11.22.10
US Fail: Beware the Ostomate Bomber
Predictably, the TSA has run into an ostomy patient, someone who had his bladder removed because of cancer. And the results were as bad you might expect.
A humiliated urine-soaked older man — someone with who couldn’t possibly be a terrorist — and another story of professional training in callousness as a way of doing things and TSA workers unable to develop or use good judgment.
From the AP:
TSA agents need to be trained to listen when someone tells them they have a health issue, because the one thing that Tom in his account talked about was he tried to explain and they just weren’t even interested in listening,” Saxton told The Associated Press.
“No one living with an ‘ostomy’ should be afraid of flying because they’re afraid of being humiliated,” she said.
“Tom Sawyer, a 61-year-old retired special education teacher, said the experience left him in tears before he caught a flight to Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 7,” it reads.
From the Register, by DD, after the underwear bomber’s apprehension last year:
In the paranoid atmosphere of oversurveillance, it doesn’t take much work to imagine a classified memo at the Dept of Homeland Security or the TSA warning to be on the lookout for the bizarre-looking terrorists masquerading as ostomate patients, even though such people are generally not young men.
“A urostomy or colostomy bag and its tubing could give cover for small amounts of PETN and chemical fusing,” it might go. “Such things have the additional value of being designed to prevent unseemly leaks and odors although not designed for compounds more active than those produced by the human body.”
No joke.
A subsequent story notes:
A bladder cancer survivor, Thomas Sawyer now wears a wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine through an opening in his stomach. When the bag was fondled by a TSA agent after the bag set off alarms in the airport’s scanner, urine spilled all over Sawyer’s clothes.
This is factually inaccurate, or very poorly worded.
DD’s dad died in his mid-50’s from metastatic bladder cancer. His bladder was removed, and the ureters redirected to an opening made in the abdominal wall — not the stomach. However, it’s easy to grasp the fact that the seal which allows drainage to a bag is very obviously a fragile one.
People who won’t listen when someone tells them of such a thing during a security check reveal training and procedures to be inadequate to dealing with the public, except in a hostile manner.