Cylindrical Nostalgia

 

I have received the above photo from a brother HP who thought I'd like it, and he was totally correct. It shows a porter's hand opening the valve on a gas cylinder. The cylinder is F-size, about four feet long and weighing thirty pounds or so; and it contains pure oxygen. My guess is that it on a static installation for use in a ward, clinic or other department. Some large hospitals have a mains supply of some medical gases. They are piped all over the site from a large storage facility in the industrial block; the JRH was one of them. Smaller hospitals usually have their own departmental static supply and the cylinders have therefore to be changed regularly by we, the porters. Changing the cylinders is not difficult and we can learn it in a few minutes; but, like all portering skills, it takes longer to perfect. The regulator has a washer on it called a bodox seal and you have to be careful it doesn't stick to the cylinder valve. Once there it will be taken away with the empty cylinder. Many have been lost that way and a regulator without a bodox will just leak so much it is useless. As it is, very few seals are perfect, so don't worry if it makes a very slight hissing sound. If you fiddle with it a bit the hiss usually goes away. If it doesn't and the device is not in use, shut the valve. When you open the valve you should hear the gas flow into the regulator and even feel it vibrate. It's a very satisfying ASMR feeling actually. We used to crack the valve briefly before attaching it to blow out the dust and excess lubrication oil, but this was not common practice. The regulator has on it a pressure gauge that tells you how much gas is in the cylinder. Some of them also have a flowmeter, but not all, especially on portables and vehicle supply because they get broken easily. I knew an old senior who boasted he could read the pressure in a cylinder just by its weight. It's true that compressed gas does weigh something, but I didn't believe him; or at least I tried it and it didn't work. What's interesting about this photo is the porter is using a very old type of gas spanner, a big cast iron one that also has a built in lever for twisting very stiff attachment bolts. It has two heads, for F and G-size valves. They're a bit too heavy to carry around and so I only went and picked one up from the lodge as and when required. Thanks very much to my HPing online contact for this little taste of cylindrical nostalgia.

Hospice Exorcist

 

This article is adapted from one posted on HPANWO Voice.
Hospitals are some of the most likely places to be haunted. Parapsychologists often say this is because the huge amount of fear, pain and death within their walls generates a psychic energetic atmosphere more conducive to ghosts. I've covered this possibility many times over the years, inspired by my own twenty-three years of service as a hospital porter, see the links below. Over the years there have been many news stories that have proved my point, but this latest one really takes the biscuit. Staff at a hospice in Norwich have been so troubled by ghostly phenomena that they have arranged to have the building exorcised. A hospice is a hospital that provides palliative care, treatment for those who are terminally ill; painkillers, other procedures to ease symptoms and generate a calm and caring environment. This does not include euthanasia in my country. The Priscilla Bacon Lodge is part of the Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust and so is a serious mainstream public institution. Exorcism is the spiritual practice of healing a person or place said to be possessed by a malevolent supernatural entity. It was popularized by the famous 1973 horror movie The Exorcist. Management at the hospice say there are concerns about "paranormal incidents" especially regular sighting of a young girl in a red dress who seems to be a phantom. According to leaked emails, Priscilla Bacon Lodge has been writing to the local bishop asking for advice and help from a "deliverance" team. The hospice's chaplain will join them in carrying out a blessing of the building to expel whatever darkness lurks within. Source: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nhs-exorcist-hospice-ghosts-b1268691.html. This will certainly not be as dramatic as the film. Hopefully no spinning heads or projectile vomiting. I hope it works. The cause of all this paranormal activity could be nothing to do with the building itself, but its location. It was erected on the site of a children's hospital which was demolished and its facilities moved to a new campus. No wonder the ghost seen there is of a child. What really surprises me, knowing how the NHS works from the inside, is how the management are acting openly and straightforwardly on this very unusual matter. I'm truly surprised they would risk it. I can't imagine any of the office wallahs who paths I crossed thinking in those terms. They would just put their hands over their ears and sack the person who brought the matter to their attention. Sadly, as regular readers will know, in today's healthcare world a service provider can be discharged for so much as breathing at the wrong volume; and the higher up the hierarchy you are, of course, the easier it is to get rid of you. I definitely never reported any ghosts to my bosses, and would probably not have done even if I'd seen any. The fact that the admin at the Priscilla Bacon Lodge are risking that fate means that something serious and immediate must be going on. The paranormal unrest must be considerable. When the media asked further questions about what staff and patients had witnessed the trust declined to comment. Finally, if HPWA readers are at all interested in palliative medicine and its spooky elements then I definitely recommend "Hospice Nurse Julie" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hospicenursejulie.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/01/ghost-of-hp.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2021/12/hospital-pm-scares.html.

