Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum

Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum
January 14, 2012
Help: Professional / Personal Development Opportunity

Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum

Our need: Nine or ten counter-protestors to support constraining the harassment behaviours of Helpers of God's Precious Infants 6 mornings a week at The Fertility Control Clinic from 7:30 – 9:30am on Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, Vic

The task: to document harassment of arriving patients, while also inhibiting it in a non-harassing way.

The context: see here for detailed description. In brief:

The Fertility Control Clinic's front gate is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne. There a group of Catholic protestors meet six days a week at 7:30am to protest patients' moral rights to a legal service authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. Their protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of gods.

The challenge: to engage with the protestors at a personal level to understand their perspectives and establish relationships, and at a social level as legally misbehaving harassers of vulnerable patients; to increase your understanding and competence at dealing with your own embarrassment / shame about taking personal action in public; the protestors have been provided a rationale and action focus for our work.

Benefits for you: increased awareness of own anger triggers, control over your automatic responses and directing them into appropriate, non-violent action to reduce patient harassment; knowing you are providing a support service much appreciated by patients and clinic staff clarification of own views of life and death issues.

The commitment: one session a week for about three months in the first instance

Even if in doubt, but interested, follow Torrey up by phone or comment on this letter at the blog below. Contact is not a commitment, either way.

Hopefully,

Torrey Orton and Charles Brass
Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo
http://www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com/

The patient experience…one’s evidence

The patient experience…one's evidence
Torrey Orton
Jan. 12, 2012

A bit more than 21 grams…??¹

 

From another frontline much like the Fertility Control Clinic one, but more common – the medical frontline where the vast bulk of the patient experience is provided by body movers (orderlies, …) and nurses and food service staff and cleaners…with registered medical practitioners ranging from interns thru registrars to fully fledged doctors and the pack leading consultants far in the distance, and often hard to see even when present (they're moving so fast) and smiling so hard …


…it seemed they all went to the same faux intimacy training programs down to the modulation of lips and expression brightness with smoothly patterned discourses of their respective domains. 'Hi, I'm X and I'll be doing Y for you for the next …hours…minutes"… I was rendered "Torrey" by fiat and minded the presumption, since I know my barber better than I will ever know any of them.


Sure the dependency's different: my barber might on a bad day nick an ear (which he hasn't in 36 years), while the more present life vs. deathness of a faulty organ creates an intimacy which is too close and at the same time massively distant, especially when the actors in the hospital drama had almost no time to know me in any other than the piece of meat sense I had experienced with my first hospitalisation 10 years ago (a pacemaker precipitating one).


"Occluded" IVs
Actually every one moved fast all the time, leaving me with a sense of being in the hands of a system with somewhat less than the optimum capacity to function safely…it felt like it wouldn't be hard for an error to arise. For example, I was on a drip from 4 hours after arrival until an hour before departure five days later…sometimes two different intravenous infusions in tandem… especially post-operative². The drip monitor signalled persistently under two conditions: one, I had "occluded" the flow at the point of its entry to my body – the cannula – by moving the arm which held it (this time in the crook of my left elbow which meant occlusions abounded for days and nights due to spontaneous arm movements).


In the process of trying to rearrange my troublesome cannulations three efforts by three different nurses failed, largely due, it seemed to me, being overtired, stressed or both. One stopped after three tries saying she'd lost her "mojo". One pretender to the role arrived saying he'd try but call another if he failed. He never started because I told him to go away if he wasn't sure of himself. I guess he was offended; I was already irritated. My release from the irritation (not anger nor pain nor anything like that; I'm relatively impervious to the pricks that presage a cannulation) came from a 60 year old who did it in 32 seconds (the others were under 35, years that is, at a guess). My reverse ageism?


The second condition
But cannulations were more than an irritant. The possibility of a mix up in the drip lines were another matter. Heavy antibiotics prefaced the op by one day and succeeded it for three days. These were sent by IV, in tandem with the permanent fluid input. BUT, the two were chemically incompatible, requiring the shared mainline to be "flushed" with a chemically neutral solution preventing contamination of the one by the other, both before the antibiotic and after. In the flashlight reduced darkness of middle night I had the impression that shift nurses were not always on top of these delicacies, though the fact I'm writing this three weeks after the fact suggests I needn't have worried, but how was I to know then?


Memorables
These sorts of things are the memorables of my "patient experience" because they occupied my waking and sleeping days for the duration, interrupted by workable, and better, nurse and supporters efforts to minimise their effects. They happened in one of the best private hospitals in Melbourne which I've used before for related matters. My impression of contextual stress was not an artefact of my degraded physical defences.


