The Biggest Swimming Pool in the World

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Version française

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Superlatives are words used to qualify the absolute top or bottom in quality or quantity. How we enjoy talking about the wealthiest man in the world, the thinnest tablet or the most crooked political leader!

I guess these words were invented to make us forget how common our ordinary lives can be.

As I was discussing superlatives with colleagues, it made me think of something that happened while I was still married.

My wife was born to drive a car. She just loved to take to the road. She used any excuse to jump into the car and travel aimlessly looking for something new to see.

On a nice sunny Sunday afternoon my wife and I decided to take a ride in the countryside.

My wife was at the wheel. Fields, groves and cattle were going by the left and right of the car. I was daydreaming, thinking how great life was and how wonderful it was to be alive.

We came to a village famous for its cheese curds factory and decided to stop and sample the local delicacy.

Cheese curds were invented in Canada in the early 1960s by dairy farmers trying to bypass quota regulations. Easy to make, this fat, salty, slightly processed cheddar cheese quickly became popular and gave birth to the infamous “poutine,” a meal made of cheese and french fries topped with hot gravy.

We bought our cheese and as my wife was admiring the quaint shop, I read a story in the local newspaper about one of the area attractions, “the biggest natural swimming pool in the world.”

As soon as I mentioned it to my wife, she wanted to see it since it was only a few miles away.

We found the “swimming pool” at the end of an unnamed dirt road. The pool was made of three communicating stone basins at the foot of a large rock where a trickle of cold water was flowing from a spring. The bottom of each basin had been painted aquamarine to give the impression of an artificial swimming pool. All in all, the lagoon was much smaller in size than an olympic swimming pool.

It had been a hot summer with less than average rainfall. The stream was not a bubbly jet of water, just a slow dribble. The smallest basin was empty and the deepest contained nothing more than three feet of sticky water, green with algae proliferating under the warm sun.

This did not seem to bother the numerous children who were noisily splashing about in the water while their parents, slumped into lounging chairs around the pool, distractedly kept an eye on their progeny.

I told my wife this seemed to be the perfect place to catch a dermatosis that would make these poor kids’ skin tougher than the hide of Big Joe, the largest alligator of Florida that we had seen near Fort Myers.

With more than one million American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) in the world this species is far from being endangered as it haunts the southeastern United States. The word “alligator” is derived from el lagarto (the lizard), the name given to the reptile by the first Spanish explorers.

“You always see the bad side of things! Look at how much fun they’re having!” she said smiling and waving at the children.

At that moment, a man with a worn-out Elvis Presley T-shirt and sporting a dirty pair of khaki shorts with a dangerously open fly came to meet us.

— Welcome to our little paradise on Earth! Are you looking for a place to park your camping trailer?

— Erm... No, we just came to see the biggest swimming pool in the world, I said before being interrupted by my wife.

— Oh! There’s a campground? Can we see it?

— Yes, behind those trees, answered the man pointing towards a thinly-wooded area. I can give you a tour if you want.

— Oh! That would be delightful! Shall we go my darling? said my wife to me as she took the arm of our improvised guide.

Against my will I followed them through an underbrush planted with birch and aspen trees.

A lacing road was forming a loop of the campground. Trailers were parked along the road close to each other, most of them permanently. Some seemed to have been there for decades.

At the centre of the loop, a large porcelain urinal decorated with lights and plastic flowers was acting as a grotto for a statue of the Virgin Mary. The saint was standing in this makeshift shrine with her open arms, looking discouraged as if she declined any responsibility for the compound she found herself in.

Our guide was explaining the intricacies of camping to my wife as she obediently listened and asked questions from time to time. The man was so happy to have found an audience that he was rocking on his heels, a nervous tick that, to my dismay, was causing the broken fly of his shorts to open even more.

He then invited us for coffee in his trailer. My wife accepted although I was not keen on the invitation and we walked towards the fellow’s mobile home.

The trailer looked like our guide: common and unkempt. As the guy started to fight to open the jammed door, the broken fly zipper of his shorts gaped even more and, to my disgust, I saw “Elvis” leaving the building.

I had had enough. I took my wife by the arm, thanked our host and, pretending we had a long ride home we left this place where I had seen everything I wished I had never seen.

Swimming pools have been popular since antiquity, the oldest one was found in Sindh, Pakistan. In England, public swimming pools appeared in the mid-19th century. However, nobody has ever boasted of having the emptiest swimming pool in the world.

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Hospital Diaries IV: The Gurney Hall

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Version française

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This is part of a series. You can begin at Part I and follow the link at the end of each installment to read the next.

A hospital is a strange world filled with machines and enigmatic people speaking unintelligible languages. For example, after only a few hours at the hospital, my vital signs had already been checked several times (I guess to make sure I was still alive), I had been incubated and rolled away on a stretcher through a maze of hallways to a “gurney hall.”

