One of the most harmful habits and one of the hardest habits to break is the habit of being right all the time. By being right one sets the other up to be wrong, one instigates conflict from the outset. This way one is always at loggerheads with someone about something. Others who like to be right all the time will spot the challenge you pose and will rise to it time and time again.

It it a good place to start meditation practice “in action”. Spot the moments when “being right” arises. Spot the ensuing thought patterns as they manifest and solidify into the sure knowledge you are right. Spot what follows: there is a rise of tension and even anger as you prepare for battle. Your body runs on stress when you are right all the time.

Using a meditation like this one slowly becomes more and more aware of these patterns, or habits of thinking that lead to negative emotions, actions and words. By becoming more aware or awake one recognises earlier the signs of trouble and stands guard against the mistaken attitude and then by chipping away at the habit with this awareness, you one day find you no longer need to be right. Instead being is itself a pleasure and a joy.

Trying to get the British Medical establishment to deal with the reality that longstanding childhood sexual abuse (CSA) causes physical injuries has been an uphill battle. I am not sure why. I have ascribed this in the past to the denial that is rife in British society today. These articles are from medical and alternative sources that support my claim. Of course, like almost everything else on the subject, they are not from Britain:

The Limping Child is a scholarly medical article about what causes a child to limp. Child abuse is listed as one of the frequent causes of trauma based limping.
Paul Linden writes on bodywork with Sexual Child Abuse survivors focussing on physical patterns including those related to dissociation and re-learning control of the body.

I have to admit I don’t want to think my experience and the ensueing lack of effective medical analysis are down to any form of deliberate act, merely a lack of experience and recognition. Indeed I found Professor Parveen Kumar was an affable sort, aside from my specific complaint that she failed to properly investigate problems in which she was not a specialist.

She apparantly loves skiing, as do I, though these days on a mountain you’d find me on a snowboard. Having done about 70 weeks skiing and 60 weeks Boarding I trust she’d understand my frustration and search for an explanation of the continued prevailing failure to investigate and deal constructively with my problems from all quarters except perhaps a rare few.

I rarely seem to be taking my usual attitude towards politics and rarer still to be writing a Buddhist inspired take on things, for which I was nominated last year for a “Blogghisattva” award.

This suffering of the body as old wounds have become raw and new ones deteriorated has taken over so much. The Buddha put Rupa first. He stopped his ascetic practices and drank a little from the bowl of life. Rupa is body and to feed a hungry body, to maintain the physical ground of being, is fundamental.

I am also a British Citizen, and Englishman born and bred. I have expectations of my fellow countrymen. Gentlemanly behaviour is always appropriate. I am known, to those who know me, from old ladies in the place I live, to close and old friends, as a gentleman. Those doctors who have done their jobs know this too. Those who haven’t know I can bite back.

Which is where my identity as an Englishman and that as a Buddhist come to a head, and Englishman loses. At the end of the day expectations lead us to greater suffering. Always. People say hope, which is a form of expectation keeps you going. It holds you down. Whether it is met and you are burdened with more earthly ties which inevitably lead to suffering, or not met in which case, generally, one suffers sooner, doesn’t matter.

So I will drop my expectation. I will attempt to carefully and fully explain that which is “wrong” with my body to doctors, for now I direly need their help. And if ever and when I am up and walking tall again, I will remove any inflamatory references from my website.

I don’t wish to fan flames. I just need a body that works. Mistakes were made. It happens. A lack of speed and grace in dealing with it can be excused. Now the time has come for things to happen promptly. My body is very weak.

Yet still I smile at everyone I see. Smiles and sunshine cost nothing is my favourite piece of wisdom.

In his letter to the refering physician, dictated 13th October, typed 23rd October and containing facts unknown until 15th October (referring to my official complaint to the hospital), Dr Polkey has backtracked a little from his assertion that it was scientifically sound to take the highest of three values from the phrenic nerve test.

Instead of using the value of 6.1 and saying my diaphragm is normal, he is now using the value of 4.1, achieved on the second mengele-like induced enervation of the diaphragm, and saying my diaphragm “could function normally under certain circumstances”. He failed to elucidate how it is functioning and perhaps why. Oh - of course - that’s because he wasn’t interested, after all he’s only one of the “leading respiritory muscle specialists” in the universe or something like that.

As it was a test of diaphragm function at rest 3.1, the first value achieved after ten minutes of rest, would be most appropriate on a scientific basis. And my diaphragm does not function normally because the whole back right side of my body has died, and the diaphragm is desperately struggling to keep me alive and standing.