I spent 4 hours waiting for a first assessment in emergency after entry triage, followed by nearly a whole day on an emergency gurney before transfer to a regular bed. This was not special treatment for me; they were full to the eyebrows. As a full fee private patient I did not get a sole occupancy private room until after the operation, another day plus later. These are system redundancy problems – ones which preoccupations with profit and profitability have removed from the vocabulary and practice of organisational competence in many of our core systems, hospitals among the most important (shortage of retail service staff really doesn't matter in the bigger scheme; it's an irritant without a serious consequence).


Such things do not matter to me a great deal; the double I shared for a day before the op worked fine, though the other guy was having a hard time in recovery from a knee reconstruction. He and I passed on my way out of Intensive Care: he arriving for more serious pain management I guessed and I departing with infection controlled and pacemaker³ unimpeded by the op electricals.


I think there was another move in there but my recollections of the pre-post op period are a little fuzzy. These are, of course, my perceptions. I am a reasonably skilled observer of behaviour, with allowances for memory fudges arising from the tiredness of the gallbladder infection I was carrying and being treated for pre-operatively. I am agile at talking to all kinds of people in all sorts of personal states about how they are finding their life at the moment. Some staff were self-immunized from that level of communication but many were accessible to observations about their apparent pressured work, explicitly confirming my impressions above.




1-As the first major loss of a body part (teeth excluded) in my medical history, my gallbladder excision on Dec. 16^th, '11 roused a wonder as to how much I'd lost, prompted a bit by the notion that a soul was a measurable 21 grams of something. Chasing down the bladder weight query went nowhere, though bilious content volume and dimension, on the average, were readily available. Midst the mild disappointment I realised that I'd already compromised the materiality of my spiritual equation by acquiring a pacemaker 9 years ago after a similarly unprovoked attack by nature on my being.
Three weeks later I got the lab assessment of the offending organ. It was rated as "gangrenous" and a day or so off bursting when the op was done.


2- The op itself was a marvel of keyhole work which, among other things, left me fully operational 10 days later and almost undetectably unwounded at three weeks post-op, plus nil internal wound pain. It took about 1.5 hours, extenuated some by the offending bladder having been "the worst we've seen in years" – made their day, so to speak, the backup surgeon opined the morning after. This led to additional infusions focussed on killing possible bugs which might have escaped from the ravaged bladder before the heavy hitters got to it with their extraction tools.


3- One risk associated with the keyhole surgery was that the electrical aspects of the process might disorient the pacemaker's little brain (it didn't). Had it done so, no worries anyway, perhaps. The techy at my most recent end of pacemaker battery life check-up said in reply to my wonder about a power down, "If it stopped now, it wouldn't make any difference to your life." How was I to know?

Learning to act right (25)… What’s harassment and why it must stop.

Learning to act right (25)… What's harassment and why it must stop.

Torrey Orton
Jan. 4, 2012

A message to HGPI* "helpers"

The Fertility Control Clinic is the everyday frontline of the lifer-choicer confrontation in Melbourne. We sit clearly on the choicer side for a number of reasons, and with a view that it's easier to inflame than it is to understand. So far we have succeeded in not inflaming a volatile setting.


We both retain a strong belief that clinic clients are being unreasonably accosted, and still want to see whether some sort of intervention might be created to address this situation. The objective in general will be to reduce perceived harassment to zero.


You are seen as harassing by many patients and by us. We know you act better when we're around, so the harassment must be even more than we see. We think the Bible encourages supporting the weak and you are harassing the very vulnerable. We also think you as a group do not understand why you are seen as harassing, and not only by us. Here's why, in two parts:

Part 1 - The idea that patients arrive already stressed so you are not aggravating it reflects a basic misunderstanding of stress. It is VERY clear that stress is cumulative, both through multiple stressors at one time and/or sustained stressor(s) over longer periods. A highly stressed person requires slight additional stress to push them over their personal limit. Anything anyone does which increases the stress of already stressed people who cannot defend themselves is understood in law as harassment. Patients are understood in anyone's church to be unusually vulnerable.

 

Part 2 - Harassing behaviour in the FCC context is any continued offering to patients and their families who have refused an initial offer by HGPI members. Continued offering means following the patients beyond the point of first contact and refusal towards the FCC gate and saying things like "You'll be a good mother / father." "Don't harm your beautiful baby", etc.

We would like you to understand this, and here's how we propose to try:

1- This document specifies a publically understood meaning of harassment (Part 2 above)

2- It also assumes a standard conception of stress as cumulative (Part 1 above)

3- We will present it to you and discuss the meanings of 1 and 2 for clarity

4- Then, we will begin to document violations of those 2 understandings and confront you in various ways with the evidence

5- In the process of step 4, our way of confronting you may elicit feelings of guilt and shame and anger from you, which is what harassment elicits from some patients.

6- We will do all of this in ways which do not add to patient stress.

Regards
Your pro-life pro-choicers,
Torrey Orton and Charles Brass
Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic


*HGPI = Helping God's Precious Infants