Sunnybrook Hospital’s Fundraising Campaign Magazine Features Danzig Street ‘Mass Shooting’

Your Working Girl’s daily newspaper announced its arrival with a thud at approximately 6:00 am yesterday, a miracle repeated at her door six times a week.   It was a day when the newspaper was made heavy with insert; this time a 64-page magazine courtesy of Sunnybrook Hospital.

Your Working Girl sighed as she reflexively thumbed through the four-colour glossy looking for something with which to take umbrage.   She knows that hospital foundations raise billions of dollars to buy impossibly expensive high tech equipment and equally expensive buildings in which to house that equipment. She looks for evidence to support her claim at every opportunity.  Sunnybrook did not disappoint her.

She learned the hospital is raising money for “Advanced Simulation Technology”, “Left Atrial Appendage Occlusion”, a “Centre for Research in Image-Guided Therapeutics” and much, much more.  You can see it for yourself at Innovation Hub on the Sunnybrook.  Click Here to discover.

Typical … just typical, Your Working Girl harrumphed.

But hold on a sec.  She turned to page 38 and found a two-page photo of paramedics attending to a gunshot victim on Danzig Street in Toronto on July 15, 2012.  The shooting claimed the lives of Shyanne Charles aged 14, 23-year-old Joshua Yasay and wounded 23 others.  They were all apparently caught in the crossfire of a targeted gang shooting while having fun at a summer BBQ.

The horrible event devastated the people in and around Danzig Street as well as the city of Toronto.   Toronto Chief of Police, Bill Blair said it was the worst shooting he’d ever seen.  From some quarters, there was on outcry for programs to help reduce youth violence.  It was that event and the call for more youth programming that prompted disgraced mayor, Rob Ford’s now infamous “hugging a thug” remark.

The young woman in the photo is half sitting, clearly terrified and grimacing in pain.  The hem of her skirt is bunched in her hands and she has a small round wound in her thigh. The blue-gloved hands of the first responder are holding a piece of dressing.

Also featured is a photo of a woman, seemingly in shock, as she stares at a makeshift memorial for the victims.  And there’s a shot of police tape with evidence markers and a bloodied piece of discarded medical equipment on the floor of the emergency room.  All in all, it was pretty gritty for a hospital fundraising campaign thought Your Working Girl.   With an uncommon interest in the community, she added.

Have they seen Your Working Girl’s blog she thinks immodestly?  Have come to see some sort of light?  Maybe they are raising money to facilitate desperately needed, but currently unfunded, programs that Toronto youth are literally dying for.

Sad to say, no is the short answer.

The life lesson Sunnybrook Hospital has taken from the Danzig shooting is that it can use its involvement as the receiving hospital for the wounded (which the last time Your Working Girl looked was their job) as a case for support to:

• Build an $8.7 million helipad
• Create a $3 million Chair in Critical Care
• Build a $22.5 million Imaging-Equipped Trauma Room

It is a great relief to Your Working Girl to know that young people dying of gunshot wounds can be ‘coptered into Sunnybrook and looked after in the Imaging-Equipped Trauma Room.

But what a pity that a few of those millions being raised by the hospital, aided by its use of images from a devastated community, won’t be directed at preventing that gunshot wound in the first place.

Your Working Girl is afraid she can’t locate an online version of the magazine at this minute.  It was an insert in the Globe and Mail on May 23, 2013.  If you come across the online edition, please let her know at workinggirlsays@gmail.com.