Typhoid Merry

I almost got to be a super-spreader. 

 

Instead, I’m isolating in my room with Bear – the first in our family to test positive for covid despite all the social distancing, masks, vaccinations, and dodged bullets. 

I got covid without even noticing it. When Bear and I got home from our usual long walk Wednesday afternoon, I had an email from someone who attended the same festive gathering in Vancouver on Sunday. After feeling a little under weather for a couple of days, he failed a home covid test. He suggested we all check our coronavirus status. Most attendees promptly reported negative results – other than an unlucky few. 

 

I’d taken so many covid tests before. This time I squeezed four drops into the plastic well, then watched the bright red line instantly light up. 

After observing so much suffering during the pandemic, my own experience with covid has been blessedly anticlimactic. I’ve had no symptoms. The kids all stayed virus-free as we finished the last week of school. 

 

However, the December schedule is a mess. And I’m still trapped in “isolation”:  staying at home except for long walks in the woods with Bear; letting the kids feed themselves as the dishes pile up; and either wearing a mask as I try to get work done at my desk, or hiding in my bedroom while Christmas music plays on an infinite loop. 

Before the covid surprise, I was planning to drive back up to Vancouver on Wednesday night to attend a holiday sing-along event hosted by friends at a club downtown. According to the CDC chatbot’s calculations, Wednesday was my most infectious day. 

 

Ironically, I’d already decided to skip the Xmas sing-along and save myself for a New Year’s trip. Instead, I told the kids I was loopy on Theraflu. I hadn’t actually taken any. I just wanted to cover up my decision to take the day off, stay home, and do edibles while pretending to be sick. Still, I’m glad I checked my email before I changed my mind about heading to the piano bar. My boisterous caroling would have contaminated numerous unsuspecting revelers with aerosolized coronavirus.

 

Instead I’m in isolation for ten days. Blame Canada.

This is what covid looks like (Xmas 2022)

Nurses are Fiercer than Drag Queens

As we inch towards a post-pandemic New Normal, the entire Vancouver Men’s Chorus is finally gathering to rehearse together again on Wednesday evenings. Our June show on Granville Island, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” will be a salute to women’s music. We started learning the same songs two years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic silenced choirs and closed the Canadian border for the first time since the War of 1812.

 

The week before the border closure, I was in Vancouver for VMC’s annual fundraiser “Singing Can Be a Drag.” I’ve never done drag myself. Instead, I was a volunteer usher.

 

In addition to avoiding high heels, prior to February 2020 I also had never lost consciousness. The last thing I remember about the drag show is the lights dimming at the beginning of the queens’ performance. I’m told I fainted and fell down the stairs backstage soon afterwards. As I wrote in “Falling Can be a Drag,” I still can't remember anything from the rest of the night, including the hot fireman who arrived to minister to me after someone called 9-1-1. (Inevitably, VMC President and uberextrovert Yogi Omar ended up with the medic’s telephone number.)

 

Back home in Bellingham the next day, I woke up feeling sore all over without knowing why. When I returned Yogi’s frantic “how are you feeling???” text, I discovered what happened the night before. So I drove across town to the walk-in clinic. After the nurses heard my story, they made me walk across the parking lot to the Emergency Room at Saint Joseph’s Hospital for an ECG and CT scan. 

None of the tests revealed anything abnormal. My excellent physician Dr. Heuristic eventually concluded the episode was a stress-related manifestation of my disability, triggered by particularly intense emotional experiences. 

A random convergence of legal, medical, family, and financial crises made the last few days my most stressful and triggering week ever. 

 

On Wednesday I was in Vancouver on my way to chorus rehearsal when I lost consciousness for the second time in my life. However, instead of drag queens, this time I had the good or bad luck of fainting in front of a couple of nurses while visiting my brother on the spine floor at Vancouver General Hospital. 

Leishman Brothers:  Brian (lung cancer survivor); Roger (PTSD); Warren (bald); Doug (spine cancer)

My next younger brother Doug was diagnosed with spine cancer five years ago after back pain revealed an inoperable tumor. As the heaviest Leishman brother, Doug was defensive about failing to notice a grapefruit-sized lump in his pelvis: “They’re big bones!” 

 

Despite many challenges, Doug is blessed with the best family in the world, marvelous medical providers, and Canada’s sane healthcare system. He was able to walk my eldest niece down the aisle at her wedding two summers ago. Since then, Doug has spent most of his time bed-ridden at home in British Columbia. This month he was airlifted to VGH for nine hours of emergency surgery after a growing neck tumor paralyzed his upper body. The surgery went well, and Doug is learning how live with a wheelchair. 

Our family has observed numerous parallels and contrasts as my brother faced cancer at the same time as I was learning to live with mental illness on the other side of the border. Last Wednesday, I arrived late to visit Doug in the hospital after spending my morning writing a particularly stressful letter to the State’s lawyers in response to their continuing refusal to acknowledge that I have a disability. My stress was further exacerbated by the fact that the judge in my lawsuit against the Governor’s Office had scheduled an inevitably triggering hearing for Friday morning.  

