AROUND THE CORNER-DEPRESSION LOOMS

Doctors! Sometimes don't you just want to smack some sense into them?

How much credence should I, a woman who has climbed and slid down more than two hills during the time my lifeline has been elongating, to one who looks all of about sixteen when she begins her diatribe with...

"I KNOW psychiatry is NOT my area of expertise BUT...you are SO deep in depression you can't know if what your feeling really IS pain!

Hey, say WHAT! The pain caused by the

herniated disks that show up along with which NERVES are effected to CREATE the pain, quite spectaculary on my spinal

MRIs is really masked DEPRESION? 

OKAY! I WILL admit I do not have more than a BA in Psychology so I am far from so well versed in the dynamics of depression I would feel comfortable looking into your eyes and saying,

"Gee, I see a tear squeezing its way out from your tear duct...therefore you are clincally depressed!"

Odds are, though, I have more schooling in the topic than a doctor who may spend one rotation in psychiatry before moving on to rotations in

gastroenterology, podiatry or brain surgery.

So what brought on this SAGE declaration of my advancing state of wallowing in waters so mucky and viscuous with depression pain can't be distinguished?

I have scars in places most people never have the kinds of scars I have. When new doctors see them, their eyes go all wide and they ask the one question I must answer if I'm to get PROPER treatment! WHAT HAPPENED THERE?

I tell them...and their eyes glaze over in disbelief. OKAY now I have to convince them I'm not lying...the only way to do that is to explain how such a device came into such close proximity to my person.

That requires a side trip into a past event...and me going to a place inside me that allows me to become ALMOST robotic so I can get through it...but no matter how deep into the

ice I go, an errant tear escapes...BRANDING me with the stench of unremittent depression.

Let me share and you decide...

I had to be somewhat rebuilt after my marriage ended in 1983 because my ex really LIKED hurting me. He came up with many clever ways to do so...not all of them physical...but I digress.

Scars...

lacerated flesh...I am left with them so cannot stick my head in the sand and pretend yesterday never happened.

My ex LIKED causing me pain...physically...but he also liked destroying any good memories I had from before him...and one had to do with Nonnie.

I have never made it a secret how much I adore my grandmother. She died when I was eleven, so I cherish every memory of the years I DID have her with her...and one of those memories deals with a Trading Post like store on the main street in one of the towns in the Poconos Mountains.

Nonnie and I had such a wonderful time together shopping in that store when I was about nine.

Fast forward to 1981. My ex knowing of that special memory made certain when HE took us to the Poconos that summer to go back to that store, take me down to the basement floor and choose from a rack the bull whip he was going to use on me.

The tear  in my eye is not for the pain, or the remnants of the pain HE wielded with such glee...NO...the tear is for the precious memory from my short years with my grandmother he tarnished.

Since the end of my marriage I have earned twin AA's, AS's BA's, an MA AND a PhD. I currently have 15 books published in just the past almost three years, I single handed raised my children from their ages of 9 and 7, and I was a teacher of the handicapped.

So let me ask you...if as this doctor suggests I am wallowing too deeply in my DEPRESSION to recognize real pain when it hits me..HOW did I accomplish so much ANYWAY?

I'd really be interested in your responses?

I KNOW what I , Lin, think...but I must admit I don't suffer fools well...I think that doctor got her MD inside a Cracker Jack Box...and after what the RA doctor told me just this past Friday I'm even MORE certain the first doctor has

QUACK tattooed on her medical bill.