I was thinking the other day, if you wanted to write a book, you ought to write it longhand on sheets of paper, because the government and others can read everything on your hard drive anyway. Then I thought, why not just write it and post it on the blog as you write it—they're all going to be able to read it anyway?
I always say, I'm going to persist with suing for at least $200 million—I used to say $2 billion—for all that bad medical bullshit, also on this blog, called Files I, II, and III. I was just thinking a key part of it was when I was supposed to have the first emergency surgery, an angioplasty and angiogram, heart surgeries, from Dr. Ravi Dave` at UCLA-Santa Monica Cardiology. It turned out later it was metabolic syndrome from diabetes from Risperdal. A day or two before the surgery there was an article in the paper: Vice-President Cheney had just had a heart surgery, his first. He later went on, as everybody probably knows, to have an artificial heart surgery. I thought he was giving me his blessing, but later, when I was on my way to Dr. Dave` and President W. Bush appointed an anti-gay cardiologist Surgeon-General, I started to wonder if they were really on my side.
My sister and I joked about it while I was recuperating in the ICU. She was Founding Chairman of the Barbara Bush Campaign For Family Literacy (possibly me at UCI) in the 43 White House and Assistant Chief-of-Staff to Vice-President H.W. Bush in the Reagan White House, 12 years. She says now that Cheney's heart surgeries have nothing to do with mine, which I, frankly, doubt.
I thought at first he was trying to encourage me, and later I thought that maybe he and the Bushes thought that Dr. Dave` or the primary care physician, who I already knew, Dr. Mark Grossman, were trying to bill them and the government, since they were in the White House and I told the doctors my sister had worked for Bush Sr. I thought he was sending the message that they didn't want to. Dr. Dave` said the operation was unsuccessful, that he couldn't get the wire through the particular physiology of my heart arteries to clean them out or put in a stent, that he would treat me with medication, and that I would be fine. I mentioned Clinton had a triple bypass and he said, "You will never need a bypass," and I haven't. I don't know if Cheney's action had any effect on the surgery; I've never asked Dr. Dave`. After the surgery Dr. Dave` said, "I said I wanted to do the surgery in five days. Five days!" and he held out his hand in five fingers. My sister had said, "Wait three weeks," so we did.
Then, afterwards, she started going on, something about, "botched surgeries" and death, which I never understood until a few years ago when I happened to catch a sermon by the late Westwood Baptist preacher from Topeka, KS, Fred Phelps, pretty much about people dying from "botched surgeries", which I'd never heard of, so, therefore, killing them, and pretty much all disabled people, whom he called "retards", "God hates retards". He was just as retarded as any of them, maybe more. This guy on the Internet swears Phelps is burning in Hell. There was an article where he pushed a man on crutches into the bushes to show how he felt about the government taking care of them. Hitler executed 200,000 mentally and physically disabled people in institutions before the Catholic bishop stopped him; that's how he got the idea of how to massacre 6,000,000 Jews. The neo-Pentecostal church I went to quoted Mein Kampf more often than the Bible, though at other times they claimed, "Hitler was the most evil man who ever lived and he's in the lowest place in Hell," and they were alive when he was. Any way the wind blows.
