On "Saint Elizabeth And The Ego Monster": Yeah, The Game Needs To Change

Over the holidays, a friend joking around (trying to cheer me up after the last two brutal months of 2009) opined that I am becoming the Ann Coulter of the Greensboro (and medical) blogging scenes. I countered that I'm not nearly as conservative as Ann is . . . I don't remotely resemble her . . . and I have not authored a best-seller.

Yet.

I certainly seem to have become the woman that a lot of the locals (be they progressive-blue-bloggers, or Asheboro's "right people") LOVE to HATE, because she cuts through their crap and tells the truth.

The truth is very ugly, you see. It needs to stay buried.

I actually am very proud of the fact that despite years of being hammered in this ether by the well-named and well-connected, I can tell the truth without calling the people I disagree with "bat-shit crazy", or "evil", or "a lunatic", or "a whack-job", or a "malignant narcissist" (for years, I thought Sue Polinsky's PhD was in Psych for all the diagnoses she threw around), or a "booger-eating-moron".

I can fight back without threatening violence or someone's livelihood.

I also can dissect an argument (although it may take more than 100 words) without ripping out someone's soul and stomping/spitting on it.

As Old Man 2009 dies in a pool of muck and poor Baby 2010 starts to crawl through it, I look at state of the world . . . and the medical profession . . . and journalism . . . and it's like "WTF happened?". How did things get so nutzoid, stupid and surreal?

And WHY am I even in this ether? How relevant IS it really?

I mean, as a doctor BURNED in public service, I came to the blogosphere for HELP in 2005 . . . at the invitation of a journalist who TEAMED UP with then-prominent local bloggers and said, "You bring 'em (the stories) and we'll tell 'em".

Five years later, in the middle of a nation-wide debate over healthcare reform, with a story that could not be MORE RELEVANT to what is horribly wrong with medicine, I'm STILL here . . . still ignored by the state's mainstream media . . . and now very seriously contemplating legal action against the Medical Board/JCAHO/DHHS (something I never wanted to do - and still don't want to) because NO ONE in a position of government oversight or law enforcement has so much as budged to investigate/prosecute a pile of non-profiteering felonies I first reported in 2003.

Oh, and I will be testifying against a blogger-turned-cyber-stalker in Court in February.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to buy that, with Dems in control of Raleigh for literally DECADES, the sad/sorry state of our state is solely the morally-bankrupt & greedy GOP's fault . . . and all of the blame for the current polarization in the Greensboro blogosphere somehow lies at the feet of the politically-incorrect & redgressive (relative) newbies?

Oh, and I broke Ed Cone's heart?

What the hell are we living in? A Salvador Dali painting?

As a New Year starts, it's a time to look back. And a new book just out does it with gusto . . . casting particular attention on a pair of North Carolinians who figure prominently into my experience as a physician and a blogger.

For better or worse, be it truth or fiction, "Game Change" is out. Let the bloviating of the pundits and back-tracking of its subjects begin!

An excerpt, entitled "Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster" was published in the New Yorker yesterday (I missed it) and picked up by Drudge.

It's worth a look if only for the Nathan Fox illustrations.

But I read it. And as I read it, I seethed.

I seethed that I EVER gave John Edwards the benefit of the doubt and/or believed his promise to be "the most accessible" Senator North Carolina would ever have.

I seethed that, as a physician burned in the very kind of public service the ex-trial lawyer advocated, I EVER wasted the time or the postage to contact his offices (all of them) or demean myself to beg the "ego-monster" for help.

I seethed that I EVER gave a royal damn what the Edwardian groupies in the Greensboro blogosphere (particularly the one with a PhD in cultural diversity) thought about anything.

I seethed that I EVER once held my tongue, paused at the keyboard or gave a second thought/passing consideration towards sparing the delicate sensibilities of a "saint" who played her bad cards like a poker-master and behaved fairly monstrously herself.

From Page 3 of the excerpt (in blue because it's just SOOOOOO progressive):

(Elizabeth) would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team.

Given that I'm one of the few bloggers in North Carolina who (after the Breck girl's joke of a term in the Senate) never EVER drank "team Edwards" Koolaid, and took 'em on from even before day one of Presidential campaign number two, I have to wonder now if Housecalls was the target of some of Elizabeth's vicious messages . . . and that my story was black-balled even more by her "communications team" than it already had been (to serve the best interests of North Carolina's then-favorite son).

After all, a lot of people in North Carolina wanted their shot at jumping up and down on the mattress in the Lincoln bedroom. That's how the Enquirer ultimately managed to show up ALL of North Carolina's major newspapers (who should have been FIRST with the story).

Indeed, after I took on our dear Dr. Polinsky (for all we know, a consultant on the Edwardian communications "team") over Elizabeth's politically-polarizing appearance at a supposedly non-partisan event (Converge South), I became blog-mamma Sue's "public enemy number one". Her PhD in cultural diversity studies gave Sue leave to "diagnose" me with "malignant narcissism" . . . tell me something was wrong with me if I didn't just roll over and "move one"/"get over it" . . . and sneer in the general direction of historically-red Randolph County every chance she got.

The M.D. didn't know anything about what is wrong with healthcare.

These days, in the wake of what we know now, that's just damned funny.

No one in the Edwardses’ political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.

The piece-de-resistance of ABJECT HYPOCRISY for me was this

Elizabeth’s illness seemed at first to mellow her in the early months of 2005—but not for long. One day, she was on a conference call with the staffers of One America, the political-action committee that was being turned into a vehicle for John’s 2008 bid. There were 40 or 50 people on the line, mostly kids in their twenties being paid next to nothing (and in some cases literally nothing). Elizabeth had been cranky throughout the call, but at the end she asked if her and her husband’s personal health-care coverage had been arranged. Not yet, she was told. There are complications; let’s discuss it after the call. Elizabeth was having none of that. She flew into a rage.

If this isn’t dealt with by tomorrow, everyone’s health care at the PAC will be cut off until it’s fixed, she barked. I don’t care if nobody has health care until John and I do!

It seems "Saint" Elizabeth's true color is not exactly blue. More like royal purple.

As for John Edwards, "ego monster", he left his mark on healthcare all right. He channeled dead babies for juries that rendered verdicts which left indelible marks on Obstetrics and Pediatrics to this day. Despite any discernible evidence that they've made a difference in fetal/infant morbidity & mortality, electronic fetal monitoring is the rule of the day and C-Section rates have tripled. Rural areas cannot recruit/keep OB's or high-risk Pediatricians because the call is brutal and the risks too great. And good doctors who do everything absolutely right and by-the-book can find themselves named in a "bad-baby" lawsuit . . . because John Edwards taught all the ambulance-chasers how to play on sympathies/emotions rather than consider facts.

But he and "Saint Elizabeth" knew what was best for healthcare.

And/so, tell me another good one about "the Two Americas" and healthcare reform.

Yeah, the game needs to change. I'm feeling really REDgressive tonight.

Signing off to seethe some more.