My Lifelong War With the "Healthcare" System
My rather unusual childhood clearly left its imprint on me. If I’d had younger, more active parents, and siblings closer to my age, perhaps I wouldn’t have been as drawn to daydreaming, and over analysis. I spent a lot of time in self-reflection, and in my own thoughts. Which was odd for a very social extrovert like me.
I saw our “healthcare” system up close and personal, from the time I was very small. My father never even went through six months of apparent health during my childhood. He spent almost as much time as a patient at Fairfax Hospital than he did at home. As a seven year old, I watched the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in the Fairfax Hospital lobby, because that’s where my father was. Both of my parents would eventually die at Fairfax Hospital, ten years apart. And I would work there for over thirty years, before moving on to other facilities within the same corporation that became Inova Health System. I gave them 44 years- my entire adult working life- before they fired me in 2018 for helping a handicapped co-worker.
So my childhood was dominated by sickness and hospitalization. My mother was also in the hospital a handful of times when I was a child. My father had so many major surgeries that his chest and stomach were covered in hideous scars. Maybe that’s why I’m so repelled by the Frankenstein scars on the chests of underage “trans” girls. At least one of those operations was what they used to quaintly call “exploratory.” This was when they had no idea what was going on inside someone, so they cut them open to see. In the cases of a few family members, I remember hearing my parents talk about how they saw the cancer immediately, so they “sewed them right back up.” It was all very frightening to a child, and obviously added to my growing list of fears.
My father grew to hate the world, but he never turned his bitterness on the medical system that consistently failed him. He loved his ridiculous Dr. O’Brien, who used to drive my mother crazy by combing his hair when listening to their complaints. Like most doctors, he wound up not living to a ripe old age. I’ve heard the allegations that doctors have the shortest life expectancies of any profession, but haven’t been able to verify that. At any rate, every time my father was hospitalized, whether he added to his record number of operations or not, he came back the worse for the wear. A little less capable of doing something he was able to do before. More debilitated every time. In all those years, the medical profession never helped him. Never made him better.
I was constantly in fear of my father dying. Even worse from my standpoint would have been my mother’s death. She gave me love and support, and provided whatever security I felt as a child. I spent too many times peeking in on them at night, to make sure they were still breathing. Maybe if they’d shown even a bit of improvement after a new surgery (and yes, my mother had several as well, and her own scars), or yet another medication, then I might have felt more confident that they were going to live. At least for a while. If my father had been active at all, or my mother didn’t always get out of breath over the simplest things, I might not have seen them as ticking time bombs. I was well aware of how much older they were than other parents.
I lost track of how many times I thought my father was going to die. When he finally did, I was working the graveyard shift at Fairfax Hospital, and heard them call the “M-Set” on him. I knew all too well what that meant- cardiac arrest. And I knew his room number, so I knew who it was. I reconcile myself to the fact that my father essentially spent about fifteen years or so- the bulk of my youth- committing the slowest suicide imaginable. He subsisted on almost nothing but beer, and drank at least 15-20 cans every day. We even used to sneak some into him at the hospital. He kept a few cases under the bed, just to be sure. So, he obviously did nothing to help himself get better. But was this due to his perhaps unconscious realization that they weren’t helping him?
My father fell once about a year or two before he died, and broke his hip. When they operated on him, they put the pin in wrong, and it tore his muscle up, causing excruciating pain and another surgery. He once had very minor surgery for a deviated septum, and almost died from their incompetence. They told me I have a deviated septum, too, but they’re not touching my nose, even if I never have more than one nostril clear at a time. When my sister fell and broke her hip six years ago, they did such a bad job that she is still in pain, and has been largely incapacitated from it. The idiot doctor who mistreated her told her she was lucky to be alive. They are entitled and shielded from blame by the corrupt establishment.
My father was sixty four when he died. Three years younger than I am now. I don’t know how you can be as sick as he was for so long, and die at that age, without ever having had cancer, or any heart problems. They said his heart was his one strong and healthy organ. Obviously, his almost all alcohol diet didn’t do him any good. Like my mother, who almost made it to seventy seven, he never exercised. Just sat in his easy chair, and raged at the television. So ranting comes natural to me. He never really guided me, just criticized me. And everyone and everything else. But not the medical profession which kept failing him.
