update: Friday Protest at MPP’s office and CCAC, and Minna’s eating again for the time being

I don’t know anything other than having received the following notice, but it seems like a very good sign. The notice I received contains places (far better than here) to get updated information:

We Are Protesting:

FRIDAY JANUARY 23rd from 8AM until NOON in front of MPP Rick
Bartolucci’s office located at 93 Ceder st, corner of Ceder and
Lisker, the Canada-Broker Building.
Then at NOON we are Marching to the Community Care Access Centre
which is located in the Rainbow Centre 40 Elm St, Suite 41-C the
north east corner of the mall at the corner of ST Anne Rd and Notre Dame Ave.

For Further and Updated Information:

Facebook Group: Minna’s Hunger Strike – Call to action for an ALS patient denied care

The Sudbury Star article

Youtube: Sudbury CCAC Exposed

Have also received word that Minna is eating again for now — but that doesn’t mean the situation is resolved by a longshot, it just means she’s not for the moment starving to death, she’s “just” totally lacking in all other aspects of necessary care. (Which is terrible enough as it is.)

Check those other websites for continuing updates, since they’re far more direct than looking here to see if I’ve found out anything yet from a distance and had time to blog it.

Anyone reading this who can do something — please do, because Minna’s dying otherwise.

(Edited a few times as thoughts pop into my head.)

It turns out I know the woman described in this article (which is frankly terrible — it makes this look like a “right to die” case when it’s a hunger strike because of being denied services):

Mettinen-Kekalainen is alone, bedridden or confined to a wheelchair, unable to change her adult diapers or bathe herself, and in constant pain.

Her only source of nutrition is the feeding tube in her stomach, but she is refusing to let friends administer the four cans of supplement she should be receiving daily.

Once the subject of newspaper articles about her indomitable spirit in coping with ALS and a role model for people raising autistic children, Mettinen-Kekalainen (who also suffers from Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder) is not receiving home care.

She says it’s being denied by the North East Community Care Access Centre because she complained about nurses contracted by the organization whom she claimed were not following her doctor’s orders.

I had not heard from her in years, and did not know she was living in such awful conditions (by which I mean the lack of care). I don’t think the hunger strike is a good tactic at all — it’s giving this agency exactly what they want. Hunger strikes only work if people care whether you live or die, which this agency obviously does not. I’m afraid they’re just going to hold out until she’s dead. But this is the situation, and I certainly can’t talk her out of it, so someone needs to get something done before that happens.

I didn’t know what was happening to her until moments before writing this. I know, however, several people, including myself, who have physical conditions in addition to autism, and who receive or require what most people would consider very intensive services as a result of the combination.

I have watched several of them end up being accused of being somehow dangerous or abusive, merely for advocating for their right to appropriate care.

Our non-typical social skills make us especially vulnerable to being sidelined and accused of improper conduct, and to others believing it even though it is not true (and make no mistake, people intent on doing us harm use that fact to their fullest advantage possible).

But in any case, even if we were truly the most hateful people on the planet (which I know Minna isn’t, and neither are the people I know — and Minna couldn’t be any threat to them even if she wanted to be), that would be no reason at all to refuse to provide us services.

The truth is that many physical disability agencies don’t want to provide services to people with developmental or psych labels — they figure that’s someone else’s problem and they think they’re above having to deal with us. So those of us with combinations of developmental, psych, and physical conditions (the strict divisions between such being largely societal anyway — with some conditions even seeming to have more than one different name depending on which branch of medicine claimed them first) often end up falling through the cracks and dying as a result.

Last I heard, nursing agencies are not allowed to administer the death penalty for having a bad attitude or unusual social skills. But this is exactly how many of them handle people they consider problematic. I have watched other such agencies, as well as staff in nursing homes and mental institutions, fail to provide necessary services for survival, to people who needed them, because they did not happen to like the person. There is a reason that serial killers and other people of questionable conscience like such jobs — they can characterize someone as a problem, or as “dying anyway”, and get away with this crap, especially because there are double standards where if we are violent, or even possible to mischaracterize as such, then it’s because we’re defective and if other people are violent to us then it’s also because we’re defective.

Don’t let the newspaper fool you — it talks about Minna “ending her suffering” which is a classic code phrase (I am terrible at using those, but can certainly often detect them in others) designed to call forth images of her disability as the main cause of suffering, and all the injustice she is suffering as incidental, or even inevitable. It isn’t. Severely disabled people are not committing suicide in droves, most of us are still around. What drives people to despair — and, often, suicide — is having crappy care (often includng abuse) and neglect be the only two options that seem to be available.

And I know, because I’ve seen it, that driving people to despair is a way these people operate. They know that desperate people often kill themselves outright or stop eating. They know that we are in what most people regard consciously or not as an expendable class of people. And they know that they will never get punished for murder if only they can drive us to suicide. (In fact a friend once told me about a guy who never laid a finger on his wife — a disabled woman — but who talked her into suicide by keeping her away from everyone and everything she cared about, emotionally abusing her, and telling her what a burden she was on him, even calling her a vampire who sucked the life out of him. He wrote a book about his techniques and was never charged with murder or even abuse.)

