DANGEROUS PLACES #1: MATERNITY WARD

Dangerous places are pretty obvious. Who doesn’t have a list of them.

Here in Oregon, land of the great outdoors, we have plenty of danger.

But, instead of a list picturing the grandeur and beauty of this great state, then spoiling if by saying climate change makes it all dangerous, let’s work a little harder.

Portland is on everyone’s list of dangerous places, except for the people who have lived there for generations.

Those people didn’t show up for a dream of the 90’s, or to retire rich and young and send their kids to Reed.

“Portlandia was the moment something shifted and a new kind of person started showing up in Portland, who wasn’t the same kind of hearty doer, but more of a spectator who wants to be entertained by a city,” said Carye Bye, a former Portland-based artist who donated her hand-printed cards to Portlandia. 

They wanted to be entertained but the fun stopped with the tents and drugs and weapons and the people in the tents with the drugs and weapons.

Who is entertained by street fights at a bus stop where a man punches his woman down, then pulls her away with him when he gets interrupted?

“The Portland that existed before Portlandia is completely different from the Portland that exists now,” said David Walker, a Portland writer, filmmaker, and the curator of the Portland Black Film Festival.

“Especially to long-term Portlanders, it felt manufactured. It brought people in who wanted to move here because of that.

I’ve met people who said, ‘Oh I love it here’ and ‘It’s just like the show,’ and I want to punch them in the head.”

Dangerous Labor And Delivery

The news of two shootings at Good Samaritan in NW Portland shook the city.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Word spread through an Oregon hospital last month that a visitor was causing trouble in the maternity ward, and nurses were warned the man might try to abduct his partner’s newborn.

Hours later, the visitor opened fire, killing a security guard and sending patients, nurses and doctors scrambling for cover.

Then the visitor was shot and killed.

Outsiders read that and chalk it up as another example of urban problems, a big city failure, just another day in the armpit of cesspool America.

As if Portland were located in Texas, or Florida. But it’s not, so save the armpit comparisons.

Any shooting is a horror the closer you are to it. Then it’s not another line of scroll by letters.

“Oh, that’s awful.”

But how often do you hear about the everyday occurrences on The Ward?

The new dad who fights his methed-up mother in-law who decided it was her baby.

The new mom who left the ward to get her drugs because the hospital wasn’t getting it done with theirs.

When you need to call armed guards for help, the ward starts sounding like the Emergency Department.

Dangerous Places Need Help

What’s more motivated than a methed-up man who needs his next hit?

Or a methed-up man who needs his next hit, steals from the next tent over, and gets sliced up for his trouble.

Now it’s a methed-up man in the ED thinking he’s going to get sewn up and score drugs all in one stop.

If you’ve never heard an addict in the throes of withdrawal talk about their next hit, watch The French Connection II where Popeye Doyle gets hooked up, then kicks the habit cold turkey.

Or take a walk in downtown Portland.

It’s dangerous in the wrong places, so don’t go there.

This part of the blog post is where I tell you something about the blogger, me.

I’d make a poor hard-core drug addict. Opioids make me sick. Literally sick, and I’ve had the good stuff.

Liquid Oxy?

I’d never heard of it before I got a prescription during neck cancer radiation therapy a few years back.

It didn’t work for me. In fact it made things worse after one dose.

What, I should have tried harder?

The ‘dope-point’ here is that people react to stimuli in different ways.

2

When an unstable guy gets high they don’t get more stable.

If their drug-life wife goes to the hospital to deliver their love-baby, and the unstable guy is high, they don’t suddenly snap out of it and behave like a normal father.

What if mom and dad both come in hot?

The hospital doesn’t celebrate their new family.

They are ‘mandatory reporters’ and make the call.

High mom and high dad have a high baby and it’s all good with them.

It’s all good right up until it isn’t and they learn they can’t share their neglect with their baby any more than they already have.

Who deals with them first? A nurse.

It’s a story of daily family trauma you never hear about.

Unless you know someone.

Do you know someone?

Which one?