So it was certainly understandable that I would grow to resent this healthcare system of ours. Sickness permeated my upbringing; open discussions of symptoms, parents arguing over who was sicker and was going to die first, way too many hours spent in a medical setting, as I waited to see if perhaps just once the doctors might do something beneficial for them. Again, maybe I would have been a more upbeat adult if the death of one or both of my parents wasn’t always a terrifying possibility in my mind. Since everyone else seemed to trust this medical system of ours, I wondered why it didn’t work for us. Added to my persecution complex, I suppose.
My father was born on September 27, 1912. So perhaps that’s why he’s in my thoughts, two days from what would have been his 111th birthday. It wasn’t just Fairfax Hospital that failed my parents; both of them had miserable experiences at Georgetown Hospital, and when my mother had a mastectomy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1981, they treated her just as badly at Arlington Hospital. I grew to really despise doctors and nurses, even though I was engaged to an RN for a brief time in my misguided youth. I found nurses to be consistently slow and unresponsive, and more often than not unpleasant.
My sister almost died at Fairfax Hospital, too. Just thirty years old, with six small children, a blood clot in her leg was treated improperly, and some even more incompetent nurses than usual were responsible for her winding up in intensive care, and being given the Last Rites of the Catholic Church. She pulled through, but in the ensuing decades, was cursed with my father’s luck in terms of health, and at eighty two is in constant pain. Just as the system had failed my parents, it failed and continues to fail my sister. She just had a pacemaker put in, and has already had to be rushed to the hospital more than once, because it obviously wasn’t done correctly. Like my father, she inexplicably trusts those who have never made her better.
I have a niece who was born with Down Syndrome. Denise had a tremendous impact on my life. As my sister likes to say, she taught me more than I could ever teach her. At any rate, years ago, she fell and broke her hip. While in Fairfax Hospital, her “care” was so neglectful that she fell again and reinjured it trying to get to the bathroom, when the nurses refused to respond to her ringing for a bedpan. I saw this over and over again with my parents. If you need a bedpan in the hospital, be prepared to hold it. For a long time. I’ve only been hospitalized once, at age fourteen. A sports injury required minor surgery that would now be done in an hour as an outpatient. But then it required an overnight stay. That was in 1970, and I haven’t been back.
When my son was born, my wife, who was skeptical of my very vocal negative opinion of nurses in general, was brought to tears by their inexplicable cruel and insensitive treatment. And her sister was a charge nurse on the unit, so they should seemingly have been on their best behavior. When my daughter was born, it was like the all female staff present decided to hold a pussy hat rally. They simply wouldn’t let me hold my daughter. She must have passed through six pairs of hands before they begrudgingly placed her in my arms. That’s the kind of coldness I saw regularly as an employee, and as a relative of sick loved ones. When others talk about the great care they got in the hospital, I cannot relate, because I very rarely saw even decent care.
Add to all this personal experience with loved ones what I saw behind the scenes as a hospital employee. I saw the sausage being made. It isn’t pretty. I heard nurses wishing aloud that patients would die. I walked past pathetic souls screaming “Help” from the hallways and inside their rooms. Ironically, I would socialize with some of these younger nurses at hospital parties. There were a lot of hospital parties in those days. And they would be entirely different there. Friendly, laughing and happy. But put them in that working environment, and it’s insta-bitch. Between the doctors and the nurses, it’s a wonder that anyone makes it out of a hospital alive.
I openly mocked the healthcare system, even as I stood in the center of it. When I was young, nurses reported me for “talking back.” I didn’t realize I had to defer to their superiority. I merely dared to answer them as an equal. It’s that kind of mindset that leads to Orwellian concepts like “mansplaining.” When I had the rare opportunity to “talk back” to a doctor, they usually ignored me. Doctors are so far above the common riff raff that they aren’t obligated to speak to you, unless you’re a paying customer. Most of them have the arrogance of rock stars and athletes. And, in reality, offer not much more of real value to the community.
