Sunday, June 19, 2022

EXCELLENT SHORT STORY BY DON ILLER ON HIS EXPERIENCE AS A TRANSIT OPERATOR AT TRIMET




This is a short story posted as a twitter thread by DON ILLER 

I'd like to tell you a story about a bus driver, mental illness, our failed healthcare system, urine, and public transit. A thread.

 A person in a ripped hoodie and green hospital scrubs got on the 8 at OHSU clutching a free ticket. They looked confused, but sat down. As we go down the hill the person asks what bus they are on, what day it is, where are they. 

Me and a kind man I picked up at the VA hospital answer her questions. She asks if she can sit next to him, he says yes. He asks her where she is coming from. "The hospital." Why were you there. "I wasn't feeling good, but they said I had to go." I'm sorry. He gets off downtown and wishes her well. 

I continue on with the route and when I get to the end of the line, I get off the bus to use the restroom. When I get back on the bus, the person in the hospital scrubs is back on the bus, squatting in the back corner, and I see a stream of liquid spraying on the floor and the unmistakable sound of someone peeing. I ask her if she's going pee, she says yes. I call dispatch. While I'm on the phone, she curls up on one of the seats in the back to fall back asleep. Dispatch tells me to do my best to get her off the bus. With the help of another operator, we convince her to get off the bus. She's off the bus, and looks confused. 

We tell her she can catch another bus over on MLK, but instead she walks toward the other driver's bus and gets on. Eventually she gets off and he shuts the door. She pounds on the door for a few minutes, shouting "Dad!"

 A car pulls up to the fast food drive through we are parked next to, and she tries getting into that car, with more yelling. At that point I leave to go get a new bus, passing people who flag me down because they were waiting for me and now have to wait 15 more min.

 I can only imagine what will happen to her, maybe the cops were called, even though they can't help her. Maybe she wandered down the road. Maybe she got on another bus and rode to another part of town. What should have happened didn't happen. She should have been cared for. She should never have been released from the hospital in the condition she was in. She needed help, she was at the hospital, the place where she should have received help, but instead was kicked to the curb. I'm guessing the emergency room personnel saw her as only an indigent person, with nothing wrong other than mental illness, something they had no intention treating her for. So off to the curb they sent her with a free bus pass so she can be someone else's problem. 

The problem is, she needs care for her mental illness. She should receive the help she needs from the hospital. She shouldn't be discharged without care. The hospital shouldn't just view her and all of us as profit, but rather as humans deserving of medical care in all its forms. It's not just OHSU either. I have picked up ill people at every hospital in Portland, people in duress, people who didn't know what planet they were on, people w/o warm clothes, but were told the hospital couldn't help them and were handed a bus pass and sent to the curb. 

Another night on the 15, I picked up a young man in tears by Good Sam on NW 23rd. He said he was sick, and scared and needed to go to the hospital but they wouldn't have him. Two security guards stood across the street, watching until he got on the bus. The guy said the guards gave him directions to Unity and it was only a 5 minute direct bus ride, a lie. He needed to transfer and had no idea where he was going. But he knew he needed help and he went to the hospital looking for it, only to get turned away. 

This is the problem with not having universal health care in this country. If the hospital can't figure out a way to make money out of you, if you're just in need of mental health care, they kick you to the curb. And once that person is kicked to the curb, who has to deal with them? Me, the bus driver, a person who is trained to drive a bus, not trained in psychology, or social work, or medicine. All I can do is be kind to people and drive a bus safely, yet I'm one the dealing with people who have been kicked to the curb and failed and rejected by the callous medical system in this country. 

It's not fair. Not fair for the people who need help for their mental illness. Not fair to me and other bus drivers. Not fair for the people who should have been on my bus but were 15 minutes late because someone used the bus as a bathroom when they should have been in the hospital. This system is sick and wrong. I'm tired of hospitals dumping who they don't want at the bus stop instead of providing them care and help, sending them away as if a bus ride could cure them. It won't, but it makes the problem disappear for them. I want to drive a bus in a country where the people are cared for when they are sick, fed when they are hungry, housed when they need shelter, and can take the bus when they need to travel, not in a country where the bus just ends up being the last line of defense.

Here  are the TriMet dispatch calls related to this incident:






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