 

While visiting my brother’s hospital room and listening to a discussion of pain management, I became lightheaded and collapsed to the floor in front of two nurses. I thought it was just a low blood sugar moment. The nurses quickly placed me in a wheelchair and gave me apple juice. I was pale and clammy, with a slow heart rate, but still alert. Until yesterday, I’d never had an even slightly elevated blood pressure reading – I inherited my father’s high cholesterol, not my mother’s hypertension. However, one of the VGH staff said she had never before seen a blood pressure reading where both the numbers had three digits. 

 

Other than losing consciousness in the wheelchair after they checked my vital signs, this time I remember the rest of the experience. Despite the melodramatic interruption, Doug said it was educational to watch me pass out. My sister-in-law told us I looked just like my brother when he overdoses on morphine. 

There are both advantages and disadvantages to passing out in a hospital. Rather than attend chorus rehearsal, I spent Wednesday evening at Vancouver General being tested and observed. 

 

Once I regained consciousness, one of my brother’s nurses insisted on wheeling me through a backstage maze to the ER waiting room. By the time she handed me over to the triage nurse my vital signs had all returned to normal. A technician wired me up for a quick ECG and assured me my heart looked fine. 

 

At this point they took away my wheelchair and sent me back to the ER waiting room, where I found my efficient sister-in-law on the phone finding me a place to stay overnight. Then the nice Canadian nurses tricked us. They led me down a hall to finally get my insurance information, something that happens much earlier in the process in the States. 

It could have been another triggering situation – trying to communicate about a stressful topic through a plexiglass screen while wearing masks. Fortunately, although English was not her first language, this was hardly the first time she had filled out the paperwork for an unfortunate American finding himself trapped in the province’s largest hospital.  

 

“Trapped” is the right word. After I signed a bunch of forms without reading them, she led me alone through a new set of doors to the secret inner waiting room.

Someone politely drew a few vials of blood. I texted my sister-in-law and told her I’d been kidnapped. Then I found a chair in a waiting room filled with sniffling children, Asian grandmas, and moaning hockey players. 

 

As I looked at my new surroundings, I took a picture of the sign above the chair directly across from me. It asked:  “Do you struggle with opioid use?” Ironically, this is what the nurses were talking about in my brother’s hospital room when I fainted. As Doug says, the best thing about having cancer is that even in the middle of a fentanyl public health crisis you get as much morphine as you need. Too much, in fact.

Eventually I got a text back from my sister-in-law saying “Wrong number.” Apparently her contact information in my iPhone was out of date. Unfortunately, this was also the only phone number I’d given to the hospital staff.

 

Fortunately, I was finally able to reach my parents. They hadn’t answered my previous calls because they were busy driving my college freshman nephew to the ER in Bellingham. (He had a concussion. I still haven’t heard that story.) I tried to obtain my sister-in-law’s actual phone number from my mother without sounding too alarming.

 

As a single parent, I’ve already spent too many hours in waiting rooms with a dying iPhone battery and nothing to do, eat, write, or read. Eventually I got bored and blew up the photo I’d taken of the “Welcome to the VGH Emergency Department” poster: 

Modern technology is amazing. As directed by the poster on the wall, I clicked on the link “edwaittimes.ca” and discovered the current wait time for each emergency room in British Columbia. Unsurprisingly, Vancouver General Hospital has the largest and slowest casualty department in the province:

According to the website, I could expect to wait four hours and thirty-two minutes before getting my lab results and seeing a doctor. Perhaps coincidentally, I could expect to wait four hours and thirty-two minutes before escaping from VGH. I was almost halfway there.

 

Meanwhile, I hadn’t eaten for six hours. I could sense actual hypoglycemia on the horizon. VMC rehearsal was about to start without me. I was crabby. I’d left my library book, laptop, and phone charger in the car, which by now was illegally parked. My sister-in-law texted with an offer to bring me a snack from the hospital vending machines. I told her I’d been through enough triggering experiences for one Wednesday. 

When I was tricked into walking across the parking lot from the Bellingham walk-in clinic to the Emergency Room two years ago, the American nurses promptly put me into a hideous hospital gown and hooked me up to a heart monitor. Armed guards surrounding the hospital campus prevented any thought of escape.

 

Everything is better in Canada. Despite my sister-in-law’s maternal sighs, I went AWOL. I used the last of my colorful foreign money to buy an invigorating milkshake and fries at Johnny Rocket’s. Then I moved my car to a nearby parking spot, grabbed my backpack, and snuck back into the ER treatment waiting room. No one noticed I was gone.

Drunk on chocolate milkshake and library books but completely sane and sober, eventually I decided it was time to drive home to my children. 