I wonder if the glare of publicity and my complaint has made Polkey return to his head a little. In August he described these tests as “absolutely the first” I should do, and that anaesthesia could be “life threatening” because of my diaphragm function - something he changed to “elective tests” when he described them in hospital. In August he saw no point taking a view on my “psychology” but that I certainly had not been properly investigated. Now he has stifled one avenue of investigation that was proving fruitful.

Oh and the funniest thing of all is that if you search Google for Dr Mike Polkey, this site - freedomforall.net - comes out ahead of his CV. And that really has got me laffin … I told him I was a scientist. I’m also adept in the arts, including the art of search engine ranking maximization.

I met a Doctor who seems to know what the right thing is when he sees it, or in this case attempts to investigate it. I met some relevant bigwigs who are willing to investigate and prod.

I hope soon there will be a really positive development, so that when my friends and family call I won’t still be telling them my health has worsened. If some of these people are allowed to do their jobs or helped to see the need, I might still be here after all to answer the phone if it rings.

After life, the only thing I want based on ego right now is the love of a good woman and the chance to have a family.

It is hard to fathom the mind of a man who can use his own child to obtain sexual pleasure. Not only is it hard, but let’s face it, who would want to and why? It is not a pleasant experience for the human mind to accept that such things happen and to delve deeply into it challenges anyone’s ability to comprehend the other.

A mind divided amongst itself, at war with itself, must produce such acts. It can not be possible that a mind intact and unbroken could be so cruel and so selfish in acting to obtain personal power and pleasure at the cost of another through abhorrent acts of sexual invasion. The depraved nature of the acts belies a mind so corrupted yet - even this mind has in it’s centre, in it’s genesis, a place of purity.

The events and experiences that make possible a mind of such brokenness can not even be guessed at by a person who has grown up whole. Yet those who have most trouble understanding, and experience the greatest reactions to these acts of brokenness, are often themselves also broken people - perhaps saved from becoming the same only by chance experience or by measure and degree of harm, pain, suffering and terror.

The walls of silence are all around us. In the minds of victims and abusers. In the press. In Government. In our religion, our schools, our philosohies, psychology and politics. We pretend that things are not as they are on a grand scale. We hide from the truth, persecute victims and promote misleading myths. Some 25% - 40% of adults were sexually molested at some point in time and 90% of those with unmanageable lives were victims, probably of invasive sexual acts when children.

Worldwide millions of pounds and dollars are spent on stranger danger campaigns whilst father, brothers, uncles and family friends use and abuse young bodies and minds for their own gratification. The next largest group of perpetrators are schoolteachers, scoutmasters and priests. All of these are known to the victims by and large and the stranger danger campaigns actually confuse these children into accepting as not wrong the harm forced into and upon them.

We pride ourselves on being civilised yet we persecute those who have been victimised as children into having no effective control over their “own” lives. We imprison, label and condemn those who, in continually running from the reality of their childhoods, lead lives of broken impulse and reactivity. These lives, so destructive to themselves and others lead them to prostitution, to prison and to drug abuse. And we label and condemn and imprison them.

In a world without childhood sexual abuse we might need ten per cent of the government, armed forces, police forces and invasive western medical practitioners that we have now, so pervasive and overwhelming are the effects of abuse. If people were in charge of their lives they would not need governing, policing and being glued together. If you base the test of civilisation on one simple question “Do they screw their children?”, we fail. We are barbarians.

A very stupid police officer from the Metropolitan Police in Borough of Newham attended the accident in which my Land Rover was written off last week.

How do I know he was very stupid? Well apart from his behaviour - insulting me, a disabled and incontinent man for needing to pee after a road traffic accident and not being able to wait until i got to hospital - he stole a number of X rays and MRI scan films from my car. He Also Breathalysed me in the Ambulance in a neckbrace for which he required special permission. All this was in vengeance for my percieved wrongdoing.

The films were in the car at the time of the accident as I was on the way to see my Chiropracter to get a comparitive set of films taken. I showed the films to two witnesses to the accident as I waited for the ambulance and discussed my situation with them to pass the time. So there were witnesses to the presence of these objects in my car immediately before I was removed from it. The films did not travel with me to the hospital in the ambulance and to make sure I have checked with the Accident and Emergency department and ambulance control, neither of whom have them.

Once out of the car I handed my keys to the policeman who told me he had parked and secured my vehicle before he handed the keys back. So he had access to the vehicle at a time when I was not present.

