Yesterday I had my last appointment with a psychiatrist, Dr. Yvonne Sturm, who is leaving her private practice to work for the federal government at the VA Hospital.
I met with her for the first time in April. To my friends who were curious about the process of me going to a psychiatrist, I decided that I could describe her best as "Dr. Lillith Sternen-ish" (the character married to and divorced from Dr. Fraiser Crane from the television show Cheers). Actually she's more like a cross between Dr. Sigmund Freud and Dr. Lillith Sternen because she's not a U.S. citizen (I asked her yesterday), she's clearly Eastern European.
During the half dozen times I visited her office as a patient she would--out of the blue--ask me a question about world politics or U.S. politics as a preface to asking how the medications she was perscribing me were working and what side effects they were causing and other "clinical behaviors" for want of a better word.
Yesterday in the midst of her doing a patient summary interview with me to give to my new psychiatrist, she stopped typing on her laptop, looked me straight in the eyes and asked me, "So why is it that this Dennis Kucinich fellow is not electable? They all say that people won't vote for him. I don't understand this."
I couldn't help but laugh out loud when she asked me this question. She could not possibly have known that just prior to leaving the house to come to my appointment with her I'd read an article that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were trying to limit the candidate field in the debates and were caught on video having a discussion on a debate stage. I had hit the "publish post" button just before rushing out the door. She also could not possibly have known that I was a Kucinich supporter in 2004 and remain so despite the other clearly qualified and distinguished candidates in the field for the Democratic nomination.
So I gave her the same standard response I gave to all the people who looked at me cross-eyed for being a Kucinich supporter in 2004, "A person is electable if enough voters cast a vote for them. The problem is how to educate the U.S. voters. There are alot of ill-informed and, quite frankly, stupid voters in the United States."
Dr. Sturm laughed a bit and then said, "Yes, there are."
To which I replied, "And the proof of that is that they elected George W. Bush not once, but twice!"
She chuckled again and said, "Yes, last week I had a patient come in to me complaining of nausea and when I asked her if she thought her medication dose needed to be lowered she was said to me 'I can't tell if it's the medication, or George Bush'". We both laughed.
I'm gonna miss Lillith. My new psychiatrist's name is Dr. Clapp. Now that's an ominous name. But I have to wait until September to find out in person what he's like and whether he likes to talk politics.
In the meantime I promised to send Dr. Sturm information on Dennis Kucinich. She can't vote for him, but she can campaign for him. I wished her well and told her that she was going to have her hands full with all the veterans from Bush's War coming home with PTSD.
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