 

After more than five hours had passed, I went to the nurses’ station to tell them I was invoking the Geneva Convention and returning to the States. They pulled up my chart and pointed out I hadn’t seen a doctor yet. I promised to turn myself in to my physician in Bellingham. I asked if my bloodwork had come back. The nurse said it looked fine. 

 

After I self-helped myself to discharge from the ER, I found my way through the hospital maze back to the spine floor. My brother and sister-in-law were on the phone with my oldest niece and her wholesome BYU husband. Their baby is due this week. Last month her brother and his wholesome BYU wife passed them by producing the first great-grandchildren – identical twin boys. Despite the tragicomic plagues that beset us, my family is eternally blessed. 

So far I’ve been to five Canadian province (British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia). How many states have I visited?

 

Business travel and multiple cross-country moves got me to the low forties. Then a decade ago I represented the Gay Softball World Series in a First Amendment case that involved deposing LGBT athletes across the nation. On just one trip I crossed off Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia. I also changed planes in Birmingham, but never left the airport. After my law school twenty-five year reunion in 2015, I rented a car and finally road tripped to Vermont, which brought me to forty-nine states. Fifty if you count Alabama.

 

In my first blog essay about our family’s devotion to the PeaceHealth walk-in clinic, “Dr. Practical,” this is what I presciently wrote:

 

I've managed to avoid hospitals for fifty-five years. In particular, as long as I retain any voluntary muscle function, I’m never going to be sick enough to go to an emergency room. Fortunately, being surrounding by loving family means that if I really needed medical assistance, someone will take me to the ER as soon as I lose consciousness. Then the ER stops being an indefensibly profligate expense. 

 

Six months later, a gaggle of Canadian drag queens pushed me down the stairs. The next morning the nurses at the walk-in clinic tricked me into walking across the parking lot to the Emergency Room to get my heart and brain examined. At the American ER, they stripped me and tied me to a hospital bed. 

This week the Canadian nurses were much nicer. Still, they were the ones who wheeled me to the ER after I lost consciousness, with my brother and sister-in-law egging them on. If that counts as “going to an emergency room,” then I’ve also been to Alabama and get to cross off all 50 states.

 

I am Karen

Last week one of my healthcare providers and I were chatting about the challenge of explaining Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to people, particularly when you don’t seem like a typical victim. 

 

PTSD can happen to anyone. Trauma tangles the neural wiring that connects a wide variety of brain functions, including memory, fear, rage, reason, and motor control. Two people can endure the same traumatic event or experience, but only one might develop PTSD. Days or years later, you might encounter a particular feeling, person, or experience that flips the switches in your brain and triggers a cascading response from your body.

 

One of my friends in Bellingham developed PTSD after serving as an Army Ranger medic in Afghanistan. I told him I feel sheepish sharing the same DSM-5 category as him. He told me not to worry, and that soldiers feel lucky they get so many folks’ respect. They’re more concerned about the many children and women who are scarred by the impact of domestic abuse and do not have access to the help they need. 

In November 2015, my Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic sent me to a specialized PTSD therapist. She helped me identify how my symptoms were rooted in traumatic events I experienced thirty years earlier as an overachieving gay student at Brigham Young University and as an earnest Mormon missionary in Korea. 

 

In my recent blog essays “Move On” and “Blink,” I described the Mormon church’s relentless campaign against LGBT dignity and inclusion. Throughout my lifetime, Mormon leaders have insisted on embracing junk science, such as pray-the-gay-away “reparative therapy.” Perhaps most insidiously, the Brethren deny our very existence – refusing to use words like “gay,” “lesbian,” or “transgender,” and instead insisting we’re merely weak sinners who struggle with what they refer to as “same-sex attraction problems.” When you also consider my family’s wrenching move from Vancouver to Utah when I was an adolescent, plus my coming out as a gay man at the height of the AIDS pandemic, it’s no wonder I ended up with PTSD.

 

Because of the nature of my underlying traumas, my most serious individualized PTSD symptoms are triggered when I feel a sense of powerlessness, repression, being silenced, or rendered invisible once again. As result, my disability makes me particularly vulnerable to gaslighting lawyer tactics. 

Looking back at my writing about mental illness over the last four years, I realize I’ve focused primarily on the physical symptoms, such as trichotillomania, insomnia, and bruxism, that emerged after my abusive former employers triggered my body’s response to ancient traumas. Because of Defendants’ and their co-conspirators’ subsequent misconduct and their continued stonewalling delays, I remain trapped in a vicious cycle of stressful triggers, re-traumas, and re-triggers. I’ve written about the resulting plagues of boils, MRSA, auto-immune dysfunction, depression, anxiety, but not frogs yet.