Once out of the hospital later that afternoon I returned to my car with a friend and we removed everything I wanted from the vehicle. The next day we went back to check for these X rays which were not there. I then checked with the local police station to see if they had been recorded in “book 66″ the valuable property book which records all objects the police remove to secure in such circumstances - they were not recorded.

So there was one person who had the opportunity and means to remove these films - the policeman who parked my car. The only thing missing from the traditional policing picture as to how to solve the crime is motive - but the man was so stupid he even explained this to me - he was one of four officers disciplined a few weeks ago for the way he treated me and he was fool enough to point this out to me. Not happy to gain vengeance he also made his need to do so perfectly clear with his behaviour and his words.

This man should not be a police officer. He is clearly not only prepared to bend the rules in doing his job but he is prepared to commit a nasty crime potentially damaging to someones health and steal some hundreds of pounds worth of medical images.

I am unsure as to whether I should complain about this officially. I would like to. I do not like theft nor violent crime and I am called by some of my neighbours a “grass” because I am prepared to report things to the police. If I do and the Metropolitan Police fail as abysmally in their duty as usual, nothing will happen to the officer concerned save for a little telling off at best. And next time he sees me it might be in a dark alley when no one is watching. He has already shown that he is prepared to break the law, risk my health and insult another human his need to seek vengeance.

By the admission of one of the local inspectors - the one who disciplined this officer for his previous behaviour - people like me are a rarity in this part of London. There is, she said, “a generational” distrust of the police service. I wonder if they wonder why?

Yesterday afternoon I was on the way to the chiropracter to have a new set of X-Rays taken. The idea was to have a comparative set of X-rays to compare to the first one he did just over a year ago. This seemed valuable as proof of the decline in my musculoskeletal condition which, remaining untreated so long, has gotten bad.

As I approached a junction my neck had a spasm and twisted round to the right. I had just started pulling in to the correct lane and I lost sight of the road. There was a parked low loading truck in my way and I didn’t see it. My beautiful Land Rover is a write off, I suspect, and immediately afterwards I was in agony, having hit the small truck at 10 - 15 miles and hour, and an ambulance was called. If you read the story below you will realise I was not keen to go to Newham Hospital but gave up my argument with the ambulance driver who was having none of it pretty swiftly.

Then the police arrived. One of them had an attitude right from the start. Later he admitted he had been one of four officers who had pulled me wrongly a couple of months ago and clearly gotten in some trouble for it. When my neck was strapped and I got out of the car I felt a desperate need to pee, as I usually do as I suffer neurological impairment to the muscles of the pelvis and subsequently incontinence.

I said to the ambulance driver I have to pee. “Wait til you get to hospital”, said the police officer. I couldn’t wait. “No I have to go now I’ll pee against my car”, I replied, and turned and did so. “Can he do that?”, asked the ambulance driver. “You dirty little shit”, the officer exclaimed.

As I turned round I said I was diabled and incontinent and he had no right to address me in that manner. “Say what?” he asked rhetorically, “no-one heard anything”. “No, no-one heard anything”, said the ambulance driver.

After they put me in the ambulance I had to wait there while the police Officer checked with someone if he could breathalyse me whilst I was strapped up anmd in a head brace. I had told the ambulance crew that I had had one can of beer over an hour before. When they came in to do it the officer had a look of glee on his face - “gotcha”, it seemed to be saying. It took three attempts to achieve a strong enough breath for the machine. I explained to the officer I had trouble with my diaphraghm and couldn’t breath hard. He said I “wasn’t trying” implying he knew when someonme was faking the severe diaphraghmatic problems I suffer.

The breath test was clear. The officer looked upset. “You don’t remember me but I’ve met you before”. Then he said he had been one of these four idiots with nothng better to do on a wet saturday morning than harass a disabled man. The penny dropped. I turned to the ambulance driver and said “I told you I had one beer. I don’t do lies. Whatever this guy thinks of me he’s wrong - I work with the police and thats why he hates me because his inspector told him he did wrong”.

After this ten minute delay I was driven rather roughly to Newham General. At least this time they did take X-rays. After assuring me nothing was broken I was discharged.

I suppose it is one better than wasting three days of my time. But as I was admitted to Newham General on Saturday because of my spine and discharged Tuesday because I’m a hot potatoe, and on the way to the chiropracter to get X-rays my self they had failed to take, these ones must be the most ironic ever taken.