I couldn't relate to what my sister was saying. The doctor had told me I was fine, which I was, and am. My cardiologist up here, Dr. Nelson Schiller from UCSF-Mission Bay Cardiology says, "Your numbers are fantastic!" and I'm certainly sitting here writing this, 15 years later. I think they think the "magic" of their lying words and lying false prophecies alone will knock you down into the grave, but they never thought to take the heart meds away. (I hope they never read this and try that.) Self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess they say that if I had been "in the faith" at that time I would never have gone to a cardiologist in the first place, which obviously was embarrassing, if not expensive, for all of them. They themselves, my sister, mom, and dad, tricked me into going to psychiatrist Dr. Lisa Fine, saying we were driving out to lunch, whose number is 310-966-6500, who said her whole clinic specialized in deprogramming and deconverting fundamentalist Christians. She was the one who gave me the Risperdal. I had had therapy like that years before, from Dr. Shadoan at UCSF-Mt. Zion, Dr. Caulfield at Belmont Psychiatric Center, and Drs. Bradman and Walsh at Ross General Hospital. I wasn't much of a Christian at that time, but my partner, Laurie Senit, was a lot into Orthodox Judaism, and her brother Steve got married to Janice, whose dad converted the whole family, including her parents, Claudia and Syl, to Chabad, maybe that's what she meant. She said, "Don't ever go to church, associate with Christians, talk to them, read about it, watch it on TV, etc. It's bad for you, it caused your mental illness as it did all of our patients (psychogenic), and the less you do it the better you're getting. If I catch you doing any of those things I might increase the dosage of your psych meds, commit you, put you in a padded cell in a straitjacket, give you shock therapy, etc. If you stop doing it I'll lower the dosage and maybe take you off it," which she did. I don't know if my sister, Joan, and my parents were aware of the type of therapy they had me in or not. It wasn't just her, all the nurses in the place patrolled for the same thing.
But I went through all of the behaviors I had learned in my 3 years as a Christian 1972-5, 20 or 25 years before, in my mind, and tried to unlearn them. One of them was, at Lighthouse Temple, no doctors, no pills, or no needles, faith healing only. There were extreme exceptions by the Word of the Man of God: Pastor Dunbar preached once: "If all the prayer lines don't work I find the best specialists I can afford." He was always into that buying the "best"'; I think that's called the "Prosperity Gospel" or "Word of Faith", like Kenneth Copeland. I didn't go to a doctor for three years and nothing went wrong.
But when Stephanie, my fiancé`, and I got committed, one of the reasons was that I hadn't had a check-up in 3 years in spite of the free health insurance at UCCS, the pastor's childrens' school. Also when I was backslidden, I went to a prostitute, and since I'd been celibate for 3 years I didn't know what to do, and since I hadn't been to a doctor for 3 years, I caught a chronic STD which I think affected my memory. Still with all that psychology I am unable to think God punished me for backsliding, with all the pressure my gay parents and their gay psychiatrists were putting on me; I still honestly believe they were right. The church was in Colorado Springs and they brought me back to San Francisco, where as far as I could tell I was the only one in the world except for Dan White, not very good company, not OK, in anybody's eyes. Mayor Moscone was in my mom's dining room the night before he got shot, and I was still a practicing Christian, but they never tried to link me like I feared, thank God. My dad would have gone for it. I'm very sorry about it. Honestly, White and all the Christians were/are wrong. Look what happened to him. He talked his way out of it with the Twinkies and committed suicide in his garage. "God" wouldn't let you be that unpopular and do such terrible things. Moscone and Milk were good guys and he wasn't.
I didn't believe in faith healing anymore. My "eye healing" hadn't worked, though I took off my glasses for 3 months. I'd heard other stories of healings that didn't work. Elder Rachel Moulton died at 42 of cancer; I don't know if they even caught it or if she ever had any medical treatment. There were a few nursing students in our church, and a pre-med student, but no doctors, no wonder. The pre-med student had to quit because he got a low grade in his first chemistry. I went in there one day and I thought it was because he was preaching to the professor. I preached to my "Chemistry for Non-Scientists" professor who said, "Plato was gay," and flunked me for not turning in the final paper on faith, which was incomprehensible to him, "F". The math professor argued, "Christianity is not the biggest religion in the world, Hinduism is." The art teacher took me to the dean of discipline and said I said something to him about a "pine box", which I didn't, and asked him to throw me out of school, which he didn't, but, "F". They'd invited all the art students to a big drinking party.