 

I’ve also referred several times to triggers leading to “PTSD episodes,” but I haven’t yet described the mechanics of the experience. In some ways it’s like the arrival of a migraine – you realize it’s happening, but there’s nothing you can to do to stop the buzzing and pressure on your brain. Soon it becomes impossible to think and communicate clearly. 

When I began reporting about life with mental illness, my examples of PTSD episodes all involved wretched customer service. I had a short fuse, and I ran into a lot of bad service. Eventually I learned to modulate my reaction to frustrating encounters. Now I react excessively only to terrible service with a reality-denying totalitarian bent, not your day-to-day consumer abuse. For example, just last week I made an embarrassing scene in a bank lobby. Not my fault.

 

When my disability was still new, I was constantly surprised by the wide variety of triggering events that somehow resonated with my thirty-year old traumas. Things have mellowed since then. My biggest PTSD epiphany this year came when I was playing a family board game at my parents’ house, and I became so frustrated I had to go into the other room and give myself a timeout. (It turns out there are trauma-based reasons I haven’t been able to play chess since I was a child, much to my son’s disappointment.)

 

Despite the progress I’ve made with my disability, I continue to endure another very predictable trigger:  gaslighting lawyers. In May 2017, I filed a lawsuit in state court against the attorney-investigator firm my former employers hired to cover up my wrongful termination. Attorney General Bob Ferguson assigned two lawyers from the Attorney General’s Tort Division, Assistant Attorney General Suzanne LiaBraaten and Assistant Attorney General Janay Ferguson, to represent the State’s interest in the investigator lawsuit. Ferguson and LiaBraaten obstructed discovery, made frivolous privilege assertions, and abused the legal process. In 2019, Ferguson and LiaBraaten violated the Ethics in Public Service Act and the Rules of Professional Responsibility when they made false representations in their co-workers’ lawyer discipline proceeding. Ferguson herself is the subject of a pending ethics complaint, and is a named defendant in my federal lawsuit against the State and its representatives. 

 

Nevertheless, Attorney General Ferguson insisted on assigning Defendant Ferguson as lead counsel on behalf of the other defendants in the federal lawsuit. Her conduct of the litigation has been an outrage. Here’s what I said in a sworn declaration about how it feels when dishonest government lawyers trigger a PTSD episode:

 

Responding to the first motion Defendant Ferguson filed in my federal court case one year ago was one of my most harrowing experiences in years. For every ten minutes I spent working on the brief, I had to spend at least an hour on soothing activities like talking with my children, walking the dogs, meditating, exercising, etc. Now that my kids are back from visiting my ex during the summer, the presence of other observers in the house makes my AGO- triggered PTSD symptoms even more noticeable. Over and over as I was forced to confront the State’s lies, I would read or write a single sentence. Then I would compulsively leap out of my chair and pace ten or twenty laps around the house, grinding my teeth from bruxism and rubbing my scalp raw from trichotillomania. When my teenaged daughter who wants to go to medical school heard my involuntary wheezes and groans, she thought I was having a heart attack. 

 

Every one of Defendant Ferguson’s court filings and each of her communications to me over the past year was triggering. (Fortunately, her good cop co-counsel politely handled all the administrative stuff.) For example, on multiple occasions she took the position on behalf of the State of Washington that for the last six years I’ve been faking a disability to cover up for my professional incompetence and my sexism.

 

I asked the State’s lawyers to accommodate my disability by assigning a lawyer other than Defendant Ferguson to communicate with me. They refused. Eventually I asked the judge to order this reasonable disability accommodation. On September 15, 2021, Judge Jones granted my request. I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders.

Defendant Ferguson’s counterpart in my state court lawsuit against the private investigator firm is Claire Martirosian, a junior partner at the grinding insurance defense firm whose apparent goal is to provoke me into pulling out the last hair on my forehead.

 

Ms. Martirosian has been involved in the case ever since the summer of 2017 when the investigators fired their first, even less smart insurance defense firm. In contrast with the division of labor between the boy-girl legal team in my federal lawsuit against the State, Ms. Martirosian is handling everything solo. That means she plays both the good cop and bad cop roles. In “Secret Agent,” I wrote about how Ms. Martirosian triggered a PTSD episode in the middle of oral argument in the Court of Appeals two years ago when she blatantly lied in response to the key question from the bench.

 

Last Friday two letters from Ms. Martirosian arrived back-to-back in my inbox. The good cop first letter responded to the proposed deposition schedule I had circulated earlier in week. Of course Defendants didn’t agreed to the schedule, or propose an alternative. But the letter wasn’t triggering, merely another round of familiar litigation Kabuki.

 

In contrast, Ms. Martirosian’s bad cop second letter was a tissue of lies. She blatantly mischaracterized the Washington Supreme Court’s recent ruling, and triggered another PTSD episode.  Once again I alarmed the dogs by leaping out of my desk chair and pacing around the house. I lost count after 87 laps. 

