Cannula Crazies; Sydney bar delivers oxygen to suckers

Today we'd like to welcome Leela, a new guest blogger for us! She has a blog called The Heart-Lung Thing blog which you can check out here: 

http://heartlungthing.wordpress.com/.

I have always been pathetically self-conscious when it comes to using supplemental oxygen in public.

Pulmonary Hypertension patients are often prescribed the stuff to ward off the effects of long-term oxygen depletion. Some people take it just while sleeping, others (like me) also use it during the day if the weather is a bit humid or if they’ve ‘overdone it’ by walking up a few too many flights of stairs. Some people can’t breathe without it, and are on it 24/7.

Years ago, when the oxygen concentrator was first delivered to my uni student share-house, I had a difficult time accepting its presence in my life.

Its crimes were these:

When switched on it emitted ear-drum destroying beeps, then proceeded to rattle, pant, and heave like an asthmatic labrador. It also had the lovely brand name of ‘Invacare’. As I was in complete denial over my illness at this stage, I considered myself neither an invalid or in need of ‘care’, and thus failed to see how this machine could possibly be of any benefit to me.

Its beige, plastic, rectangular shape was weird and creepy. It sat in the corner of my room like an uninvited guest – a bland-faced hospital bureaucrat perhaps, who would obsessively tidy up the clutter on my desk, then insist on listening to a program on ABC Radio National about dahlia cultivation.

It came with yards of coiled rubber tubing, and had a metal attachment called a ‘nipple’. It also had a thing called a ‘nasal cannula’ that was supposed to go up my nose. Ick.

Most unforgivably, it didn’t even match my furniture. How was I supposed to encourage a creative yet home-like aesthetic with something that looked like a dalek camped out in my bedroom?

If I ever had to wear the nasal thing in public (say answering the door, or hanging laundry on the line), people tended to avoid looking me in the eye. This is because the most common sight of someone hooked up to oxygen is when they are an actor dying of cancer on a telemovie. Me wearing one turned me into Scary Cancer Lady.

It took me months, and a bout of airway restricting influenza, for me to start using it properly. Stupid, I know.

And, I recently found out, highly unnecessary. Because concentrated oxygen has suddenly become the very latest hip and decidedly cool thing to inhale.

An ‘oxygen bar’ has recently opened up in Sydney’s Harbourside Shopping Centre. Here, by the darkly glimmering waters of Darling Harbour,  you can hook your stylish self up to a stylish nasal cannula, and enjoy stylish 90 % oxygen for a dollar a minute.

The ‘bar’ which is in the middle of a shopping mall, is all neon glowing surfaces, touch screens, and shapely white stools, and is decorated with a back-lit blown-up photo of blue sky and green grass. Evocative, I presume, of health and vitality.

Basically, it’s pretty tacky. It looks like a cross between a food-court juice bar and a nail salon. And then of-course there is the array of colour-coded bubbling oxygen flavours that make it look like the Slurpie section of your local Seven Eleven.

While experts such as a respiratory specialist from the Australian Lung Foundation, and two scientists from the University of Technology, Sydney, say that oxygen for healthy people is not only pointless but dangerous, the bar owner insists upon its health benefits.

Taking 90 % oxygen (most air that we breathe is only at 21%) is, apparently, a great way to relax, and speeds flu recovery. And if you’re up all night popping pills and hitting the clubs, then it’s a terrific hangover cure so you’re all perky for the seven am boardroom meeting.

So for years, I have been self-consciously hiding my diseased, cannula-wearing, self in my bedroom, while being hooked up to oxygen was what the cool kids were doing all along.

Worse still, now I puff around town with blue lips, unable to afford the portable oxygen that these days I would wear no matter how self-conscious I’d feel, while the rich and stupid sit in shopping malls sucking down a substance which does nothing for them.

It’s a bit ironic if you think about it.

I suppose you could argue that the same irony exists in many other consumer items. Food that one doesn’t need, for example. Only this morning I bought a pink glazed donut and guzzled half of it while driving home from an appointment.

It was an entirely unnecessary act of crass consumerism. Someone out there in the teeming hungry world would do wonders on that hefty wad of saturated fat and strawberry-flavouring.

But can oxygen be classed as a ‘consumer item’? Should it be? Isn’t taking pure oxygen for a hangover cure the same as having a blood transfusion for a health kick while someone else bleeds out in an emergency room for lack of adequate blood supplies?

Isn’t using oxygen for ‘a bit of a boost’ trivialising the terribly serious world of Medicine and Illness? Or is it a good thing; does it normalise and bring oxygen use out into the open?

I’m not really sure.

The only thing I am sure of, is that I won’t be eating any more donuts – at least not in public. How embarrassingly uncool of me. The really hip trendy people only eat artisan-produced gluten free organic confectionery made locally or in Belgium. From now on, public consumption of donuts will only occur when they are available intravenously in bars.

Travellers Aid Allows Me to Work and Get Drunk

No accessible toilet at work?! Luckily for Carl and many others in Melbourne, there's a solution... 

Travellers Aid in the city of Melbourne is a unique organisation. They don't fall neatly into any existing charity structures, nor do they aim to run at a profit. So what exactly do they do? Lots.