Now consider that these memories come from the 1960s-1980s. In the case of my kids, the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The medical profession then, as bad as it was, was like a script from Marcus Welby, M.D. compared to the present monstrosity. Then, you had uncaring almost all White doctors and nurses, who at least spoke English fluently. Now you have Third World doctors and nurses, who are even more unconcerned with patient welfare, and demonstrably more incompetent. During the summer of 2020, I watched my brother be mistreated at several nursing homes and hospitals. He was certainly a difficult patient (as was my father), but they were unfailingly rude and, again, never made him better.
When Ricky had an unnecessary surgery in 2020, the urologist was about as bad as I’ve ever seen. Incredibly unresponsive (they didn’t even let me know he was out of surgery, and he never visited us afterward), he clearly didn’t know what he was doing, and after pressuring him into an operation he didn’t need, his problems just got worse. Surgery, and medication, are supposed to improve things. For my loved ones, that simply never happened. Regular readers know that Ricky was eventually murdered by COVID protocol at Fair Oaks Hospital, an Inova facility. This week on “I Protest,” I’ll have a husband and wife on, to talk about how he almost was killed at the same hospital, by the same protocol.
It was natural for me to be keenly interested in the COVID psyop, from the very beginning. I know this Medical Industrial Complex all too well. I tried to tell people that those who work within it are the last people who would ever care about your health. It isn’t good for business. I saw a nurse openly joke to a medic, who was bringing a kid up for surgery, “Don’t try too hard- we’re already overcrowded.” I saw an old woman, who was reluctant to leave her dead daughter’s side, bullied by nurses and security in an ICU unit. I never once felt that any of my loved ones were in good hands in any hospital, or that the medical “professionals” were giving them good care.
Almost everyone my age goes regularly to doctors. And all of them that I know are on meds. Usually more than one, sometimes many. It was only a few years ago that some doctor was exposed as having given numerous patients a fake cancer diagnosis, and then subjected them to deadly chemotherapy. There have been others, and there will be more. From what I saw regarding the ethics of most doctors, this kind of crime wouldn’t be out of character. How many people have you known who felt fine, went in for their yearly “checkup,” and then found out they were actually deadly sick. Thus, “asymptomatic” patients learning they have COVID is par for the course. Come and see us, we’ll let you know how sick you are. They need the sick, not the healthy.
When I was a young blue collar worker in the 1970s, the only time I went to the doctor is to get a sick note. All of us tended to call in “slick” once in a while, and they sometimes made you get a note from a doctor. Dr. Podolnick- whom I otherwise didn’t visit- was pretty cool. He would simply write a note, with no questions, and have his receptionist give it to you for ten bucks. He had a pet bird that would fly around the office, and they say he placed undue importance on checking women’s breasts for lumps. But he was better than most. My childhood doctor wasn’t great, but he was maybe the last one in northern Virginia to make house calls. Yes, in America 1.0, the doctors came to you. And no one squawked when they stopped doing it.
Before it became the Medical Industrial Complex, the medical profession was really high on removing the tonsils of children. You can see references to this in many old TV shows. Bill Cosby had a funny skit about it on one of his comedy albums. I was one of the few 1960s kids that kept his tonsils. Now, they seem to have pretty much stopped doing it. When and why did tonsils suddenly become needed? But they replaced the missing tonsils with dubious allergies. Especially peanut allergies. There was always at least one kid in my son’s or daughter’s grade school classes that had this now deadly allergy. The young boomers relished peanut butter. Where were all the allergic kids then? And why have tonsils become much healthier?
Over a century ago, they used to bleed patients with leeches. Seemed like a good idea at the time. So maybe the medical profession has always been iffy. There’s a reason why so many oldsters, who avoided doctors, called them “quacks.” And became oldsters in the first place. But the ones today are especially bad. Violating their Hippocratic Oath to first perform abortions, and now mutilating children with “gender affirmation surgery.” Why would anyone trust monsters like that? Why would you think they know about your health, when they think it’s “normal” to give puberty blocking drugs to children, and leave them with Frankenstein scars, by cutting them open to fix a “problem” that isn’t there? They are utterly reprehensible.