Twopence a Bag

Last week on The Gas Spanner I had a special feature to mark my fourteenth "sackiversary", fourteen years since I was thrown out of the Hospital Portering Service. In the show I brought up the strange experience of a song running over and over in my head as I walked up to the hospital on my final day as a serving OxRad porter. The song on a continuous loop in my mental playlist was Feed The Birds, from the musical Mary Poppins. This is a famous 1964 Disney film that skilfully and stylishly mixes live action with animation. It has been adapted into books, stage shows and radio plays etc. It tells the story of two London schoolchildren, Jane and Michael, who have parents who are emotionally neglectful. One day a new nanny comes to look after them and it turns out she is a benign supernatural being with magical powers, played by Julie Andrews. One day Mary Poppins sings the children a lullaby about an old lady who sells birdseed outside St Paul's Cathedral and the following day, when the children's father takes the children to open an account at the Bank of England, they see her. Here is the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHrRxQVUFN4. Their father, Mr Banks, is scornful about her and insists that the children take the twopence they were going to buy the birdfeed with and instead deposit it in their new bank accounts. The bankers join him in trying to persuade them and they sing this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxyB29bDbBA. The children are therefore faced with a choice, to spend their money on something spiritual or on something materialistic. The children decide to stand by the inspiration they received from Mary Poppins. That is essentially an act of faith. I felt that same self-assurance. I describe my experience in detail in the Spanner show and its accompanying article, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/01/thirteen-years-on.html and: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-gas-spanner-programme-145_18.html.

Literally a few hours later, as I was walking to work the following morning. I saw something lying on the ground, just on the pavement in front of me. I picked it up; it was a two pence piece, see the illustration above; I show both faces of the coin. This felt connected and symbolic. I occasionally find money abandoned like this. People regularly drop coins accidentally and either fail to notice or can't be bothered to pick them up. These are almost always coppers or five P's; anything more valuable and people will generally make the effort to retrieve the lost coinage. A skeptic will, of course, say what happened was just a coincidence; and, to be fair, I can't completely prove them wrong, but if you look below at the details in my studies on synchronicity you'll understand how, in my view, coincidence theory falls short. The number of times I find coins lying on the ground is maybe once a year or less. There's about a one-third chance that they are two P's. How likely is it that I should find two pence lying on the ground just after presenting a radio show about the "twopence a bag" song and its significance to my life? I'll hear mumblings from the skeppers about "P-values" and "Bayesian inference", but nothing really makes sense to me except this was some kind of good omen, a portent, a subtle nudge from the powers of reality. I've had quite a few of them related to my sacking. This is not spoon-feeding me; the power wants me to be independent and exercise my free will, but it is saying: "Don't worry. I am here. I am watching out for you." Dr Joe Dispenza put it very well in the film What the Bleep Do We Know? when he explained how he communicates with this power; call it praying to God if you like: "https://youtu.be/_G5JilcIaLI?si=Fh7YpDUyHAFpwD_G&t=5311". I hope my fellow HP's, and indeed anybody else who reads this, finds hope from what happened to me. I knew I would have to share this with you.

See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/07/jackies-synchro.html.

And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/01/dont-give-up.html.

And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/05/more-synchronicity.html.

And: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/skeptics-portal.html.

Reprimanded for Writing Stories

 

