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Tag Archives: Compassion

I Suppose Hospitals are Full of Such Stories

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in General

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Compassion, Cruelty, Hospitals, Illness, Medicine, Nusing, suffering, Vomit

bosch20

I think a little Bosch is in order here.

“Do you want them or not?”

This was the nurse talking to the patient next to me earlier this morning. Her words struck me as about the most cruel thing I had heard anyone say in a very long time. To be fair, I wasn’t privy to the whole story, and the occasional dose of percoset could not have done much to improve my own perception of events happening on the other side of a curtain. Still, I think I took in enough of what was going on to understand the poor sobbing man who had to answer this question.

My own stay at the hospital was rather uneventful. Three minor procedures and an overnight stay. It was painful, but hardly beyond my own (less than impressive) tolerance levels. I found the staff pleasant and helpful. The story of my brief encounter with the medical world this weekend has thus far been a rather boring story of a plan coming together nicely. The drama last night was unfolded just beyond the curtain beside me.

The patient showed up well into the evening, obviously in great distress. I could hear the man explain that he had walked out of another hospital because they wouldn’t give him enough pain killers. He didn’t seem to be capable of repeating that move again. Shortly after being left to his own devices, the man began to vomit. He seemed to vomit until he had nothing left, and he just kept on going.

…all night.

Granted, there were moments of respite, but they were few and far in between. I could hardly imagine the pain he must have experienced, but listening to him cry just like a child was enough to drive the point home for me. The physical suffering of the patient next to me was but the kicker for the real story. Over the course of the evening, the staff slowly seemed to disengage themselves from the struggle to control his pain, replacing the effort to help him with explanations for their own inability to do so. The response time for his requests grew longer and longer over the course of the evening. At least one time I could hear people joking and laughing just outside the door as his bell rang, and the man struggled to expel whatever it was that wanted out of his belly so badly.

Was I missing something? Perhaps the staff believed him to be a problem patient of sorts, contributing to his own misery in one way or another, or perhaps they simply felt they were unable to help him. Either way, their increasing reluctance to try seemed to grow more obvious over the course of the night. I suppose it would make sense in that perverse way that the human mind actually seems to work that a nurse unable to help a patient in any substantive manner would withdraw from him emotionally, but this seemed to be an exceptionally striking loss of compassion. By morning, it seemed the staff could hardly pretend to care anymore just what happened to this patient.

One particularly sad chapter in the drama came when my neighbor asked for pain medication. He was given a pill and some water, all of which stayed down less than a few minutes. As the patient pointed out that his pain medication was now in the bucket, the hospital staff argued that some of it must be making its way into his system. How much was in the bucket and how much was in his system, no-one could tell, and that unanswered question had serious consequences. The man continued to complain of pain all night, and having given him pain medications, the staff explained that they could not risk giving him anything more. Despite any evidence to the contrary, they had to assume the medication they had given him was still in his system. He would simply have to tough it out.

At some point in the evening, I heard somebody take them man into the bathroom where they left him. About ten minutes later I heard a crash. Do, I know that he fell? Not quite. Something else could have gone wrong, but I continue to believe that is what I heard. By this point in the evening, I was getting a slow response to my own requests for help. Perhaps the staff was just that busy, and perhaps my own efforts to get help for the neighbor had earned me too a skeptical ear. Either way, no-one came to help for several minutes as I pressed buttons and talked into speakers. The man begged me to find him some help. Finally, I decided to get up and make for the hallway.

Someone finally entered the room as I grunted and groaned my way out of bed. After asking them to help my neighbor I was told he was just lying on the floor. It was only after I insisted several times that he had fallen, and after I added that I had heard a crash, that anyone turned their attention to him. After sometime they got him back into his bed and listened as he added a very sore shoulder to his list of complaints. Convinced that it had popped out of place, my neighbor asked for help pushing it back into its socket. This request was of course denied, and rightly so, I imagine, but I couldn’t help thinking that to this person it was just one more refusal to help him.

Things were relatively quiet for awhile after that. When asked, the man always said he was in pain. Finally, someone brought him a couple pain pills and a glass of water. The man patiently explained that he would vomit them back up just as they had the first time. His nurse interrupted with terse question; “Do you want them or not?”

After a long silence, I could hear the man taking the pills. It had to be a difficult decision. The previous botched attempt at such medication was the very reason he spent the night in so much pain, and now this was the only option the nurse could (or would) offer him. She left immediately after giving him the pills, and the room fell silent. As it happens, he did keep this batch down, and things were okay for awhile (less than an hour). Who knows, maybe there was a trace of wisdom in her cruelty.

I keep thinking about this, wondering how accurate my sense of the events may be, what details may fill the gaps in my own sense of the story, and just how much I should be angry over the story unfolding beside me. If I’ve gauged the bathroom incident correctly, then I think that argues for an angry-as-hell verdict, but I am on very uncertain ground there. Most of the story takes place in more grey areas, a patient in great pain, and staff well beyond their ability to help him. I wonder if people may have overlooked some options that were available to them all along, but I don’t know what those would be. Perhaps there are lessons here about the way bureaucracies allocate authority for decisions and the way people deal with those policies in real life. Far more likely, I suspect there is a lesson here about the way that people respond to their own limitations, and the short trip from inability to help to utter lack of compassion. These weren’t uncaring people, at least I don’t believe they were, but by the end of the evening you’d have been hard-pressed to see it in their actions toward that patient.

