Hey there all you wonderful people trying to find your way in the world with hope and love…with the keys to survival. The key to it all is faith. You can survive anything as long as you have faith in something, right? I was sick for a whole month…nobody would listen to me or believe me in this pretentious town. One ER doc insisted that I was in withdrawal and handed me a prescription for Suboxone even though I told him repeatedly that I had a fever for a month, was already on Subs, and just needed him to run a test on my blood for an infection. Bottom line, I survived (no thanks to him or others like him).
Today though, I had to say goodbye to my Primary Care Physician in Santa Fe. I have never had a doctor before in my life this amazing, and likely never will again. This man is a mensch. “A mensch is a person who can be relied on to act with honour and integrity. But the Yiddish term means more than that: it also suggests someone who is kind and considerate” (Grensch, 2019). “Tributes to the American film director Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, who died earlier this year, noted that he had the reputation of being a mensch. The critic Richard Christiansen said that he was “aggressive in his desire to succeed but never at the sacrifice of somebody else’s gain” (Grensch, 2019).
I cried when I saw him and had to say goodbye. He hugged me and kissed me on my cheek and told me “don’t say anything bad about yourself again, remember that you are a beautiful, good woman.” WHO DOES THIS??? I WAITED MY WHOLE LIFE TO FIND A DOCTOR WITH THIS KINDNESS AND COMPASSION, and I am losing him because he is going to another state to be a teaching doctor for the new young residents. THANK YOU DR. MICHAEL CHARTRAND. YOU ARE THE BEST! (By the way, I saw that he was awarded the Compassionate Doctor Recognition, AND a Patients Choice Award. (Never knew that before, but am not surprised that a lot of other people felt the same way I do).
I will survive this too of course, but my abandonment issues kicked in, and I felt triggered as I cried all the way home. I wrote a great review for him, but I don’t know if I can ever tell him how much he meant to me, or how important he was to me as one of a very few people in my life that I respect who treated me with UNCONDITIONAL LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE. There. Those are the keys: UNCONDITIONAL LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE. If we all treated each other with that kind of empathy and compassion, imagine what the world would be like…we would actually evolve! So those are the keys, and faith is the door they unlock. Walk though it… Some may struggle with this concept or mock it. All I can say to the pseudo-intellectuals is that you can’t disprove the existence of a higher power or creative force (no matter what you call it). The transition to believe in something greater than yourself or mankind is not easy. It is not a choice you make lightly or just once. That’s why it’s called “a leap of faith.”
That’s it. That’s the key and that’s my mission now. I WILL become a licensed drug addiction therapist, and I WILL SURVIVE anything and everything that comes my way so I can set an example on that score – I am learning to be unconditionally accepting of others and that empathy is part of what makes the world go ’round. I fear that I don’t have anything important to say now, like perhaps I have shared everything and now have nothing left to say to you. But I will continue to try for another year. We want to promote recovery and help for addiction in the workplace. It may not be easy, but we will try…one step at a time. I will keep you posted about that.
Peace, love, blessings…and UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE & COMPASSION to ALL who read this blog post.
NMRecoveryHOPE 