These stories are true at their heart—emotionally intense, vivid portraits of real people. They all share one thing: an experience of illness, hospitalization, or death. In each case, physical and material suffering is made far worse by the indifference of those around them. Doctors, nurses, orderlies—they often ignore basic human dignity, patients' rights, even simple courtesy. Who among us has not felt it, either ourselves or watching someone we love: what it means to be treated as a number, or worse, as a disease? To be denied the right to know what is happening to you, to be stripped of personhood? How many times have we swallowed our rage, our shame, our humiliation?
These episodes, told in lively, readable prose, unfortunately repeat themselves. That is why this book does more than move us—it offers concrete ways to respond. How? On one hand, it presents the Tribunal for Patients' Rights (TDM), founded in 1980 to collect complaints about failed healthcare systems, to monitor hospitals and public health services directly, and to enforce the Charter of Patients' Rights (which are, after all, just civil rights). On the other hand, it shows us the power of the "volunteer"—anyone at all (a young person, a retiree, a conscientious objector, a family doctor, a relative)—who becomes the "FATT 'CURAGG'," the bridge between the suffering person and the world around them. This person heals wounds that often cut deeper than any physical injury.
The message is clear: not frightened patients resigned to their fate, but clear complaints to the Tribunal; not passive bystanders, but devoted volunteers.
by Anna Cece, 1986