But I have a request for anyone with any power to do anything about this:

Don’t get bogged down in how sad you feel about what is happening. Don’t — if you can do anything more — just write about this. Don’t treat her death as the only inevitable conclusion in all this. Find a way to pressure the right people until Minna gets her services back, free of abuse/neglect and free of coercion to avoid reporting abuse/neglect.

You might not believe it can work, but it can — I’ve done it. This is someone’s life here and something can be done. I know because I’ve put pressure like this on agencies myself on behalf of others — and a hospital suddenly started providing appropriate care to one person, a home nursing agency started providing appropriate care to someone else. (This is a lot of what I do when I’m not on the Internet.) Often what they need to know is that you are watching and that the consequences for them of not providing appropriate care will be worse than the consequences of providing appropriate care. They won’t necessarily do this for any of the right reasons, but find a reason for them to do it and then put as much pressure on as you have to.

I’m not able to do this in this context — I have literally no energy left over (barely enough to write what I do online — and lucky that I was able to write this today, when just as important stories on other days I haven’t been able to), none of the needed connections, and no ability to form such connections rapidly enough. But someone who reads this has to be, I know my blog is widely read. So don’t fall prey to the Bystander Effect where you think “someone else will take care of it, there’s so many people reading this” — people die because of the bystander effect. Don’t let whether you like her or not determine what you do (I have friends who quarreled with her a few years ago, but I sure hope they know that liking someone or not doesn’t determine whether they should live or die — if you take that attitude you’re no better than the nursing agency). And don’t stop the moment you encounter some resistance from the medical establishment — and you likely will encounter it, so brace yourself.

Someone needs to be out there picketing and otherwise publicly embarrassing the agency itself and getting reporters involved in that — putting out newspaper articles that don’t call Minna’s credibility into question or confuse the issues. Someone else needs to be going to the proper authorities on this and seeing if they can get any of them to do anything. I can’t do that even locally right now, let alone in Ontario, so someone, somehow, needs to take the lead in this who actually can.

Don’t take the easy way out here. Don’t find excuses not to do something if you’re capable of doing it, or to do a half-assed job if you’re capable of a… whole-assed(?) one. Don’t let Minna die. And if she does die, don’t let up on the agencies that ultimately caused it by neglecting her when she needed them the most, find some way of holding them accountable.

Holiday “joy”, and assorted communication stuff.

I am starting to wonder whether disabled people who happen to depend on paid staff for everyday tasks have a very different conception of assorted (secular and religious) holidays than other people do.

I’ve had a relatively new staff person and a completely new staff person this week, which has meant not only a lot of important things not getting done, but also a lot of things that are important for them not to happen keep happening. Meanwhile, my friend has had no staff at all some days and completely new ones for very short periods of time other days.

Which is probably why I’ve ended up mildly dehydrated and both of us have ended up pretty exhausted.

Meanwhile, of course, there’s other things going on. My dog has a UTI. I went to the pain clinic only to get poked and prodded around the neck area and made to turn my head in such a way that, whatever combined effects those had, I ended up vomiting, a lot, a few minutes later, and being queasy the rest of the day. My communication device’s USB port finally completely broke, and the loaner the company had been claiming to be about to send me since sometime in November still hasn’t arrived, nor do any staff people know about that since none of the ones who were here this week were around in November.

But there’s sort of a point to this besides whining. Seriously. ;-)

I’m not sure that a lot of people fully get the point that despite a working communication system, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to tell everyone what’s wrong at the moment they need to know it. I might not even be able to make it over to the $30ish computer I got for everyone to leave notes and scheduling information for each other on.

There are projects that have been supposed to happen starting since the day I got services here. They haven’t happened. I don’t know why. I do know that repeating myself about them occasionally doesn’t seem to do much. I’m told people are “working on” them. I haven’t seen the finished product.

I’m supposed to get a handicapped parking placard. Been supposed to for years. Even that, which is simple as projects go, hasn’t happened. Despite the fact that everyone on my support team has strong incentive for it to happen, especially in the winter with the chair and so forth.

I guess I’m not a very good nag. Especially when I find myself only able to communicate things to the people around me that don’t necessarily have to do with everything I need to communicate. There’s this weird assumption going around that if someone really needs to say something, it’ll get said, if they have the means to say it.

I don’t work that way. I have a long medical history, noted in my records (often by the staff who’ve had to deal with the firsthand results), the worst parts of which often result from me not working that way. Which reminds me, several medical professionals in about three different disciplines have been telling me I ought to consult with a surgeon soon. (I have this weird image of pulmonologists sitting around telling gastroenterologists something like, “Do something to keep ‘your’ fluids out of ‘my’ lungs.” I know it doesn’t work that way, but for whatever reason I find it sort of amusing to see people in various specialties as owning assorted sorts of body parts.) But I think everyone thinks it’s someone else who’s going to write the referral, and I haven’t been asking (in part because too much else has been going wrong and for a fairly large part of this month I wasn’t even usually awake). And then when I do talk to that doctor, all possibilities (whether having surgery or not having surgery) are somewhat scary and I’ll have to actually make decisions.