The gurney hall was actually a large square room of the emergency ward where patients waited either for a diagnosis or for a bed to become available. Along the outer walls, about 20 cubicles could accommodate two gurneys each, separated by a thin curtain. In addition, five glassed-in rooms were used to isolate contagious patients and the dying.

My cubicle neighbour was an unfortunate victim of a sporting accident, a 42 year-old woman who broke her back hitting a mogul while tobogganing with her children.

A toboggan is a runnerless sled used to travel over snow in Canada. It was designed by Natives to haul supplies and young children. Nowadays tobogganing is popular among Canadian children and their parents who have forgotten they are not as flexible as in their youth. Illustration: Dog-sledges of the Mandans by Johann Carl Bodmer. Source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, public domain

A nurse showed up at my bedside bringing with her the usual equipment for taking blood pressure and temperature as well as a clipboard to scribble notes.

“Good morning sir, my name is Florence and I will be your nurse today. Are you in pain? Can you give me an estimate of your pain?”

Maybe I was confused because of my sufferings but I didn’t understand the question: for a moment I thought I was supposed to estimate my pain in Canadian or US dollars.

“On a scale from 0 to 10 could you rate your pain?” explained the nurse.

“It hurts a lot,” I muttered.

“Very well. Let’s describe your pain as an 8 then. I will bring you some painkillers. If you need anything, just ring,” she said showing me an alarm button tied by its wire to my gurney’s railing. She then disappeared with her machines.

The pain was excruciating. With every move I made I moaned. Soon my cries were joined by my neighbour’s whimpers and the wailings of other patients in the gurney hall, cascading into a tormented concerto accentuated by the bells and alarms of monitoring machines.

After an hour of waiting for the painkillers that Florence promised me, I remembered I had some ibuprofen in my shoulder bag. I swallowed two capsules and drifted into a restless sleep.

“Wake up sir! I brought your medicine!”

It was Florence who was handing me two caplets of acetaminophen and a glass of water.

As I was about to take the pills from my nurse, she noticed the bottle of ibuprofen on my bed.

“What’s that? Who gave you this medication?” she enquired as she picked up the muscle relaxant.

“Nobody, I answered, it’s the medicine I was taking at home to ease the pain and the swelling.”

“Did your doctor prescribe this?”

“Not at all, it’s available over the counter in any drugstore and it provides me with some relief,” I replied.

“Sir, you are not to take medication that is not prescribed by a doctor. I must report this right away.”

And she left taking with her my valuable remedy and the painkillers she was supposed to give me.

Stunned to see my medication confiscated, I uneasily managed to doze off.

When I woke up, a smiling bearded little man who looked like a leprechaun was sitting at the foot of my stretcher, tapping on my leg.

“Good day, how are you today?” he said.

Still in a daze, I felt like I had magically awakened in Middle-earth and that anytime Gandalf the Grey and Frodo Baggins would come to take me on some outlandish journey.

“Not very well, but who are you?” I replied.

“My name is doctor Ogham and I am a neurologist. Please tell me how you ended up in my hospital.”

One more time I explained the unbelievable story of a gout attack that turned into a sprained knee degenerating into overall paralysis. While I was talking, the practitioner was feeling my knees, my wrists and my hands, taking notes in the process and asking me to flex my limbs.

“I see, I see,” said the doctor. “But I could see better with a CAT-scan, an MRI, an EMG, some X-Rays... I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

He then left as I was struggling to make sense of what he had just said.

One hour later, an orderly came to wheel my gurney to the nuclear medicine department to be irradiated with a scanner.

CAT-scans are 3-D images of the inside of a human body produced with an X-ray machine that looks like a giant bagel. In the last 25 years, medical imagery has become so common that the number of people exposed to radiation has been on the rise. This could explain the colour of the skin of the patient in the above photograph.

Several times in the next few hours I was to be rolled in and out of the gurney hall for tests.

Finally, I was taken to a room where Doctor Ogham hooked me up to an electromyograph, or EMG, that sent electric shocks to my nerves to see if my muscles would react.

Laying down as the neurologist was poking me with needles, I felt like a voodoo doll being subjected to some arcane ritual.

Voodoo is a complex religion which origins can be traced to the African slave trade. The voodoo doll, an amulet used to cast spells, became well known following the release of the 1932 Hollywood movie White Zombie. Fortunately, modern neurologists have little in common with voodoo witch doctors.

“This is strange, very strange,” said the good doctor, “Your muscles are reacting perfectly well. This does not look like a neurological problem, everything is working normally.”

Back to the gurney hall, I became acquainted with my neighbour who told me she was waiting for a brace to be made in order to stabilize her spine so she could sit up and move without risking any further injuries.

“Anyway, she said, they can’t keep me more than 48 hours in the emergency ward.”

