It has been revealed that the government are making plans to
force NHS frontline staff to take the COVID 19 vaccine. The trades union have,
for once in their lives, actually made a stand about something real and
important instead of bleating on about "EEEEEEEEEvil white men!" etc.
Christina McAnea, the current head of Unison, the union I was a member of,
said: "Forced vaccinations are the
wrong way to go and send out a sinister and worrying message," Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/03/unions-attack-sinister-plan-to-force-nhs-staff-to-have-covid-vaccine.
Sinister and worrying indeed! Having some vaccinations is a part of normal NHS
duties. When I joined hospital portering I was obliged to have some vaccines
not normally available to the general public, for instance Hepatitis B. However
in 2009 when the swine flu outbreak happened I chose not to have the optional
vaccine. This was because of the information presented by the late great Ian R
Crane, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuV_buIBCg0.
For pro-vaccinators, the question of whether to use legal force is hotly
disputed. Even the very pro-establishment Ben Goldacre is against it, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/03/bad-science-by-ben-goldacre_25.html.
However, Dr Paul Offit is in favour of total tyrannical coercion, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2015/04/vaccinate-or-else.html.
He is an American, but is always poking his nose into other countries trying to
make their governments do his will. An NHS serviceman who refuses the
compulsory vaccine schedule can face disciplinary action up to and including
discharge. However, if large numbers of health workers refuse in an organized
manner then management can do nothing in response; they can't sack everybody!
It looks as if the unions will support them. It's a healthy sign. Although I am
no longer personally involved anymore, I will be one hundred percent behind
them.
Saturday, 6 March 2021
Tuesday, 2 February 2021
I Lost my Temper
I'm generally regarded by others as a tranquil and
self-possessed person, and I am most of the time. However, I am no weakling and
I will act with force under some circumstances. Those who underestimate me
always end up regretting it. A few months ago I discovered a new trigger.
Predictably it is connected to one of my greatest passions; the Hospital
Portering Service. I sometimes take lunch breaks from work in a small cafe near
my main area of employment. On those days I sit for three quarters of an hour
or so reading and sipping coffee. However, the other month when I was there a man
walked in wearing a hospital porter's uniform, at least he had on the familiar light
blue polo shirt with the word "PORTER" and the OxRad motif on it. I
think his trousers were his own, unless the issue has changed since my
departure. I had seen this man a few times before in the cafe and never before
wondered if he were a hospital porter. I always boast that I can spot a
hospital porter from ten paces. The fact that this man had, apparently, been one
and I never noticed didn't bother me; I just assumed that my por-dar had become
a little rusty over the years. I went up to him and began a conversation,
introducing myself as a former John Radcliffe porter. He shrugged and said:
"I'm not a porter, mate. I'm just wearing this. My cousin is a porter and I
borrowed it off him." Something inside me snapped. A lot of emotion that
had been frozen inside me suddenly thawed and boiled to steam. The following is
not a verbatim transcript of our conversation; I recall swearing an awful lot
more. I replied: "How can you wear that if you're not a porter!? Don't you
know what that uniform means!? It's not just a piece of clothing! It's a symbol
for what porters do!"
He recoiled from me and shrugged: "Come on, mate. It's no big deal."
"It is a big deal!" I retorted. "The men who wear that uniform dedicate their lives to keeping you safe and healthy! Keeping you secure knowing there's an ambulance and a hospital with the best care in the world one phone-call away! You are insulting them and disrespecting their mission! You're a disgrace! We porters have earned the right to wear that! YOU HAVE NOT!"
He tried to protest. "That's a bit over the top, mate; ain't it?" he chuckled.
But I carried on: "Porters dedicate their lives to what they do and sometimes lose their lives!" Today I think specifically of Elbert and Oscar, two OxRad porters who passed away from Covid 19, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2020/04/ive-lost-two-brothers.html. In fact even without the coronavirus, the life expectancy of hospital porters is worryingly low. No formal statistical or causal research has been carried out, in fact probably nobody cares except us; but I have attended many a funeral over the years of porters who died in middle age. We also take these risks and commit to our service with a miniscule financial reward and very little public appreciation, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/10/an-open-letter-to-richard-dawkins.html. I shouted at the man: "I have lost friends who wore that uniform on the day they died!" I commanded him to take it off. He had nothing else to wear so I was being pretty unrealistic, but I was too angry to think straight. He refused. I shouted: "Take it off now or we'll step outside and I'll take it off for you!"
