Anti-Climax

I know myself and how I can be, and how other people see me as difficult. Primarily, I am brutally honest, which contrary to your mother’s lies, is not the best policy. I do not indulge other people’s egos for the sole sake of their egos, and see my life, even as it is now, as something other than clay for shaping by control freaks. My refusal to blend in with the flock of sheep or take that plunge with the other lemmings leaves me vulnerable to other predators.
I respect other people’s opinions and beliefs, but have found that others get upset in various ways when it becomes clear that respecting other opinions and embracing them as my own are two different things. I do alter my thinking and change my mind, but there has to be logical reasons that change the why of my thinking, not the what that is makes up the thoughts.
Those ways that my odd brain works really sums up a great portion of my almost-automatic disagreement with doctors. I can narrow it down to the differences in attitudes with my GP: he looks to maintain a quantity of life, and I would greatly prefer to have a quality of life. This same thing would cover the from-the-gate difficulty with Dr. Paz at Sturdy Hospital. He was opposed to a Do-Not-Resuscitate" order from someone so young. Put ego in the mix where others thinks their beliefs should automatically apply to everybody, and some level of conflict is as inevitable as neuropathy in diabetics.
I think of these quirks in relation to my last day at Sturdy because a "diabetes educator" came to visit me. I visualize some regular readers or people that know me going pale at the thought of the explosive conflict that must have resulted from such a meeting. No conflict occurred.
There is one major aspect to my personal diabetes care in which I am probably (almost certainly) dead wrong about but have and will stubbornly continue my way. The diabetes educator and I discussed this point with disagreement, but we each maintained enough respect for the reasons for each other’s opinions that no conflict arose out of a difference of opinion.
The diabetes educator did not draw out my more stubborn aspects because she at least listened to the me and the reasoning that developed over near 40 years of living with diabetes.
The diabetes educator was much younger than I. She freely admitted that I taught her a few things about how diabetes was handled long before she got into the field, and some things she quietly acknowledged but "they" were not "supposed" to acknowledge to patients. She dispensed advice, not dictates.
She got called away and was one of the few Sturdy staffers to leave my bedside without fuming from the ears. I was looking forward to speaking with her again, but when allowance for discharge came in that Monday afternoon, I did not wait around for tearful goodbyes. I figured Dr. Paz and the staff had a party to begin as soon as I had left the building.
The lack of conflict seems logical: the diabetes educator understood what I consider a basic fact: you cannot tell someone that the sum of their life experiences is wrong.