Austin Gionet cruises past Ottawa’s ByWard Market building when a woman flags him down.
Her name is Thumper. She sleeps in a staircase nearby and needs his help. Her hand is swollen around her thumb.
“I punched the security guard,” she tells Gionet, smiling.
Thumper insists it was a joke, but her hand is hurting so Gionet wraps it.
He suggests she see a doctor at a walk-in clinic the following day, and hopes that by gaining her trust she might one day take his advice.
“I don’t like going to the hospital,” Thumper tells him. “Once you’re a mental patient they treat you like a mental patient as soon as you walk in and I hate that.”
It’s interactions like this that Gionet says drew him to the job. The …