Helplessness is becoming easier and easier to achieve. We've never had full control over the world, the country, our jobs, even our lives, but it seems worse than ever now.

And what's worse than worse-than-ever is, I think some of us prefer it this way. Why do something about the things that are wrong, why exert yourself, or stray past comfort and couches, when you can, with fair certainty, say, 'There's nothing I can do about it'?

You know what? Maybe you can't. Maybe you can't, on your own, change the big picture of pain and woe and injustice. Maybe, in your own world, you can't get your children to do what you think they should. Maybe you can't reorient the thinking of your workplace gods. Maybe you can't change a medical condition that has befallen you.

But for all these maybes, there's always a what-if. That's not something I think; that's something I know.

Earlier this year, a pregnant woman was not given the attention she needed by her local medical facility. Not only that - and I'm only going on news reports here - it is alleged that she was treated to escalating levels of dreadfulness. First, she was mildly ignored; then there was some lack of civility and care; and thence to full-scale hostility.Then her babies died. Though premature, they were born alive and held by their mother. I don't know if in her head she'd named them. I don't know if her husband was allowed to hold them, too. The hospital believed these babies would not survive. I don't know what happened after they were taken from their mother. Except that they stopped being alive.

I cannot speak to the legal implications of all this and I don't think I even have the heart to. What can I say about the paid vacations some health workers got in the wake of these events? What to say about the obligation of medical staff to provide care?

You see, since January, this is a helplessness with which I have been wrestling.

With her article Helplessness: Definition, Theory, & Emotions, Kelsey Schultz, helped me to unpack, define and parse what had been lingering in me like poison. 'Poison' being a gentle word for unchecked fury.

'Helplessness is the belief that you lack agency in a situation,' Kelsey (I have come to think of her as just Kelsey. Kelsey my helpful friend) starts.

And so I start here. I can see why patients in distress might, faced with active belligerence on the part of care-providers, feel they cannot do anything.

Who can they turn to? Who can you turn to if the dearth of help started even before the doctor had the chance to put you out of the clinic?

In my head, the line of helplessness, in its most charitable form, goes something like this: might doctors give vent to beastliness because the system has worn them down - they're tired of not having what they need to help people? Do nurses and other medical aides feel cowed by senior personnel, and are they also tired of not having the wherewithal to help?

Again, gleaned from news reports, it seems the only person in this story who was not helpless was a security