Then something else. You go around and around, the list gets longer, and you never get off.
And when a man finally asks about it, he is treated as the problem. Not the list. Him. As if the question is the symptom.
I saw that happen more than once, and it happened to me. This is my own opinion of it, and I am not claiming it is anything more than that.
Why I do this now
Now I sit with veterans in the hospital. I walk the ward and say hello to every one of them, and then I find the one who needs somebody to sit down.
I get to their level. I treat them like a friend, not like a file, and not like a number. I have been in that bed, so nobody has to explain it to me.
I do this so no man sits through what I sat through. That is the whole reason the chapter exists, and it is the whole reason I am still here.
If you are the man in that bed right now, you are not a file to me either. Reach out, and I will answer.
A man is allowed to ask the question.