Ambulance Driver Files A Day in the Life | Kelly Grayson
… I figured I’d repost a little blast from the past.
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Dear Ambulance Driver— I am 28 years old, and I work as a nurse in an Emergency Department. Some of my co-workers say there is no such thing as fibromyalgia. My ER nurse manager says, “If you see it in A Day In The Life Of An Ambulance Driver, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there such a thing as fibromyalgia?
Virginia Monologues
Virginia, your co-workers are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds, and excuse it by giving it high-minded names like ‘evidence-based medicine.’ All minds, Virginia, whether they be doctor’s, nurse’s or paramedic’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Fibromyalgia Claus. He exists as certainly as malingering and whining and perpetual victimhood exist, and you know that they abound and make your working life a living Hell. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Fibromyalgia Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no Reiki or acupuncture. There would be drastically decreased profit margins for the makers of Vicodin and Duragesic patches. Pharmacists would be reduced to panhandling on street corners. Soma, Xanax and Lortab would only be prescribed to sick people. Emergency Departments would become desolate, lonely places. Malingerers should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which potent narcotics fills your mind would be extinguished.
Not believe in Fibromyalgia Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your nurse manager to hire an in-house ER rheumatologist to screen patients for fibromyalgia, but even if only one in fifty of those purported fibromyalgia sufferers actually had the disease, what would that prove? Nobody sees Fibromyalgia Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Fibromyalgia Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Just because I’ve never personally seen a legitimate fibromyalgia sufferer does not mean that they don’t exist. It may just be that they’re too busy living their lives to show up in an ER six times a month begging for a fix. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. If you have, then you likely have fibromyalgia and the Dilaudid you demanded is working wonderfully. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world, including the ever-elusive genuine fibromyalgia sufferer.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, and you could try, and fail, to discover a disease pathology or objective set of diagnostic indicators for fibromyalgia, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the smartest epidemiologist, nor even the united strength of all the EMS and ER staffs that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, drug-seeking and shady pain-management clinics can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Fibromyalgia Claus! Thank Sumdood! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of addicts and whiners everywhere.
I hope I answered her question.