Tales from Dumpsite Workers
The people working at the city dumpsite have a good idea of what is happening in the city.
Judging by what people are throwing away, they can tell what people are eating, wearing or doing to pass time. Occasionally, they will find a live infant dumped in the trash and alert the city of a mother so distressed she didn’t want to keep her baby.
I work in a hospital. My job is to see the sick — largely people that come when something is wrong. That means I see a lot of bodies and minds that aren’t working as they should.
At the bedside, we see years of slow damage that shows as a decline in health. There are a lot of failing hearts, brains that have suffered strokes or kidneys that won’t work at full capacity. We are at the end of the conveyor belt waiting to see problems when they become too obvious to ignore. For some problems, picking them up when they show is too late. Clearly, more work should be done upstream when the chance of reversing disability and preventing death has greater chance of succeeding.
Working at the bedside is working too close to the problem. It’s being on a hamster wheel that never stops spinning. There are always patients coming through the door. Being too close to the problem means you never really stop to step back and look at the big picture. You are too close to the mirror so you can’t see the reflection of everything else in the background.
The disability and slow deaths in a hospital rarely make the headlines. They don’t sound as tragic or dramatic as those from air crashes where hundreds lose their lives instantly. The numbers in the hospitals are just part of “life” even though they exceed those from sudden catastrophic accidents. It’s all a matter of perception.