If I were a Republican congressman, I could announce “As the father of two daughters, I condemn the Attorney General’s scurrilous accusations of sexism.” But I believe in mindfulness and empathy. When someone else’s model of reality diverges so far from my model (and from reality), I wonder why.

Here is Defendant Ferguson most recent accusation that I am an unrepentant misogynist:

Mr. Leishman elected not to respond to the Defendants’ requests for conferral because it was not made by the male attorney with whom he prefers to communicate…. Defendants will not recount the many, documented instances of Mr. Leishman’s personal attacks on Ms. Ferguson and other women, parties and not, attorneys and not, because that issue is beyond the scope of this motion. When they do, Defendants will submit evidence, not conclusory allegations, proving that Mr. Leishman disproportionately demeans, attacks, and underestimates women – particularly those who disagree with his subjective view of events. Avoidance of female counsel is not a reasonable accommodation.

Washington tax dollars paid for this deranged rant, which appears on page two of the State Defendants’ Reply in support of their Second Motion to Stay Discovery. 

My eyes were drawn to the word “disproportionately.” Perhaps Defendant Ferguson is referring to the fact that woman outnumber men in the captions of my lawsuits. That’s because most of the middle and lower level managers at the Washington Attorney General’s Office and other State agencies are women – but all the top brass are men. The federal defendants include the office of Governor Jay Inslee; the office of Attorney General Bob Ferguson; Bob’s two top lieutenants, the Chief Deputy Attorney General (Defendant Shane Esquibel) and the Solicitor General (Defendant Noah Purcell); and the former president of Western Washington University (Defendant Bruce Shepard). These important gentlemen are joined by seven female underlings who personally interacted with me or were directly involved in misconduct and coverups. Only one defendant is actually named “Karen.” I could have sued two more female defendants, my unprepared novice “Team Leader” and her passive-aggressive supervisor. But I don’t need to make everything personal.

Behind every powerful man is a harem of less powerful women. Look at Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, or Andrew Cuomo and Melissa DeRosa. One definition of a “Karen” is someone who is not quite privileged enough to avoid doing the dirty work herself, and takes it out on the unprivileged. Or maybe a Karen is just someone who likes dirty work.

Although Bellingham is blessed with amazing public schools, shepherding three teenagers through Zoom School was a challenge for everyone. At the height of the pandemic I had to deal with one of those bureaucratic tangles that would have been triggering even at the best of times. 

I’ve always been terrible at talking on the telephone with strangers, and PTSD just makes things worse. This phone conversation with an assistant principal was excruciating, a combination of Abbott & Costello & Kafka. The school administration had ignored my communications for weeks, and instead kept asking me to do administrative tasks that made no sense. I tried desperately to remain calm. It was a blunt yet incoherent calm, as I kept flirting with entitled-lawyer global nuclear destruction mode. The bees were buzzing in my head. Late in the phone call we figured out the reason no one had paid attention to my messages was that the school’s spam filter had tweaked itself to eliminate me. Nothing I said was getting through. 

The assistant principal took a deep breath, I sorta de-escalated, and we shared an awkward chuckle. When I finally ended the telephone call, I looked around and realized my son Oliver had been listening. His observation:

“Papa, you sound like a Karen.”

Yep.

Dr. Heuristic, Foot Whisperer

Fall has arrived, and the kids are home and back in school. After a four-year slog, last month I finally won the appeal in my lawsuit against the sleazy attorney-investigators who conspired with my former employers to deprive me of my civil rights and to destroy my health and career. Days are filled with hope, work, and productive dog walks. 

 

As I wrote last year in “First Fall Walk,” I depend on my time on the trails with Bear to get a lot of my thinking and writing done. Buster used to be the weakest link. Unfortunately, now the weakest link is my right foot.

Years ago my Seattle physician referred me to a podiatrist who prescribed custom orthotic inserts for my shoes. By the time I acquired the perfect Comfort Animal and began walking at least ten miles a day, my ancient shoe inserts were in tatters. My feet always hurt. So last summer my doctor gave me a referral to foot specialist.

 

Sadly, one of the unfortunate consequences of longterm unemployment and disability is having terrible health insurance. No podiatrist within a hundred miles will take me as a patient. I tried salvaging the remaining scraps of shoe insert with duct tape, but that didn’t work. Plus my shoes didn’t fit. By this summer I couldn’t walk any further than Buster without excruciating heel pain. 

My Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic keeps saving my life. When we met he immediately figured out my weird symptoms added up to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He recognized my underlying problem with codependency and sent me to Codependents Anonymous. He’s much nicer than Dr. House, the abrasive but insightful head of TV’s fictional “Department of Diagnostic Medicine.” Dr. Heuristic doesn’t laugh at my jokes about suing people for malpractice, but doctors never do. 