I don’t trust anything doctors say, any more than I trust politicians, corporate leaders, professional “journalists,” or any other authority figure in this crumbling country. They are promoting and participating in the Greatest Psyop in the History of the World. Making up statistics to push a false narrative. And calling it “science.” So, you’re going to trust these people to tell you how healthy you are? Their methodology is “slash and burn,” and to prescribe expensive medications that have potential side effects that are worse than whatever it is they’re supposed to help. They don’t “cure” anything. We’ve spent untold trillions on cancer research, and childhood cancer rates have never been higher. Contribute to St. Jude’s!
I know there are good doctors. Some of them like my work. And certainly, there are kind nurses who care about patients. They just never happened to be there when my loved ones needed care. Needed to get better. I don’t mean to generalize. There are honest doctors, nurses, cops, even a few politicians. But they are so outnumbered by the corrupt and dishonest who almost always oversee them, that they couldn’t reform anything if they wanted. They don’t want to jeopardize lucrative careers. Look what happened to the doctors who spoke out against the COVID nonsense. Look what happens to every whistleblower.
As I related in my book Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963, cancer was practically unknown before the twentieth century. A recent university study of hundreds of mummified bodies from antiquity found virtually no evidence of cancer. I quoted many experts at the time who were concerned about the introduction of vaccines in this country, which coincidentally or not happened at the exact same moment that cancer suddenly became the scourge of the twentieth century. After all the donations, and “research,” and supposedly fantastic technological advances, we seem to have achieved only a far greater rate of diagnosis. Catch it early- it’s treatable! With our radiation and Big Pharma! They’re not “curing” cancer, or anything else.
Again, just as coincidentally, cancer took center stage just as consumption and the horrifying array of childhood fevers and diseases disappeared. As Rosanne Rosanna Danna used to say, “It’s always somethin’.” How many billions, or trillions, did Jerry Lewis collect in all those decades of hosting the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon? Have any advances at all been made in “curing” that ugly disease? How about Parkinson’s? Michael J. Fox and others have brought extra attention to this tragic disease. But where was it fifty years ago? Why is it so prevalent now? What with all those donations and everything. My friend Joe Burton suffered for years with it before dying too young. Again, what are they doing with the money? Where are the “advances?”
When people are turning back to natural, “folk” remedies, and vitamins and supplements, and getting better results, you know your “healthcare” system is a fraud and a failure. It’s made lots of hospital administrators, doctors, insurance executives, and Big Pharma honchos sinfully rich. And it’s financially devastated millions who trusted it, never got better, and couldn’t afford their “healthcare.” They started putting fluoride- a certified poison- in our water supply over sixty years ago. And they called people who objected to that “nuts.” The “conspiracy theorists” of their day. They wouldn’t do that if they cared about your health. They’d at least give some kind of non-fluoride option in certain areas. Poison in the water. What does that tell you?
They put unnecessary and toxic chemical preservatives in most of our food. I noticed this in the early 1980s, when they started putting BHA and BHT into many of the cereals I liked. This included things like Quaker “natural” oat cereal. It’s a false advertising thing, you wouldn’t understand. The one area where I had some impact on my wife is here; she has become very diligent about reading labels, and looking for high fructose corn syrup. She can’t look for GMO products, because the authorities who care so much about our health that they mandate a “warp speed” vaccine, refuse to force GMO ingredients to be labeled. It hasn’t been that long ago that the FDA was raiding health food stores. Think about that; they were opposed to '“health food.”
I’m astonished that anyone is addicted to the “services” of our Medical Industrial Complex. Perhaps they make some people feel better. They have never worked that way, even when they were far less incompetent and profit-driven, for anyone that I have known and loved. Where are these highly-rated hospitals where the nurses are kind and prompt, and the doctors attentive and wise? Fairfax Hospital used to brag about being one of the “Top 100” rated hospitals in the nation. We all used to joke that we would hate to see the bottom 100. “Preventative” care superseded actual health a long time ago. No one is cured by the Medical Industrial Complex. There’s a lot of money to be made, and that won’t happen if people actually get better.
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Source: donaldjeffries.substack.com. IMG: © N/A; hhmglobal.com
AWIP: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2023/09/28/my-lifelong-war-with-the