At this point the cafe servers intervened and warned me to calm down. I realized that I had gone too far so I stormed out into the street and walked away. I have not been back to that cafe since then and I assume I'm barred.
Did I do the right thing? I'll leave that for the reader to decide. It was actually not a question that has crossed my mind because I was acting purely on instinct, not logic. It is possible that on another occasion I would have engaged in the exact same situation and reacted differently. I would have most certainly been angry no matter what, but I would perhaps have expressed my ire in a more controlled manner. On reflection I feel a sense of calm following the emotional storm that swept through me. I have no regrets and if I see that man again I will definitely not apologize. He owes me an apology actually, and all hospital porters as well, for insulting our uniform and all those who wear it. If he had his own trousers on then he wasn't even wearing it properly! Hopefully the next time our paths cross he will be differently attired.
He recoiled from me and shrugged: "Come on, mate. It's no big deal."
"It is a big deal!" I retorted. "The men who wear that uniform dedicate their lives to keeping you safe and healthy! Keeping you secure knowing there's an ambulance and a hospital with the best care in the world one phone-call away! You are insulting them and disrespecting their mission! You're a disgrace! We porters have earned the right to wear that! YOU HAVE NOT!"
He tried to protest. "That's a bit over the top, mate; ain't it?" he chuckled.
But I carried on: "Porters dedicate their lives to what they do and sometimes lose their lives!" Today I think specifically of Elbert and Oscar, two OxRad porters who passed away from Covid 19, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2020/04/ive-lost-two-brothers.html. In fact even without the coronavirus, the life expectancy of hospital porters is worryingly low. No formal statistical or causal research has been carried out, in fact probably nobody cares except us; but I have attended many a funeral over the years of porters who died in middle age. We also take these risks and commit to our service with a miniscule financial reward and very little public appreciation, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/10/an-open-letter-to-richard-dawkins.html. I shouted at the man: "I have lost friends who wore that uniform on the day they died!" I commanded him to take it off. He had nothing else to wear so I was being pretty unrealistic, but I was too angry to think straight. He refused. I shouted: "Take it off now or we'll step outside and I'll take it off for you!"
At this point the cafe servers intervened and warned me to calm down. I realized that I had gone too far so I stormed out into the street and walked away. I have not been back to that cafe since then and I assume I'm barred.
Did I do the right thing? I'll leave that for the reader to decide. It was actually not a question that has crossed my mind because I was acting purely on instinct, not logic. It is possible that on another occasion I would have engaged in the exact same situation and reacted differently. I would have most certainly been angry no matter what, but I would perhaps have expressed my ire in a more controlled manner. On reflection I feel a sense of calm following the emotional storm that swept through me. I have no regrets and if I see that man again I will definitely not apologize. He owes me an apology actually, and all hospital porters as well, for insulting our uniform and all those who wear it. If he had his own trousers on then he wasn't even wearing it properly! Hopefully the next time our paths cross he will be differently attired.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
Return to Oz
The Festive Season is a time for films on TV. One of the
great holiday favourites is the classic fantasy, The Wizard of Oz; however it had a less famous sequel made in 1985
called Return to Oz. This second film
is very different in many ways to the original. It is not a musical and has a
much darker tone. It has some excellent special effects. It is set a few months after the original, following
Dorothy's return to Kansas from
the Land of Oz. She is obsessed with her experience in the magical kingdom and
badly misses the friends she made there, the Scarecrow, the Tim Woodman and the
Cowardly Lion. Her parents start to worry about Dorothy's mental health. They
dismiss her ravings as hysteria and are concerned that she cannot forget what
they believe was nothing but a hallucination when she received a head injury
during the tornado. They decide to take her to a doctor specializing in electrical
brain stimulation. For a brief period during the turn of the twentieth century,
doctors believed EBS could cure mental illnesses. What it did instead was make
the patients worse by causing brain damage, like it did to the Aston character
in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. The
supposed hospital Dorothy is taken to looks like Dracula's castle and the
matron wears a dark vampiric dress. The first two people she meets are a pair
of porters pushing a trolley onto which she is secured with leather straps like
a prisoner for execution. It's an extremely disturbing scene and obviously
terrifying for Dorothy, who is played by a pre-teen Fairuza Balk, which is odd
seeing as Judy Garland in the original is clearly a good few years older, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EXoqJKE6Eg.