A “heuristic” is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. Over the last several years, I’ve figured out my doctor’s heuristic for me. Whenever I show up with some new complaint, he will generally select from a repertoire of three standard responses:

 

1.       It’s just another typical stress response/PTSD symptom.

 

2.       It’s a common side effect of my medications.

 

3.    It’s what happens when we get older. (He calls these “barnacles.”)

 

Dr. Heuristic might as well prepare three tape recordings. Nevertheless, I was encouraged by his visible excitement several years ago when he got to step outside of the box and diagnose me with keyboard-induced Tennis Elbow. Together with Dr. Practical and her colleagues at the Urgent Care Clinic, Dr. Heuristic has guided me through a series of Biblical plagues, including boils, MRSA, tinnitus, and the time a bunch of vicious Canadian drag queens caused me to lose consciousness and fall down the stairs.

At our annual check-in last month, I told Dr. Heuristic about my inability to find a foot doctor willing to take my terrible insurance. Rather than continue my hopeless quest, he told me to go to Fairhaven Runners & Walkers and drop his name. I’m happy to announce I finally have shoes that fit correctly, as well as the appropriate Superfeet inserts, which are manufactured right here in Whatcom County.

 

During my physical I also described the chronic pain in my right foot. I could tell Dr. Heuristic was ready to interrupt as soon as I reported my heel pain was always worst first thing in the morning. I have “plantar fasciitis,” i.e., inflammation of the plantar fascia, which is the tendon on the bottom of your feet connecting your heel and toes. Dr. Heuristic printed out instructions for simple exercises and told me to apply ice as needed.  

I conscientiously did all the foot exercises on Dr. Heuristic’s instruction sheet several times a day. I iced my heel. I put new inserts in my slippers. (My Canadian sister-in-law’s mother said the worst part of having plantar fasciitis was her doctor made her wear shoes in the house for the first time in her life.) Coincidentally, Bear had recently injured his paws jumping out of a car window, so we both took a break from walks and rested our feet. 

 

After a few weeks of responsible footcare I could keep up with Buster on the trail. Bear and I could even make the four-mile loop down to the Boardwalk and back. Beyond that the pain was still too much. At this rate I’d never be able to finish all my briefs, blog posts, and book chapters.

 

Then as I wandered through the foot section of the drugstore I saw a box labeled “Foot Support for Plantar Fasciitis.” The exercise instruction sheet had mentioned something like “Your doctor may prescribe overnight foot splints.” I’d seen similar references in my online research. A night brace keeps the tendon stretched.

 

I replayed Dr. Heuristic’s diagnosis in my mind:  “You have plantar fasciitis. Some people benefit from a night brace….” Then I heard his unstated “but your insurance probably won’t pay for it.” The box cost $35.

 

The next day felt like a miracle. Bear and I walked for seven miles. After five miles my other heel started to ache, but only a little. Instead of the piercing heel pain of plantar fasciitis, I’m back to the normal background blisters, aches, and pains of someone who walks a lot and can’t afford to replace his shoes often enough. Bear and I can live with that for now.

After dropping off the kids for their first day back at in-person school, last week the dogs and I stopped in Fairhaven for our short morning walk. (Buster inevitably poops out after a couple of miles, but Bear and I still try to include him once a day.) Near the train station we passed a runner, a lean guy about my age. He stopped, spun around, and said, “Roger, right?”

 

He looked vaguely familiar, but my PTSD-addled brain couldn’t make the connection. I stared. Then I remembered. One of my original lawyer colleagues in Seattle had the good sense to find a legal job in Bellingham long ago. Amy’s husband Gib is a physician at PeaceHealth Medical Group. When we moved here six years ago, I asked Amy if Gib could suggest a new doctor who would be a good fit for me. That’s how I met Dr. Heuristic, who quickly diagnosed me with PTSD and codependency, and has managed my recovery ever since. 

 

I stammered “You’re my doctor’s partner.”

 

Gib laughed, and said “That’s not how I think of myself.”

 

Nevertheless, that’s how I will always think of Gib. Because I’m grateful for the blessing of healthcare providers who listen. 

 

Free Britney

The American legal system has a long and shameful history of mistreating disabled folks, particularly those of us living with mental illness or intellectual disabilities. 

 

For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who served on the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, is considered one of our greatest judges. After Britney Spears’ tearful court testimony last month, various over-educated pundits were moved to quote memorable language from a 94-year old opinion by Justice Holmes. Among other indignities, Spears testified that her court-appointed conservators refused to let her remove her IUD. In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that authorized the State to surgically sterilize “mental defectives” without their consent. Justice Holmes’s rationale:  “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

When I was on the Board of Governors of the Washington State Bar Association, the bar commissioned a comprehensive statewide survey of the legal profession. We wanted to understand who made up our membership, and to ask them what it took to succeed as a lawyer in the twenty-first century. We also looked for patterns in how various types of attorneys describe their professional experience. 