Ah well, I now have a date with some percoset.

…which I am apparently unable to spell.

71.271549 -156.751450

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Compassion with Caveats Aplenty and Malice by Any Other Name: The Case of a Teacher with a Purpose!

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Cognitive Dissonance, Compassion, Cultyral Conservatism, Diane Medley, Gay Rights, Homosexuality, School

UPDATE_-Local-Students-Want-Traditional-Prom-Gays-BannedSometimes your 15 minutes of fame is a moment in the sunshine (or so I hear), and sometimes it’s fifteen minutes under the spotlight of public interrogation (or so I fear). Sometimes, I expect it’s a confusing mixture of both. Take for example the case of Diane Medley, a special needs teacher who claims those of homosexual orientation have no purpose in life. She will be grist for the left wing mill for a little while, and I suppose a hero to Christian conservatives and right wing culture warriors.

Just to be clear, we will be doing the grist-grinding thing here in this post.

…just a little.

So, what’s the story? Well apparently the standard prom for the local high school will be allowing those of homosexual orientation to attend, which is the reason Medley and others have taken to advocating a second prom in which homosexuals will not be admitted. Wabashvalley.com come attributes the following quote to Medley.

Homosexual students come to me with their problems, and I don’t agree with them, but I care about them. It’s the same thing with my special needs kids, I think God puts everyone in our lives for a reason.

Asked if this also holds for those of homosexual orientation, she responded:

No I honestly don’t. Sorry, but I don’t. I don’t understand it. A gay person isn’t going to come up and make some change unless it’s to realize that it was a choice and they’re choosing God.

Now to be fair, there is a trace of compassion somewhere in these comments, but it’s struggling for shoulder room with a whole mess of condemnation. One suspects that Diane Medley’s caring may well be cold comfort for those whose lives she has declared to be utterly without purpose.

The same could be said of assurances made by some of the others in favor of the alternative prom, and by Christians everywhere who wish to assure us that they hate the sin but not the sinner.

A distinction that often comes up short of any real difference.

And here it is easy to get dismissive, easy to write Medley and so many others off as people without redeeming value. I can’t pretend I don’t feel that way at times, but herein lies the really terrible thing. I actually don’t think she sounds like a person completely devoid of humanity. I strongly suspect that she does indeed help students on a regular basis, that she cares for them deeply, and that her caring does extend in some perverted sense to the homosexuals that may come to her for help.

I said perverted, didn’t I?

And I mean it too.

And yes, it is Medley’s approach to homosexuality that strikes me as perverted, deeply so in fact. To imagine that one could help someone whose very life one accords so little value requires an exercise in mental gymnastics that would surely break the back of a healthy conscience.

This is good will gone wrong folks, and that’s the charitable interpretation of her statements.

You can ask people to change and rethink an awful lot in life, and yes that includes religious beliefs, political commitments, work ethics, and even favorite sports teams. Hell, you can ask people to get over an aversion to cats. But you cannot reasonably expect people to change their sexual orientation, nor to live their whole lives as though it didn’t matter. I expect there is a certain range of people with bisexual orientation who could make conscious choices about what gender they do and don’t want to be with, but for the vast majority of us that decision has simply been made for us. We don’t choose which gender we find attractive; we learn it. …and that learning process can be difficult enough for those of us fortunate enough to end up on the socially acceptable side of the spectrum. So much the more difficult for those whose desires take them in a different direction! People going through that deserve all the help that they can get; they do not deserve the conditional embrace of those whose love is full of caveats and footnotes. And they certainly do not need to hear that the only choice that they can make which would possibly make any difference in their lives, the only choice that could give their existence meaning, is the one that will have them going against their their own natural inclinations.

That approach just isn’t good enough.

And God is no excuse.

Medley has attached conditions to her compassion, conditions that dehumanize those who may need her help. That she accounts for these conditions by recourse to her faith in Christ is both beside the point and ironic at the same time. Frankly, I don’t think you get to set aside the vast array of evidence on the subject of human sexuality and proceed as though important factual questions can be safely relegated to the sphere is personal faith, not when other people’s lives and mental health lies in the balance. But beyond that, there is something deeply inauthentic about that approach.

It isn’t that Medley and her allies have renounced the love and compassion, so central to the vision of Christianity. Indeed that message is all over their approach to the subject. But they have reduced it to a sort of footnote. Gone is the motivating force of this powerful message, and what is left of that message is a mere rationalization. Love does not guide their actions; it guides their narrative. Because it is unthinkable that a Christian should act without love, an explanation must be offered which includes it. And so we get one, a vision of love and compassion so filled with caveats that it is guides actions indistinguishable from those motivated by clear malice. And we are left with an absolutism of laws and rules while the very value of a human life is reduced to an artistic expression of sorts, a trick of story telling.

Again, I don’t think Medley is a beast. But in this matter, her faith is hardly a virtue. Indeed, Christianity as she articulates it in this story is an outright moral failing. It is the reason she cannot treat some students with the dignity they deserve. I’ve known Christians who took the message of love to heart, Christians for whom it was a genuine force in their lives. And perhaps on other days, in other moments it is for Medley.

But not today.

And not for those that are gay.

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