“Why is that?” I enquired.

“That’s the maximum time allowed by the Ministry of Health. The hospital will be heavily fined if it goes over it. They better find me a bed quickly.”

Night had come. Lying shivering on my stretcher, I could feel the pain creeping back to my joints. How I wished the nurse had not stolen my ibuprofen!

I achingly reached for the alarm tied to my gurney’s railing. Bells were ringing and patients were crying in the gurney hall. Exhausted, I fell into a restless sleep waiting for a nurse to bring me drugs to ease away my pain.

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To be continued in Hospital Diaries V: The Seagull

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Pneumonia

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Several years ago, around the time smoking in Canadian workplaces was banned, I was working under a contract in a gigantic office complex. Smokers had to go outside under a large, damp, concrete portico with a two story-high roof sarcastically called the “Batcave.” It was there, in the middle of winter, surrounded by the haggard faces of scores of other smokers, that I developed a nasty cough.

The Batcave is where Batman retires to light up a Batsmoke when he needs a Batfix. The stairs, of course, lead to Wayne Manor.

After a few days, I started having trouble breathing and my chest hurt. When a fever set in, I knew something was wrong. I took a day off hoping rest would improve my condition. It did not and I became convinced that I had pneumonia.

I went to a walk-in clinic early the next morning. After about 45 minutes of waiting coughing my lungs out, a young doctor finally saw me in his office. He asked me the reason for my visit while distractedly looking at his computer monitor.

– Doctor, I have this bad cough and a fever. I think it might be pneumonia.

– Really? Let me have a look, he said, taking out his stethoscope.

He auscultated me, looked at my eyes, my tongue, inside my ears, took my temperature, checked my pulse and my blood pressure then said the only way to be sure would be for me to go to the emergency ward at the hospital and have some x-rays taken.

– But this is a medical clinic, don’t you have an x-ray machine?

– We would need specially-trained personnel and right now we only have doctors, a nurse and some administrative staff.

– Well, I have a friend who’s a dental hygienist. She operates the x-ray machine all the time at work. If I may, let me call her and ask her to come and take the picture.

– Sir, we don’t have an x-ray machine, you have to go to the hospital.

– You don’t have an x-ray machine? Even the vet where I take my dog has an x-ray machine!

– I’m sorry sir, go to the emergency ward at the hospital, they will help you there.

I had the feeling I was annoying him and that he was politely trying to get rid of me.

Pneumonia is an inflammation of the alveoli, where oxygen passes from the lungs into the bloodstream. According to William Osler (1849-1919), the Canadian-born physician known as the “Father of modern medicine,” pneumonia will kill you quickly and relatively painlessly. This affliction is celebrated on World Pneumonia Day, November 12 every year.

So I left for the hospital, knowing that my case was not an emergency yet and that I probably would have to wait hours before seeing a doctor.

Emergency waiting rooms are grim, sullen places. At this one, the medical staff was limited to a receptionist and a nurse locked up in a glass-enclosed office.

I pitied this caregiver: outnumbered in a roomful of dangerously sick people, she could provide no relief until the intervention of a medical doctor.

I arrived around 10:00 AM. There were already 25 people waiting. Some were old and silent, others were restless children accompanied by their parents. The rest, like myself, were in their 40s or 50s and did not look overly sick except for some hacking coughs, ugly skin rashes and obvious lack of energy.

I gave my requisition to the receptionist and took a seat. I picked up a two year-old issue of People magazine on a nearby table and set myself for a wait that I expected to be long. I hoped I could sleep between coughing fits.

A young couple entered the room in a frenzy. The man had his hand wrapped in a bloody towel. He had taken off two of his fingers with a circular saw as he was building kitchen cupboards. The nurse put on a temporary dressing on his wound and told him to take a seat. Soon he was being attended to by a physician.

Sick people came in, others left, tired of waiting. I wished I could smoke a cigarette but I was in no condition to indulge in my favourite pastime. Finally, I dozed off and dreamt of drowning: I woke up painfully choking on my phlegm. I was feeling dizzy from the fever.

Around 3:00 PM, I was called into an examination room. A nurse gave me a hospital gown to put on and asked me to wait. When the doctor came in 15 minutes later, I explained that I thought I had pneumonia and she proceeded to examine me in the same way the walk-in clinic doctor had several hours before. Then she asked me to lie on my side and left the room.

As I was facing the wall in a daze, I heard the door of the observation room open and close followed by the characteristic snapping sound of latex gloves being put on. Then I felt somebody trying to pull down my underpants. Startled and confused, I quickly rolled onto my back to find a surprised young nurse dressed in scrubs with her hand caught between my bottom and the gurney I was lying on.

– Excuse me, but what exactly are you trying to do? I said.

– I need to take a stool sample, she replied, flustered. Please let go of my arm.