 

At the end of the long survey process, our research firm summarized their observations in a lavish PowerPoint presentation to the Board and membership. In their key conclusion about legal careers, the researchers identified four factors that were strongly associated with job satisfaction and career stability:  mentoring, spousal support, income, and work/life balance.  

 

For me, the highlights of the survey report were various factoids about statistical anomalies. For example, military veterans were the most likely to be in solo practice among all diversity groups, perhaps in compensation for their prior institutional experience. Unsurprisingly, racial minorities experienced the greatest incidence of social, opportunity, and advancement barriers, and benefited the most from effective mentoring. Surprisingly, parents and other caregiving lawyers reported no significant difference in their hours worked as compared to the overall bar membership. And the income of LGBT lawyers “lagged notably behind the overall median, and was the lowest of all diversity groups, despite comparable years of experience.”  

Although I remembered many of these bar membership factoids ten years later, I couldn’t match each statistic to the correct demographic group without tracking down the survey’s Executive Summary. Even the gay tidbits. In fact, only one statistic from the entire survey was so surprising it stuck in my brain after a decade:  over one fifth of the bar’s membership identified as disabled.

About 40,000 lawyers are members of the Washington State Bar Association. Statistically that means at least 8,400 attorneys identify as “disabled,” at least on a confidential survey. Nevertheless, I haven’t encountered thousands of disabled lawyers in my three decades of practice. Or hundreds. Or dozens. To the contrary, I can count every visibly disabled Washington lawyer I’ve ever met on two hands, with fingers to spare. And I go to the meetings.

Even if you added openly disabled attorneys like me whose impairments aren’t obviously visible, we would only fill a few tables at one of the grand banquets where the state’s legal community regularly gathers to celebrate much smaller segments of the profession, such as the Vietnamese-American Bar Association, the Korean-American Bar Association, the Middle Eastern Legal Association, and Q-Law: the LGBT Bar Association of Washington. Thousands of disabled Washington lawyers prefer to remain in the closet, avoiding the “disabled” label for as long as possible. 

Can you blame them? Here are some disheartening conclusions from the bar membership survey:

 

·      After racial minorities, disabled lawyers reported the second-highest frequency of encountering professional barriers.

 

·      Disabled lawyers faced the highest overall intensity in professional barriers.

 

·      Disabled lawyers experienced more “social” barriers to inclusion than any other group.

I’ve learned from personal experience how the legal system treats visibly or openly disabled litigants and lawyers. Three decades after Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, judges and lawyers continue to display implicit and explicit bias – just like the rest of society.  

 

Fortunately, society slowly makes progress. Britney Spears’s recent court victory – the judge granted her request to appoint a lawyer to represent Britney’s interests – is the first step toward her eventual freedom. Meanwhile, just last month the justices of the Washington Supreme Court unanimously recognized that ordinary people often make biased assumptions about what it means to be disabled. 

 

The case, named In re the Termination of Parental Rights to M.A.S.C., uses initials to protect the parties’ privacy. J.C. is the mother of a five-year-old boy. J.C. has a developmental disability that makes parenting difficult. Her son M.A.S.C. became legally “dependent” and entered the foster system after the State discovered evidence of maternal neglect. The (overextended) social workers in the (overwhelmed) foster system must choose between two different tracks. Sometimes, as with two of my children, the birth parents agree or the State proves that it’s necessary to terminate the original parental relationship and identify adoptive parents. But in most cases, the goal is “reunification.” The State works with the parent to remedy enumerated problems and to develop effective parenting skills. 

Whenever the State has reason to believe that a parent may have an intellectual disability, it must make reasonable efforts to ascertain whether the parent does in fact have a disability and, if so, how the disability could interfere with the parent’s capacity to understand the social workers’ offer of services. The State must then tailor its offer of services in accordance with current professional guidelines to ensure that the offer is reasonably understandable to the parent. The State – not the disabled parent – has the burden of figuring out how to accommodate the particular disability in each case.

The question before the Court in In re M.A.S.C. was whether J.C. had a meaningful opportunity to remedy her parental shortcomings before the State took the extreme step of terminating the parental bond. The social worker who interacted with J.C. didn’t think she was disabled because J.C. “was able to ask some questions and follow up on some services, at least to some extent.” According to Justice Mary Yu’s opinion for the Court, terminating the parent-child relationship without actual evidence regarding the scope of the mother’s impairment “would wrongfully reinforce the belief that all disabilities are profound and visible, and that individuals with less visible or invisible disabilities do not succeed solely because they are not trying hard enough”: 

We know that this belief is inaccurate because some individuals with relatively severe intellectual disabilities that do require accommodation may nevertheless learn to “mask” their disabilities in ordinary interactions by reading social cues and acquiring significant “adaptive skills.” Nevertheless, the belief that only visible disabilities require accommodation persists as just one example of how parents with disabilities and their children face significant discrimination based largely on ignorance, stereotypes, and misconceptions. We do not condone it. 

