Journalists & Advocates in South Australia - Denial of Care

I need to tell you about the night I realised that "free will" is the most violent word in medicine. Body Integrity Dysphoria sits in a strange ontological space. It is neurological—aberrant body mapping, cortical misalignment—but because the patient desires alteration rather than restoration, medicine reinterprets pathology as choice. Once choice enters the frame, care exits it. I knew this intellectually. I learned it viscerally when a South Australian public hospital sent me home with sepsis and bacteremia from a necrotic ankle wound. Nurses had called an ambulance. The hospital discharged me. When I asked what would happen if I took a meat cleaver to the limb my neurology had convinced me was foreign, I was told no public hospital would sew the stump. I had free will. That would simply be how I chose to exercise it. Consider that architecture. "Free will" used not as ethics but as administrative absolution. It transforms duty of care into a courtesy for the deserving, and agony into a consumer decision. That night I burned at 41 degrees. My body twisted and howled for hours as pain flared through every nerve. Alone. And I could only wonder how this level of torture could possibly be legal. How is it ethical to leave a person suffering not because no treatment exists, but because someone decided they were not worth treating? This is not a trauma narrative. It is an argument. Systematic dismissal, labels, stigma, gaslighting and humiliation in healthcare—the place sick people cannot avoid—can make a person who loves life choose to die in the fever heat at home rather than be laughed at one more time. I have the documentation. I have the intellect. I have a story so evidenced across SA institutions it reads like bureaucratic fiction—except every page is signed. What I lack is a platform. I am begging anyone with a voice to lend me theirs. Not for pity. For witness. I want the construction of "undeserving" patients—through diagnostic laziness, psychiatric labelling, and the weaponisation of "free will"—to be named and made illegal. This is why I am launching #CareforCare: a little bit of momentum that asks that the act of caring for patients be protected, resourced, and enforced by law. Because a system that punishes the sick for being sick is not broken. It is brutal by design. If you are a journalist, politician, lawyer, academic, or advocate: I need you. Comment. Message me. Tag someone. Help me make this loud enough that lawmakers are forced to listen. This has been building for years. I cannot carry it alone. #CareForCare #SouthAustralia #SAHealth #HealthReform #DisabilityRights #BID #StructuralViolence #LivedExperience #MedicalEthics #Advocacy #Healthcare #MentalHealthAwareness #PatientAdvocacy #HumanRights #Australia #ChronicIllness #InvisibleDisability #HealthEquity #PatientVoice #Change #Reform #DisabilityTwitter #MedTwitter