Today, not long after my fourteenth "sackiversary", I've come across a case of attempted dismissal which is possibly even crazier and unjust than my own. A nurse has been facing discharge and deregistration, being banned from working as a nurse in the UK for the rest of her life, for writing stories. The actual charges includes one in which the author, Kathleen Pugh, "advertised" her literature in the course of her job and sold her book, a short story anthology called Aristocracy or Not, to other staff members and patients; she was allegedly observed putting up posters for the book at her clinic. However I suspect that this is an embellishment; it's more likely she sold the books to willing patients after getting into a discussion about the subject with them. I'm an author too, see: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2016/08/roswell-rising-is-here.html, and know that when I bring that subject up, people are often curious and ask me more about it. I've made a few book sales that way and I don't apologize for it. Besides, the conclusion of the disciplinary investigation was that the subject matter of the story itself was their main cause for concern. So they're not trying to hide it. There is a parallel with this lady's plight in the past because of Robin Cook the American author who has written dozens of medical thrillers involving themes of organ snatching, human experimentation, necrophilia, neurological mind-control, pandemics, murderous and corrupt medical organizations and many other frightening subjects. Like Kathleen Pugh's story, Cook's novels contain explicit sex and violence and are intended for a purely adult readership. He's an extremely influential writer, has had several of his books turned into films and has inspired other authors like Tess Gerritsen and Michael Creighton. Yet Dr Robin Cook is also a practicing physician. During the height of his career, in the 1970's and 80's, there was never any question that he was a writer on one hand and a doctor on the other and that he could effectively do both. Nobody was concerned that his fictional settings mirrored his own medical activities; why? Because they were just stories... Duh! Source: https://www.oldham-chronicle.co.uk/news-features/8/news-headlines/74799/nurse-and-her-steamy-novel-a-cautionary-tale.

The world has definitely changed. As I've explained with Robin Cook, a few short years ago it would be unthinkable to persecute a person through their employment for simply writing fictional stories, but now it's completely acceptable. The patients who bought Kathleen Pugh's book probably didn't think twice about complaining about her, if indeed they did. You'd think that Kathleen Pugh had written a real description of something she herself had really done and forced the book onto their shelf, deaf to their protests. The authoritarianism of the modern NHS has crept up on us so slowly that we haven't even noticed it. We're still "free", technically; but there are so many strings attached to our freedom and so many hoops to jump through to get it, that a lot of people will simply give up on it. It's particularly revealing that this nurse has been slated for an act of artistic creativity; it's almost punishment for that very act in itself. We're not allowed to be creative. We're only machines after all, designed to do a job for the state we live in. This is why it is vital that we defend our rights to be creative and have free expression in our creations. What I most object to in the media coverage of this incident is the normalization. It's terrible that the news article includes the words "a cautionary tale" in its title. It's almost like it's about a man who goes swimming in a dangerous river or something and drowns. The risk of persecution by authority for doing nothing wrong is regarded like that, a morally neutral force of nature; and that it's perfectly reasonable to warm people not to mess with it. Like Kathleen Pugh I was also once a health care provider who was stripped of that calling because of activities in my off-duty life in suspicious circumstances, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/01/thirteen-years-on.html. I wish her luck with her writing career. And who was it who said: "The only bad publicity is no publicity"? The source article, even though it supports the establishment position and is pretty disparaging of her, will spread her name across the land and hopefully get her a big pile of purchases.

Breaking Bad Art Gallery

                                          

The "main street", a large corridor that runs through the public area of hospitals, is often used for purposes auxiliary to the core medical mission of the institution. At Oxford's John Radcliffe, at the main street on Level 2, just inside the JRII main entrance, there has long been a public art gallery. It is officially called The Corridor Gallery, although it is in fact just a stretch of wall. The artworks often have a medical theme, although not always. The artists also decorate other parts of the unit. One recent exhibition is rather unusual; it appears to be based on the TV series Breaking Bad. This American serial has become one of the most popular and highly-acclaimed TV productions in history. It's a drama that mixes familial relationship and friendship with the conflict themes of the old Wild West. It centres on a school chemistry teacher called Walter White who is afflicted by a fatal disease. He dedicates the end of his life to securing his family's financial security, but in doing so resorts to organized crime. He uses his knowledge to produce synthetic narcotics. The paintings are not disturbing, in fact they are quite benign and even stylish. They are a form of still life. Their tone is what you'd need to show in a hospital. The artist, Claire Venables, is from Oxford and she sells prints and cards etc if you're interested, see: https://clairevenables.co.uk. These photos were taken for me by one of my "men on the inside". As always, I have protected his identity by sanitizing these images of all metadata, like I did previously, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/12/jumpers-update.html. I had not heard of Breaking Bad until I was introduced to it by my friend from Newbury "AnotherBlonde", see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-secrets-of-newbury-2.html.