To cut a long story short, Dorothy escapes and ends up back in the Land of Oz.
As with The Wizard of
Oz, a lot of Dorothy's experiences in Return
to Oz, as well as the characters she interacts with, are seemingly
connected to her original life in Kansas ;
and so the possibility is never eliminated that her adventure really is all
just a dream, something purely internal to her imagination. She reaches the Emerald
City to find it in ruins. It has
been sacked by the evil "Nome King" and the protagonists from the
original film have been imprisoned. The ruins of the city are patrolled by
"the Wheelers", a group of strange four legged humanoids with wheels
instead of feet. It is clear that these are based on the porters Dorothy encountered
at the hospital. Their locomotion even makes the same squeaking sounds that the
un-oiled wheels of the porters' trolley did; and they are played by the same
actors, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM0RFE3QGAU.
Could this be an example I could add to my article Hospital Porters in the Media? In that case it is our strangest
portrayal as all. We begin as ghoulish assistants in an electrical brain
torturing facility and turn into freaky four-wheeled evil clowns. I'm not sure
what the implication is.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/12/hospital-porters-in-media.html.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/12/hospital-porters-in-media.html.
Wednesday, 16 December 2020
Oxford Grooming Gang
This article is partly a follow-on to this one: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2020/11/gosh-porter-admits-child-abuse.html.
The details of the "grooming gang" scandal are slowly coming out bit
by bit. The Home Office has just released a major report. The true scale,
horror and longevity of this syndrome of crimes are almost too terrible to
describe. I will not even post links to news stories about it. One of the
branches of this conspiracy of evil was in Oxford .
It was not only an act of child abuse and sexual violence; it was an outburst
of racial hatred and religious supremacy. Some of the victims were black, Hindu
or Sikh, but the vast majority were white. What makes it all the more galling
is that the authorities whose duty it was to protect these young girls tacitly
collaborated with it simply because they couldn't endure being called
"racists!" What I personally find very difficult to deal with is that
some of the twenty-two men were hospital porters. I served alongside them as a brother
porter. I will not name them. Like Paul Farrell, they are no longer hospital
porters and I reject and despise them forever.
Saturday, 28 November 2020
GOSH Porter admits Child Abuse
The hospital portering service has done so many wonderful
things. We have changed the world! See here for details: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/07/hospital-porters-who-changed-world.html.
However, we are not a separate species. We are human beings in uniform. There
are evil people in the Hospital Portering Service, terribly destructive people;
people I believe are demonically possessed. I've known one or two... Another
is, of course, Jimmy Savile, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/02/jimmy-savile-nhs-knew.html.
One such person has just brought shame on the Hospital Portering Service. Paul
Farrell was a porter at the world famous Great
Ormond Street Hospital ,
a dedicated children's hospital in London
that has cared for the youngest members of society since 1852. He pleaded
guilty to fifty-eight sexual offences against children carried out between 1985
and 2020. One of his victims is now aged forty-three. This was a
multi-generational reign of terror. The sad and frustrating thing is that the
civilian staff at GOSH will henceforth inevitably regard Farrell's crimes as a
part of something related to the nature of all porters and/or hospital
portering in general. The same is never the case when it comes to one of their
own. Hospital civilians who commit crimes, even the worst crimes of all, are
shrugged off as "a few bad apples!"; for example see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/05/killer-nurses.html.
