Back In The U.S.S.R.

                       Back In The U.S.S.R.

                                     By

                        Philip A. Kumin

I had a very jarring experience today.

For the previous two appointments, I had asked my nurse practitioner to hold off on her prescribing of meds for me.  I  explained to her that I wanted to use up a surplus of medication which had accumulated in my apartment.  I wasn’t aware the clinic had a policy whereby, if you missed three appointments in a row, you were discharged from there.  I wasn’t aware my nurse practitioner had counted the two appointments I had asked her to hold off on, as missed appointments.  The surplus had occurred because the nurse practitioner doesn’t always schedule my following appointments exactly 30 days after the most recent ones.  Sometimes she schedules them sooner.

Today, I called the clinic to set up my next appointment and was confronted with the fact that I had missed two appointments.

This encounter brought back so many memories of other occasions when I had been brutalized by the mental health system over the previous 53 years, I went into a severe depression.

Mental patients are Soviet dissidents in the Gulag Archipelago.