I spoke about Travellers Aid briefly inthis post, but there is much more to be said about the organisation.

Travellers Aid operates out of two main locations, one at Southern Cross Station, and the other at Flinders Street Station. Both train stations are the largest in Melbourne, and thus they both have an enormously large and diverse make-up of people passing through.

Perhaps intuitively, Travellers Aid as an organisation attempts to cater to pretty much everyone. Whether it is tourists looking for simple directions, the elderly requiring assistance with transport, people escaping from abuse or domestic violence, and in my case particularly - those seeking personal care assistance.

I've written about personal care at ABC RampUp, and it is an issue that frustrates me to no end. So last year, when I found out that an organisation in the CBD of Melbourne provides public, free personal care without needing to book in advance, I was pretty impressed.

I found out that Travellers Aid provided free personal care due to some research I did when contemplating starting paid employment through an internship program at my university.

Unfortunately, I can't work wherever I want; location, space and funding are all major considerations of mine. In polite terms, I need personal care assistance and facilities at my potential workplace. In not so polite terms, I need a place to do a wee, and someone to give me a hand.

And how many workplaces have completely accessible facilities, including an electric hoist? And I'm not just talking about your standard accessible toilet, I'm talking about the full works. The answer is none, at least none that I could find. And yes, maybe I could rant and rave, complaining about discrimination and the like. But it was only for work experience, and if I make too much of a fuss then they might not hire me! Even if they do, they might just make me the guy who does the coffee runs.

I had an epiphany; enter Travellers Aid! I worked out that I could conceivably work anywhere centrally in the city of Melbourne, and make a trip to Travellers Aid whenever I needed to do the proverbial business.

In short, I went for the job and I got it! Hooray!

Was the personal care regime with Travellers Aid perfect? Definitely not, it took a good 15 minutes at full pace to reach the facilities from my work - through wind, the rain and the heat. There were also often queues, I hate queues.

But was it bad? Not in the slightest. The staff were great, all of them. Going to the toilet was really quite a quick and painless process, and that is just how it should be.

But let's think about this for a moment? I have said it already, but I physically could not work for more than a couple of hours without having a facility such as Travellers Aid nearby. If that was the case, and Travellers Aid didn't exist, it wouldn't have been worth applying for the job. As such, I now wouldn't have seven months work experience at a prestigious organisation under my belt. I wouldn't have some key references, I'd be a couple of thousand dollars poorer, and perhaps most importantly, I wouldn't have met many great people who have opened some pretty large doors for me.

What I am trying to say is this, without Travellers Aid I would have much less work experience, and much less life experience.

I've been talking about Travellers Aid in the context of work. But life isn't all work, and the city of Melbourne isn't all work. Travellers Aid often stays open quite late, and is thus also a social enabler in a context different to work.

Travellers Aid allows me to get very jolly and quite drunk in the city - all without worrying that my bladder will explode. I know they can't exactly use what I have just said on promotional materials, but it's definitely another great aspect of the organisation. It enables us disabled folk to leave the house and have a good time for once. Beware people; we are in your streets and in your towns, drinking your beer and eating your food!

Why am I telling you about Travellers Aid now? Well, I was asked to help them out with a couple of promotional activities, but as they say, that's a story for another time.

ode to a kitchen

Thanks to Joanna for her latest post :)

I didn’t realise that the apricot kitchen at my mother’s house in Orange meant so much to me until she told me last night by phone that she is having it renovated for the 1st time ever in what I think is nearly 20 years. It was largely built for teaching daughters who sit in wheelchairs how to cook I think. I don’t remember actually being taught much actual cooking. Like many homes, it was and probably will remain the heart of the home. It does need renovating; the laminates bench top in apricot looks dated, and with me out of the home the majority of the bench space is now too low for my mother. It probably always was, but she is starting to feel it.

I don’t get home much these days. Even when I am home I don’t cook much in that kitchen, circumstantial and not opportunity. However, I could cook there. Just knowing it was there made me feel better about all the kitchens before and since that haven’t worked. In the back of my mind, I knew there was a kitchen that worked. I knew it was possible to design a kitchen that worked without it looking too much like it belonged in a hospital, or in a rehab facility. To me anyway.

In watching all the Masterchef stuff on TV and reading cookbooks, I’ve learnt how to cook in kitchens that aren’t designed for me. I can make it work in this new kitchen and in whatever other future kitchen I work in. I can still be a foodie. I can still sit on cushions when I need to see into pots. But I am the only person I know who likes to cook who prefers electricity on their hotplates than gas. I put that down to my mother and her willingness to put any kitchen that I could use when I was at home and needed it and demonstrated inclusion. The world before and since did feel better to me knowing it was there.

I’ve been invited home before the renovations actually installed a couple of times to cook before the old one gets taken down. I plan to show Mum what she did for me. Being a foodie is not something you need to be able-bodied to enjoy, and with patient guests, you can cook in most places sitting down. I will enjoy that time in Orange. I will take lots of photos, so that I can show people the legendary kitchen and the fact it can be done. I will show Mum that her kitchen inspired me and cook up a storm to say thank you for the inclusion.

But it is time for the kitchen to be renovated. It is time. I just hope she puts in a powerpoint that I can reach.