It's a horrific thing when young people enter hospital for help and healing,
and only suffer exploitation and abuse. I said a long time ago: "once a
hospital porter, always a hospital porter". In the case of Mr Farrell I
make an exception. Like Jimmy Savile, he is no longer one of us.
Tuesday, 13 October 2020
Porter's NDE
24 Hours in A&E
is a long running hospital documentary on Channel 4. In their recent series
they featured a porter called Jeremain. Jeremain serves at Kings
College Hospital
in Camberwell, London and the
programme follows him on a few jobs which include "POV" shots where
the camera shows us what he would see as he manoeuvres patient transport
vehicles along the corridors. He's a cheerful kind of porter who sings to himself
while he works. He originally comes from the Cayman Islands
and in his youth was very keen on fast cars. He once drove a sports car round a
corner at ninety miles per hour... something you could never do with a patient
trolley; and the car left the road and overturned. In that terrible moment,
Jeremain thought he was about to die. Then he saw a big white light shaped like
a triangle. He felt that it was God intervening to save him, telling him that
it was too soon for him to die and that God had made divine plans for what Jeremain
had to do with his life. Based on the duty Jeremain is performing now, I cannot
disagree. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUbU2sbfeDE.
An increasing number of people have been reporting experiences similar to that
of MEP&DBP Jeremain. Most of these are in hospital and the reason they have
become more common is medical technology. Before modern resuscitation
techniques, once a patient's heart stopped they were generally declared dead
straight away. Today there are ways of restarting their heart which are
sometimes successful, allowing for the first time in history, people to
continue their lives able to describe the experience of beginning to die. Their
stories are incredible. They talk about visiting a heavenly realm and meeting
with God. Sometimes dead friends and relatives commune with them. Occasionally
this happens outside hospital with people who are seriously hurt, but not at immediately
death's door, like MEP&DBP Jeremain. I'm glad he managed to be featured in
this series and tell his story. It is good to see hospital portering portrayed
respectfully by the media.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/return-from-dead.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/10/proof-of-life-after-death.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/11/consciousness-beyond-individual.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/11/near-death-experience-proved-true.html.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/return-from-dead.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/10/proof-of-life-after-death.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/11/consciousness-beyond-individual.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/11/near-death-experience-proved-true.html.
Monday, 31 August 2020
COVID 19 Whistleblower
A video has been currently circulating produced by a
healthworker called Louise Hampton. She is employed by a contractor called Care
UK and reports
that her hospital was very quiet during the COVID 19 pandemic. This tallies
with what I myself have heard from insiders I am still in touch with. She was
awarded a certificate of merit for being part of the coronavirus response team,
but she has returned it, calling it "a certificate of bollocks!"
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWfuhe5YhY.
This was a brave thing to do because, as I know only too well, the NHS is
merciless towards whistleblowers; see the background links below. Predictably,
her Trust and contractor authorities have retaliated with typical bureaucratic
ferocity. They have placed Ms Hampton under an investigation which is eerily
similar to my own discharge from the NHS, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2013/01/one-year-on.html.
The BBC have now got on the case and their own reaction has been equally unsurprising.
They have published an article written by somebody called Shayan Sardarizadeh
from the BBC's "Anti-disinformation unit". Talk about an Orwellian
name! The article is as biased, deceptive and derogatory as the BBC's typical
output. Care UK
issued a statement: "We are aware
of this video, which we consider to be materially inaccurate in a number of
ways, and can confirm that a member of staff is subject to investigation. We
expect all our colleagues and services to support the work of the NHS in giving
the public the right information and support during the pandemic." The
article then leans on the fact that Ms Hampton is a QAnon supporter. They call
QAnon "...an unfounded rightwing conspiracy
theory that says President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satanic paedophiles
in government, business and the media known as the 'Deep State' or 'Cabal'...
(They believe) prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton will be arrested and executed." The Guardian has recently called QAnon "anti-Semitic"...
Of course they have! Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-53948820.
I salute my civilian sister for her courage and feel loathing for the
management who are persecuting her for her beliefs. I know her career is now in
jeopardy and I wish her all the best.
See here for
background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2016/08/nhs-whistblower-branded-too-honest.html.
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