Beauty of the Rose

Beauty of the Rose

I was reading Liz Miller's Top Ten Health Tips today. What is so good about Liz is that she focuses on the person. Miller has helped legions of doctors. I am utterly hopeless at supporting people emotionally probably because I am such a practical cat. Also, it is to do with never relying on anyone for emotional support. Yes, I trained myself like that. I am more of a practical person, a provider of solutions but one of my failings is my inability to tolerate those who wallow. Wallowing though has to happen to achieve some sort of focus.

I learned a long time ago that people come and go - mostly go in my case. This is what happens to all whistleblowers. If you aren't self sufficient then you don't survive. Period. There are a number of doctors who have mailed me this week about the " destruction of their career" and subsequent depression. The worst issue about coping with this is peer pressure and social expectation that by a certain age you have to be somewhere in life. Social evolution is very interesting. Keeping up appearances is also interesting but destructive to those who have had a knock from the social pedestal. As people, we all spend our lives keeping up with our peers. We spend less time being ourselves and more time being someone who we think we ought to be. That is until a disaster happens to you - like it did me. By then, just getting through days and weeks is a miracle. I consider every day of my life a miracle to be cherished.

I have attempted to figure this out over the years and discovered that the only way to cope is having no expectation of people and also developing a certain acceptance of the way fate deals with you. Acceptance is also a way of moving on. Moving on in whatever way you can. Baby steps are important. Life after whistleblowing is all about learning to walk again. Learning to live and learning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of darkness.

I watch doctors gloating about their various achievements but living empty lives. In addition, you finally realise that no matter how many degrees people have, many are empty people. This is not the case with everyone and achievement is no bad thing. For me academic achievement lost its novelty. This is probably due to the fact that I have always worked so hard through school and university simply to understand that a minute can change your life and all that work remains meaningless. The achievements I have had were meaningless in the real battles that lay before me. For that, it was important to learn new skills of survival. It is adapting to the circumstances I have found myself in. I have also learned not to live in regret but to be happy and enjoy each day that I live. I am extremely grateful for my sanity. I value it more than I value many things in the world.

I have no long term goals and I think this puzzles Liz Miller a great deal. The fact is I don't plan ahead, I don't have expectations of people around me and I try not to put myself up for disappointment.

I am a Omega 3 queen :). I tend to like eating healthily despite my chocolate addiction. Last year, after I lost my job, I started to develop an interest in cooking. Cooking is an interesting escapade where your brain functions in creating something that is appreciated. To beat negativity, I tend to keep my brain active all the time but I have learned how to have 6 hours sleep whereas in the past I would live on 2 hours sleep per day. My mind is inquisitive about everything. This is probably what keeps me focussed on the days a head. My combative nature is probably best seen on a badminton court. It is true that I hate losing in anything. I also consider survival after whistleblowing - a project where I need to win, not lose. My battle has been to keep my life and not sell it to the authorities. I watched Harry Potter with the hobbits in our family. The dementors at the time reminded me of what I had been going through. I coined the term the "Dementors" for the General Medical Council because in my minor skirmishes with them, I have felt them try and take my soul out of me. It is a horrid feeling if you don't fight back. I don't have a spell against it - all I know is that no one must accept the status quo with the GMC - you have to fight and fight hard. If you don't fight, you let yourself down.

It is also a bit like treading water with your little legs moving rapidly before the sharks come and gobble you up. I watched a terrible movie once called Open Water. The story centred around two divers stuck in the middle of the ocean for days. That is how being with the GMC feels like. They encircle you like the great white swimming round and round. If you don't get them first, they get you. It is no miracle that I don't have a GMC sanction. I fought for that status. Every other whistleblower ends up down the GMC steps suspended. In my world, no one was going to say I was bad at my job - therefore it was either the GMC who had to go down or I did. So in 2004 the GMC went down and I didn't.

Whistleblowers can be compared to battered wives. It is the recovery after this constant battering that is vital. Liam Donaldson once called it "Whistleblower Rehabilitation" when he spoke to Steve Bolsin. Perhaps that is what it is. I will though be damned if I allow any day of my life to be wasted on these authorities. I am not going to be found dead in a ditch and no one is going to drive me off the edge. Perhaps it is this slight defiance that enables me to progress in small ways.

I am no expert in life having only had one - although the GMC thinks I have 9.

All I can say - having suffered high level losses in terms of friendships, bereavement, loss of career, loss of job, loss of reputation - is that each person who ends up in that pit should start to live each day slowly. Concentrating on living each day is a vital task that everyone should learn. Small goals then larger goals is the way to go.

Amongst his frustration, Dr Rant told us the story of the bird with a broken wing. This is of course a rare insight into the softer and gentler side of Rant. He said :-

"I had a teacher, Miss Fish, at school when I was a child. She was forever going on about how much she loved animals. She had posters of fluffy woodland creatures all over the walls and made much of her membership of the WWF. One winter morning, Young Rant found a bird with a broken wing in the roadside on the way to school. Nursing it in a woolen glove, I took it to Miss Fish for help. She sternly refused to have anything to do with the bird and placed it outside in the old where I found it dead at play time. I had learnt a valuable lesson:

those who profess a great love do not always know, in fact, what love is"

That is true of many people I have known. It also applies to the many doctors who walk past those of us with broken wings. My big problem was that I didn't want to die in the cold in 1998. The path of survival was long, really hard but not impossible.

My late father told me one thing - that is that there is a certain wonder and beauty in simplicity and living a simple life. To even appreciate the beauty of a rose on a dark day is progress. That is an important lesson to learn for any doctor or person who falls on tough times. The day a person cannot appreciate the simplicity or beauty of nature, is the day they let the authorities win.