In my own life, I have seen someone I know online get kicked in the butt by karma. She had a fibro diagnosis before I knew her, and vehemently disputed that my symptoms could be as severe as I said they were ... right up until she had a flare that landed her temporarily in the same condition that I had been describing. The whole time she was on the couch, she mentally did penance for calling me a liar.
So the question comes down to, what did I do so horribly wrong in my life that it seems the only person I can count on is me? I take some comfort in the assertion of a Buddhist acquaintance that this can be a carryover from a previous life, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's something I did in this lifetime.
Invariably, when it's something that I have complete control over, say meeting a deadline for work, I have no problems. The only thing that success is dependent on is my own willingness to work hard and do a good job. But as soon as I have to rely on someone else – such as a professor giving grades or a co-worker providing his/her share of the work done right on time – that's when the problems start. My career plans were torpedoed by a professor who had a reputation for not giving fair grades to women, no matter how hard a woman worked, she would never get more than a D; it had nothing to do with a personality conflict between him and me, because he did it to all the women. At the office, the assumption was made that Good Old Responsible Karen would pick up the slack and either do both halves of the work or re-do the slapdash job done on the half the other person was contributing. In my last few months at one office, I was constantly writing CYA memos to the office manager, all on the same subject “he procrastinated until I'm given one hour to do a three hour project, and when it's not done on time, which is impossible, I don't want to be blamed for it”.
When I hire people to work around the house, invariably they do half the job: I may be sick in bed, clearly not able to do much, and they come to me at the end of their shift feeling quite smug that they were clever enough to come up with the idea that “all that stuff you told me to put away, I found a box and put it in for YOU to put away!” Which is not the way that I ever did my work ... I always went above and beyond what was expected of me. So clearly, that's not karma for what I did in this lifetime, where I have always (even as a youngster) had a reputation for being over-responsible. And it's particularly annoying that I ask people to do something simple and they can't (or won't) do even that right, to the best of their ability.
I have always joked that my ability to move furniture that outweighs me stems from the fact that “all my life, there has never been a man around when I need one.” And it's true – the men in my life have always made sure they're around when I'm baking their favorite dessert, but if I mention over breakfast that I will need them to carry some boxes or help me clean behind the fridge, they disappear to points unknown while I'm in the bathroom and don't come back till after midnight.
And so it has gone with my CFS. I would have been well and back at work in a few weeks if I had had a prescription pad and could have gotten the pills I asked for the first time I asked for them. Instead, I dealt with a bunch of quacks who flatly refused to do the tests I asked for or provide the prescriptions I requested. I got worse and worse, to the point that I was only able to lie on the couch doing almost nothing, because my success at going back to work was entirely dependent on my being able to rely on someone else to do their job properly.
If I had known that I was going to need the skill in later life, perhaps I would have majored in something that would allow me to go into the lab and do my own research to find a cure for CFS. But there again, I have to rely on other people to do the work for me, and because I have to rely on other people, I've been sick for 21 years without hope for a cure. Elaine DeFreitas gave government researchers everything they needed to confirm her work, and despite detailed instructions on how to do it correctly, they (apparently intentionally) did it wrong, then simply stated the virus she found could not be replicated in their lab, instead of copping to it that it couldn't be replicated because they failed to follow the instructions.
The one thing that has kept me going through all this has been the thought that karma's going to come around and bite these people in the butt. Once I left the office, the irresponsible people were left to fend for themselves, and got reprimanded because I was no longer there to perform miracles and clean up after their sloppy work. Maybe my quacks won't get CFS, maybe they'll get something else equally chimerical that no one believes their symptoms are real.
But meanwhile, just like when things were turned in late at the office, I'm the one who winds up getting blamed for it: doctors just love to blame the patient for not getting well when, in fact, the real problem is that the doctor isn't prescribing the right pills. At the first appointment, I told him what the experts/specialists had diagnosed and told him what to prescribe for it – with all that information handed to him on a silver platter, how can it be my fault that he made a wrong diagnosis and didn't give me the right pills? Yet, I'm repeatedly blamed for not miraculously curing myself when the doctors were doing everything wrong.
Again, it has nothing to do with a personality conflict between me and the doctor, because I hear the same “blame the patient for your mistakes” stories from other patients. One, who had made the rounds of doctors trying to find a diagnosis, then went back to the same doctors to tell them what they had missed, and every one of them put the blame on him for “not accurately describing the symptoms” or “not being assertive enough” in insisting that he really was physically ill and not just depressed. In some cases, his assertiveness stopped just short of punching out a doctor who clearly wasn't listening, so I don't know what more he could have done. I ran into the same thing: I knew what symptoms differentiate CFS from depression, and made sure to mention all of those so that I would not be misdiagnosed with depression. When I complained afterward, he insisted it was not his fault for jumping to the immediate conclusion that a divorced woman must be depressed, and then refusing to be swayed from that wrong diagnosis – it was my fault because “nothing you said made sense”. Which is true: nothing I said made sense in the context of depression because I was deliberately making sure to mention the symptoms that would make it clear I didn't have depression. But it was easier to blame me than to change his mind.
Give me a prescription pad so that I never have to rely on another doctor, and I'll fix my own health problems, to the extent that they're fixable. But as long as I have to rely on someone else to write my prescriptions, I refuse to take the blame for not getting well as fast as other people think I should.
Once I have told them “this is my diagnosis and this is what the specialists recommend for it”, I've done my part. Them doing their job correctly should not depend on whether they think I'm likeable or any other reason than having a good work ethic and taking pride in their work. If you got into medicine for the money, you're there for the wrong reason – go do something like autopsies where the patient doesn't care. Unfortunately, too many doctors, when put on the spot, aren't honest: they know the answer you're looking for is “I went into medicine to help people”, so that's the answer they're going to give you, even when their later actions prove that helping you is the furthest thing from their minds.
I wasn't a big believer in karma until I saw how often it did come around on those who in one way or another made my life a living hell. My personal belief system is that God is trying to lead me to something. For example, I was not a particularly patient child; I learned a lot of patience from repeated bouts of bronchitis that kept me in bed 6 weeks at a time. And all the times that other people have proven themselves irresponsible and unreliable has taught me that I cannot and should not rely on other people: the only person I can rely on is myself, because relying on others just gets me into trouble. After dealing with a couple of professors who based my grades on my gender and not my actual work, I questioned whether I really wanted to continue at school where I'd have to deal with them, and concluded that I would be happier away from them. And after dealing with a series of doctors who were not particularly interested in helping me get well, only in not having to discomfit themselves by having to change what they think about divorcees and about CFS, I concluded that self-help is the only help I can rely on. I'm mostly back to things I can buy at the Natural Foods Co-Op without a prescription.
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