MRI Deaths

 

Most modern hospitals these days have a magnetic resonance imaging facility. MRI is an alternative to computed tomography X-ray scanning and is better in many ways because it does not involve an ionizing radiation dose and it provides better quality images of some tissues. It works by causing the nuclear particles of atoms to spin and give off a radio signal that can be picked up by a special antenna. It's more stressful for the patient though. MRI's make a loud rattling noise and the patient has to wear earplugs. They have their whole body inserted into a narrow tubular space inside the machine which is a bit claustrophobic. MRI scanners are very expensive; each one costing up to a million pounds. Despite their health benefits, they have their own dangers. The magnetic field generated by the system is incredibly powerful, four to five teslas, sometimes more. This can cause injury if a person has a medical implant or jewellery on. It can also damage electronics, machinery and clockwork, in a wristwatch for example. All magnetic objects, metallic primarily, have to be kept away from the scanner.  Sadly there have been some accidents. I have found two. Michael Colombini was aged just six when he was taken into the MRI chamber for a scan. When the machine was activated a steel oxygen cylinder was attracted to the coil and flew across the chamber, striking the boy's head. Michael, of Croton-on-Hudson, New York USA, was killed. The hospital accepted full responsibility, but the hospital consists of many different disciplines, including portering. Were some more to blame than others? Well, the transportation and installation of medical gases is the job of the porters. It is our duty to make sure the cylinders are moved safely and attached to their regulators correctly. In an MRI chamber no cylinder should be left because they are made of metal. Gas comes from a mains supply via a non-magnetic pipe. So in this instance, it may well be the HP's fault. However, blame can rarely be assigned to one person. Who trained them? Were they trained correctly? Is the radiographer supposed to double-check the chamber before scanning commences etc? However; it was clearly at least partly a porter's fault. Source: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/hospital-horror-boy-6-killed-35605165.

In the case of the second accident, a Mr Keith McAllister entered the chamber after his wife, Adrienne, called for help. This was during the scan when he was not authorized to do so. The sixty-one year old was wearing a weight training chain around his neck... God knows why! The magnetic field dragged him into the machine by this chain causing him lethal injuries. Source: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/man-dragged-death-mri-scanner-35601685. Ironically this happened just two days previously at the Nassau Open Hospital on Long Island, New York; quite close to the Westchester Medical Centre in Valhalla, NY, the one Michael Colombini was at. No porter can be blamed for that. I'm not sure it's the fault of any staff member. Mostly likely it was simply misadventure on the part of Mr McAllister. The relatives of both he and young Michael have my deepest sympathies. Bad things happen in hospitals, some of the worst things you can imagine. Some of that is the truthful inevitability of healthcare, other times they are mishaps. It seems to be standard practice to try and blame HP's as much as possible; as the saying goes: "shit rolls downhill". We HP's are not blameless angels. We get things wrong and we even commit evil deeds, but sometimes you simply have to be fair and admit that the porters are innocent.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2017/08/lift-accident-porters-not-to-blame.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/12/jumpers-update.html.

Bad News

 

See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2021/11/guess-what.html.
With great regret I am compelled to bring you this unsettling update. I recently got into a conversation with somebody I know online. He is an Englishman called Troy who lives in Portugal; he is married to a native woman. Although I have never met him, I have been interacting with him for a long time and consider him to be an honest person. He is calm, rational, intelligent and friendly. He is a fairly well-known author, publisher and commentator who keeps a regular and detailed blog. I commented under an article he wrote about David Fuller, mentioning my feelings of relief that he was employed as an electrician in the PM suite and was never a porter. My acquaintance then informed me that he was. This was quite a shock to me; this was never reported in the media. Troy then explained how his mother had been a nurse at the one of the Royal Tunbridge Wells hospitals and knew him. She described him as "extremely odd and creepy". I have no reason to disbelieve Troy. Source: https://troysouthgate.substack.com/p/the-beasts-of-tunbridge-wells. This is of course sad news. I hate to think of a HP committing such horrific crimes, but I have to remind myself; we HP's are not angels. I have tried to publish an honest and disinterested assessment of our general moral character and it does indeed often fall short of what I'd like. I've experienced this personally, although never quite to the depths David Fuller plumbed; for example see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/12/hps-and-psychos.html and: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2020/12/oxford-grooming-gang.html. I regret having to inform MEP&DB&SP's of this uncomfortable fact, but I have a duty to. David Fuller is serving his sentence at HMP Frankland, a Category A men's prison. Among the inmates is also Wayne Couzens, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/07/sarah-everard-update.html. The gaol is nicknamed "monster mansion" because it houses some of Britain's most infamous criminals. We can only hope the less revolting among them offer David Fuller a "traditional prison welcome".