In February 2003, when my partner cancelled his half of our medical appointment at the last minute  so he could get to a  job interview, I thought our physician  would raise a fuss.  He didn't.  In fact, the doctor told me  that the additional 30 minutes presented a great opportunity for him to perform a "full body exam".  He asked me if I ever had a thorough body exam before.  I told him that I did, but it had been a number of years before.

"Oh, but you never had one of MY full body examinations," the doctor boasted.   I thought  that he was trying to convey his level of professional expertise.  He was, but not in the context  of medicine.

 The doctor himself brought me into the examination room. After being told to strip naked I was left in the examination room with no hospital gown.  No big deal, I thought.  When tthe phycian returned, the only comment he would utter throughout the very thorough examination was the word "GORGEOUS!" 

That day I discovered  there is a big difference when a doctor repeats the word "GORGEOUS" using a stethescope on a patient's back, and when the word is used with the doctors' hands gripping and fondling a patient's scrotum.

 This photograph depicts best the subsequent visit with Dr. Gershan during March 2003.   Because I was standing for the second episode in March, rather than lying flat on my back,  I was able to flex my head forward  as the doctor fondled my testicles and then squeezing tightly as he made a sentence-long comment using the word "GORGEOUS!" in the sentence.    My immediate reaction was that I didn't feel gorgeous, and when I went to pull away, I couldn't.  I remember looking forward out the window and feeling like I wanted to be on the other side of that window... I felt like I just wanted to throw up my own body all over him if that's what it would take to make him stop...! Make him stop...!  WILL SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE HIM STOP... NOW!!!   I could feel one of my more dominant multiple personalities -- the personality who can turn sex on and shut it off -- jerk my body sideways, callling out, "NO!"  It was too late!  I was now injured, perhaps seriously.  All I could feel was like my testicle had been ripped off and the doctor was acting as though he had done nothing wrong.   It was like there was Dr. Gershan one moment, a sweet, docile, doctor who wanted to everything he could to help the male ipatients that caught his fancy, but then there was this other twisted side.   That was the side that sat down with Brian and I and described himself as "the biggest whore in the Castro",. referring to the well-known mecca of the San Francisco neighborhood that bears its name.  Clearly, the second episode was indicative that I wasn't  going to return to see the doctor as a patient ever again.   I made several attempts to get copies of the MRs made at the request of the SFGH Ward 86, where I had relocated my healthcare directly afterwards.  But when I asked them for my records, they initially declined me.  When I insisted that they provide them, they said that they would provide me with a photocopy of what was in my file.  It would cost me "$45.00".  I felt like I was getting raped again after I returned again and what $45.00 bought me was three pages of a single lab report that I already had copied.   When I questioned the people at the clinic,  they insisted that what I rec'd was all that there was in my file.  

Following the second episode, Dr. Gershan became so fearful that I was going to report him that he botched my medical records, depicting me as his own alter ego in the fabrications that he introduced.   Unbeknownst to me, these records were circulated to the PACE clinic in San Jose and then to a San Jose SSA administrative law judge.

Without sp

 I was naked with a doctor who was doing things to me that made me want to throw up my body.    For all those who enjoy rape fantasies, you should know that there is an extraordinarily huge difference between someone you love pursuing you in a fantasy and someone who thrusts himself upon you only to discover that it is psychologically draining.  However, far worse was the fabrication of medical records that resulted after I pulled away.  Thinking I might try to report him, Dr. Gershan conjured up MRs which portrayed me as a sleazy junkie hustler.  When my MRs were transfererred to a clinic in Santa Clara County, I couldn't continue receiving housing assistance, I was unable to file a lawsuit against an employer wh discriminated against me, and I found myself a victim of the senseless War on Drugs.  Not until I was taken in on a 5150 and remained in a behavioral unit for one week that it was discovered that everything that Dr. Gershan wrote into my MRs was pure fabrication.   It was a composite of the person Dr. Gershan had been before going to St. George's Medical School in Grenada and getting a bogus degree in medicine.    

I reported Dr. Gershan in October 2004 after witnessing my medical records.  I felt relieved in my decicion to do so.

Richard Gicomeng, Photographer

MANIFESTATIONS OF MEDICAL MISCONDUCT (April 2006) is digital stroboscopic surrealism captured on a single digital frame.

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