But it’s not even just medical stuff, it’s everyday stuff. I just don’t say it. Can’t always say it. And there’s so much of it. Sometimes the sheer amount of stuff I’ve got to say is the reason I can’t say it. Sometimes it’s the fact that if I told one part of it they’d do the wrong thing and I don’t have the energy to tell them how to do it right. There’s just a lot of stuff not getting done and very little of it that I can communicate about. It’s not that I’m not trying, either. It’s just there’s so much of it. I remember a staff person who got to know me really, really well, who just assumed that (where I lived before) when she left the house I got up and did a lot of stuff. She had no idea that I sat around in one place most of the time, and that this was the reason she would leave when I was in that spot and come back to find me in that spot, despite me having a need and desire to get up for a wide variety of reasons. (She did find out when I turned up with dehydration eventually and she asked a few questions that elicited the answer.)

Ideally eventually everyone will know it or a large portion of it. It’s just amazing to me how haphazard this process is. It turns out I’m some sort of strange beast the agencies haven’t encountered much: I am my own guardian, I communicate for myself, I receive their services, I’m classified by their testing system as severely disabled, and I have no clue how to tell them all this stuff that they normally hear either from their clients or their guardians. Usually, at least ideally, there’s supposed to be some other person pointing out what’s needed, but there’s nobody like that for me. My parents are across the country. I’ve got one friend here who has enough trouble directing her own services. I end up reading assorted manuals designed for everything from physically disabled people hiring their own support staff to parents of disabled adults trying to set up assorted support programs, trying to find something that would contain the lists of stuff that needs to get done around here. Sometimes I find stuff and sometimes I don’t, but nothing fully covers it. So in the meanwhile I just keep getting told how strange I am (first words out of one case manager’s mouth was “Our team (the one for people without roommates) doesn’t deal with people with this many needs this often”, and I spent the rest of the time he was my case manager trying to keep him from forcing a roommate or worse on me.)

Somehow there has to be something that can provoke the list of answers that would allow me to say what needs to get done around here (beyond the checklist assorted staff have already developed on their own). But so far I have not found it. And none of this situation seems fair to either me or to people who have to work for me (but who aren’t told much if anything, and of course with funding this low are not allowed to “shadow” other staff for very long before starting). There also needs to be some central point for information, and so far that’s only partway accomplished (and large, large pieces of it have not even been started, nor am I sure they ever will be unless something changes).

The difference between what’s normal for someone and what isn’t.

I remember being confused about something that happened during my first Autreat.

After Autreat, someone was talking about how surprised she was to see a particular person having a particular kind of trouble. (I’m being vague on purpose, the kind isn’t all that important and the people involved probably want to be anonymous.) I was surprised how focused she was on this, given that lots of people there (including me) had the same kind of trouble and she did not seem alarmed that the rest of us did. I asked her about it but she hemmed and hawed more than she gave an actual answer.

I eventually got an answer from a friend of hers that was more blunt: “Nobody looking at you expected you to be high-functioning enough not to have that trouble anyway.”

Oh. (Keep in mind at that point I regarded myself as being, and looking, extremely “high functioning”, and believed in functioning levels. This was awhile ago. But, more to the point, I didn’t always have that trouble to the extent that I had it after flying across the country, especially after getting stranded between flights.)

Today a guy came over who works for the nighttime emergency service I use in lieu of a roommate. Normally, they’re sent over here for bad situations. Often I’m some combination of very ill, in pain, and immobile. Apparently there’s some mandatory part of the program that involves them coming out and meeting us on an ordinary day periodically. And I’m beginning to see why.

Someone who mainly sees me during emergencies is going to have a much different understanding of what my baseline abilities are, than someone who sees me on an ordinary day. In fact, a person who doesn’t know me well could easily mistake the way I’m doing on a bad day, for the usual, and thus not really worry even if I’m showing clear signs of something being incredibly wrong.

This isn’t just true in medical situations, either. People who worked for this agency have disregarded signs of emotional stress on my part before because their presence caused me enough stress that they never saw me un-stressed. When my friend had to explain to them that normally I’m a fairly animated person and don’t sit meekly in a corner saying yes to everything unless I’m terrified out of my mind, they had trouble believing her.

So it actually seems like a really good idea to have people get familiar with what someone is usually like, even if what they’re normally going to be dealing with is emergencies. That way, they can tell the difference between something being wrong and something being normal for that person.

(BTW, the recent absence of posting is because I’m working on a video about my cat, and cats take a lot of time to film, at least in the contexts I’m trying to film her in.)