Anyway, after all that therapy I was very scrupulous about medical stuff and doctors' orders having landed in the nuthouse because of it. So I didn't think twice about seeing Dr. Grossman and the other doctors at Wilshire Urgent Care with my Anthem for ear infections and whatever other minor things it was. And so, when I got chest pains driving….I'd gotten chest pains in New Mexico where my friend was Director of Taos County Ambulances, gone to the emergency room, gotten an OK EKG, "Come back if it bothers you again," gone home, and they didn't come back. Too many hamburgers. So this time I didn't think twice about doing the same thing, near the Howard Hughes Center, just to be on the safe side. They said the same thing, EKG OK, go home, but they gave me an appointment with a local cardiologist, which I obviously had to keep. And I missed it, so they scheduled me with Dr. Dave`, I guess because that was Dr. Grossman's hospital. I walked in and he was going to do emergency surgery. I had no choice. It never occurred to me to refuse emergency surgery. I would have expected to be put in the mental ward for my own protection. Joan never said anything about refusing it either, even when Cheney had his heart surgery; it only occurred to me 10 years later. I later thought Cheney and Bush did that because their churches, like my old one, didn't believe in surgery, or heart surgery, or maybe medicine in general, or maybe science in general, or maybe science and technology in general, I don't know. But this was in a cardiologist's office, and an operating room! They put a wire in your thigh with a camera on the end of it, in an angiogram, and they put it up into your heart, and show you the video of your heart beating from the inside. The cardiologist had my blood all over his smock. I won't listen to a non-cardiologist tell me how it works; they don't know. Only the cardiologists know. Pastor Dunbar didn't even graduate high school; he couldn't even read the table of contents of a cardiology book. Neither can I really—it's all completely incomprehensible. What that is called is "quackery". John Hagee had a bypass, look it up.
Jesus and the early Christians used what little medical technology was available in those days. There's a verse about, "Is there no balm in Gilead?" Balm is medicine, and in the Old Testament they may have used animal blood and olive oil for medicine.
The fundamentalist churches just want the poor peoples' medical money, their make-up money, their entertainment money, their sports money, their kids' education money, etc.—all the "abstinences". Pastor Dunbar told me. I will die that He may live. Maybe saliva, or dirt, or some plants, were medicine for Jesus. The first hospitals were built by monks and nuns. Probably some of the first physicians were ministers. Jesus had the title of "Physician", and of course He is said to have healed many people. Maybe the Pool of Bethesda, etc. were hot springs, mineral springs, or some kind of healing waters? Hezekiah was healed. In those days, they incorporated their primitive technology in their religion. They make a big deal about the construction technology of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and the Temple, holy buildings, and they compare building to the spiritual life. Jesus and Hagee's church are called the Cornerstone. Nowadays it isn't unusual for preachers to preach about automobiles or other modern technology, including medicine. Why do they call that evil technology by evil scientists because they develop it for a living, like they preach for a living? Much of it is very beneficial to mankind; some is harmful, but so are some religions. Doesn't it have to do with the intent or the use of it, like the "two-edged sword", which also is technology? They don't condemn all "work"—they don't mind plows, threshers, reapers, scythes, farming implements. There's no difference in modern technology, it's made by humans. Who are they to judge "good" and "evil" technology? I heard evil Phelps say airplanes were evil! Well, before they were safe, when he was a boy, maybe. Maybe they take flights and go away on Sundays. Why not automobiles, too? What's the difference? Christians make cars but are not smart enough for planes? Catholics have hospitals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jews, Baptists, and Pentecostal Oral Roberts built a hospital. We had a Catholic doctor living next door, Dr. Kuzell, who was a professor at Stanford Medical School. My doctor told me he didn't care what religion his patients were. But it's not evil to bomb and napalm Vietnamese villages of women, children, and elderly, as long as you pray for forgiveness. It would be evil to take them to the hospital and let them live, even as sex slaves; that's the Christian way. Roman, Roman Catholic, same difference. They say that's how the Norse Odinists were, the Germanic neo-Pagans like Hitler, but they were polytheistic Satanists with human sacrifice, or maybe they didn't notice. All that's a sin too. Odin is Jupiter, and Thor is Mercury. It's a religion based on genocidal mass murders and Holocausts; a Satanic death cult, as Kevin Costner said, that's all there is to it, so screw you! If there is a Heaven, I don't see how they get to go, murdering and robbing all those innocent people, and lying for the cover-up. That's the Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth of only Ten Commandments right there. This whole hemisphere was once owned by the American Indians, I can prove it!