Here’s how I began my first blog essay four years ago, when I publicly came out as a disabled person living with mental illness:

 

As Harvey Milk said long ago, the most important thing you will ever do as a gay person is come out. Over the last three decades, our collective coming out has transformed society. 

 

Coming out also transforms individuals. Of course safety and other practical considerations can put reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on how we do it. But even as an introvert, my own experiences and my observation of other LGBT folks have taught me to err on the side of outing yourself. The truth makes you free.

 

Most gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals, some transgender folks, and a minority of people of color can easily “pass” as one of the majority. Each of us must choose whether to publicly identify as part of a marginalized community. The price of our privilege is the tyranny of the closet:  the temptations of masks, the compartmentalization of personal relationships, and the warping of our true identities. 

 

When I graduated from law school and moved to Seattle three decades ago, I had already broken with Mormonism but I was still ostensibly straight. Over the next few years I joined the gay community, started dating, and went public as an LGBT advocate. Eventually I was fortunate enough to be offered a job with the ACLU of Illinois as Director of the LGBT Rights/AIDS & Civil Liberties Project. By the time I moved to Chicago with my first boyfriend, I thought I was out of the closet. (Although I should have paid more attention at my farewell reception in Seattle when one of the law firm partners asked whether I was married, and if my wife was moving with me.)

 

Then I began my new life in Chicago. No one there remembered the old me. Instead, everyone encountered me as “the gay lawyer from the ACLU.” For the first time in my life, I didn’t waste any of my mental energy on multiple personas. With the closet door blown off its hinges I slept better, felt healthier, and thought more clearly. 

When I ended my time as a professional homosexual and returned to Seattle, there was no going back. I’m done with closets. As it says on my website,

 

Coming out as a gay man decades ago saved my life and gave it meaning. Now I am coming out again, this time as a person living with mental illness, and again trying to make the world a better place for everyone.

The personal is political. But it can remain intensely personal as well. 

 

Like Harvey Milk, I’m convinced that coming out of the closet transforms LGBT individuals and society for the better. Nevertheless, I recognize that everyone must make that choice for themself, in their own time and in their own way. We don’t all need to be professional homosexuals, drag queens, or flamboyant TikTok influencers. Even in our social media era, you should be able carve out your zone of personal privacy.

 

In hindsight, I recognize limits to the analogy between sexual orientation and disability status. The substantial proportion of lawyers and of normal people who live with disabilities have very good reasons to remain quiet – such as preserving a measure of autonomy, dignity, and privacy in the face of relentless challenges, even as they try to focus on their health. In particular, as the bar survey revealed, disabled individuals routinely face intense social barriers. Regardless of our best intentions, each of us finds it difficult to “reach out to someone with an off-putting disability, particularly someone living with mental illness or another handicap that interferes with smooth communication.”

 

In my case, publicly telling my story was an essential part of my recovery from the debilitating impact of traumas and triggers. Meanwhile, my only tool for creating change is my knowledge of the legal system (plus a mountain of incriminating evidence). Several years into this journey, I’m disappointed to report that I’m still a disabled middle-aged unemployed gay single dad trapped in a small town, waiting for some judge to finally listen to the truth.

 

I’m frustrated and lonely. I still pull my hair out. I read a lot, and write even more. I hug kids and dogs. Starting tomorrow, I’ll finally be able to escape to Vancouver and recharge my batteries once again. I have good days and better days. I struggle with the pace and uncertainty of various legal, financial, and other processes. I recognize that no one really wants to listen when you speak truth to power, particularly if you’re disabled. And when you use too many words.

 

Still, I’m more privileged than most people, including most disabled people. My health is much improved. I have amazing resilient children, and the safety net of loving parents nearby. I recognize I’ve joined a dialogue about including disabled people that has been going on for decades – and a movement that in many ways still hasn’t progressed much further than where LGBT folks were when I began advocating for that community over two decades ago.  

 

So I will continue writing and speaking out about injustice. Because someone has to. 

July is Disability Awareness Month. As usual, there were no parade or flags. But there were encouraging rulings from the Washington Supreme Court and from the California conservatorship court. If a disabled single mother like J.C. or Britney can finally find a judge who will listen to her story, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

August 19, 2021 update: 

Today the Washington Supreme Court entered an order reconsidering their January 2021 ruling in my lawsuit against the State's sleazy private investigators. Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud substituted an entirely new opinion. Her original concurrence is now a partial dissent. Justice Gordon McCloud’s thorough analysis reinstates most of my claims against Defendants Ogden Murphy Wallace and Patrick Pearce. 

The parties will now return to the trial court and start all over – but this time with the benefit of the mountain of incriminating evidence I uncovered while lawyers and judges procrastinated. I am grateful for Justice Gordon McCloud’s willingness to important examine details that other members of the bench and bar were prepared to overlook.