– I’m afraid you have the wrong room, I said, lifting my behind to free her hand. My bowels are just fine, It’s my lungs that are causing me grief. I will gladly give you a mucus sample instead if you want, I replied snarkily

– No, I need a stool sample, she said, missing the irony. It’s a standard procedure. We have to take one from all patients to have it checked for harmful bacteria. Now, please, turn on your side and let me do my work.

I cringed as she uncomfortably probed me with a plastic tool. Having bacteria potentially lodged deep in my rectum threatening the outside world did not make me feel any more dignified.

John G. Bourke (1843-1896) in Scatalogical Rites of All Nations, explains that ancient Romans worshipped Cloacina, goddess of the sewers. In the above illustration, Roman priests and their acolytes prepare to take a stool sample from a woman as an offering to their deity.

Finally, the doctor came back and told me x-rays would have to be taken. I was to get dressed and go back to the waiting room.

Two hours later I was called to the radiology room, three floors up and hidden in a maze of cluttered hallways.

I put on another hospital gown and a technician asked me to stand still against an upright table. He then rolled the x-ray machine close to my chest. The machine whirred, clanged and banged while it was taking pictures of my innards. After a few minutes of this, one of the attendants said I could get dressed and go back to the emergency ward’s waiting room. Despite feeling disoriented from the fever, I managed to find my way back to the anteroom of the hospital.

Dozing on and off, I waited for another 90 minutes before I was called back to the observation room. The doctor told me the x-rays were positive: I had pneumonia. She wrote a prescription for antibiotics and sent me away telling me to take a 10-day leave from work.

After having my prescription filled at the drugstore, I laid in bed at home considering the 12 hours I just spent among the sick, the injured and those commissioned to care for them. It seemed a long time to have somebody qualified telling me what I knew all along.

Ultimately I fell into a nightmare-filled sleep. I was standing half naked in front of a fingerless man who was holding an insect repellent vaporizer and asking me to spread my buttocks while a group of doctors and nurses observed the procedure smilingly nodding their approval.

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Heartbreaking News

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Version française

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Thursday morning, I got up, took a shower, got dressed and went to the kitchen to have breakfast. My girlfriend was frowning in front of her bowl of cereal.

I gave her a peck on the cheek and, as I sat across from her, eating my toast, she continued to stare gloomily.

“What’s the matter hon?” I asked.

She did not answer. I picked the paper from the table and then I understood. On the front page, in bold letters, the headline read:

Canada’s Defence Minister Weds Princess of Persia

Apparently, while my girlfriend and I were sleeping, Peter MacKay, a man of action, married his Iranian-born girlfriend, Nazanin Afshin-Jam, in Mexico, land of La Cucaracha.

According to The Hill Times, it is no secret that every woman in Canada, available or not, has been nurturing fantasies about MacKay, the “sexiest male Member of Parliament”. Now their dreams were shattered.

I was aware of my girlfriend’s fantasies but I was not jealous, as long as MacKay did not hang around our house (unless it was to mow the lawn, clean the pool or take out the garbage). Still, because I am a caring man, I felt sorry for my sweetheart.

Peter MacKay, MP for Central-Nova in Nova Scotia, is a man’s man. A lawyer who plays rugby with his buddies, he loves being outdoors and spending time with Jack, his Bernese mountain dog. He hangs out with soldiers who, according to recent news, gladly pick him up with search and rescue helicopters at remote fishing locations in Newfoundland.

As Minister of National Defence and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, two of the most powerful Federal Cabinet positions, Peter MacKay commands respect.

In the past, he was associated with powerful and beautiful women such as the former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Belinda Stronach, daughter of the owner of Canada’s largest automobile parts manufacturer.

Belinda Stronach and Peter MacKay were elected as Conservative Party of Canada candidates. In 2005, just before the Liberal government faced a confidence vote, Stronach defected to the Liberals. This move helped keep the Liberal minority government in power for a few more months. MacKay, a staunch Conservative, had only a few hours notification. He was appalled.

MacKay was left heartbroken and sore after this unforeseen turn of events. The next day, he was photographed at home in Nova Scotia with his dog, his most loyal friend.

But let bygones be bygones. Now Mr. MacKay has a new wife and a smart one at that. Nazanin Afshin-Jam holds a degree in International Relations and Political Science as well as a Master of International Diplomacy. She also has a heart. She is actively involved in human rights issues and successfully campaigned for the release and exoneration of a young Iranian woman accused of stabbing the aggressor who tried to rape her. She is an actress, a model, a singer and, not to forget, a former Miss Canada World.

I am also told that she is a licensed pilot. If she ever learns to fly a Sea King helicopter, all Canadian taxpayers will feel the utmost gratitude towards her.

The Sikorsky S-61 Sea King helicopter was designed in the late 1950's primarily for anti-submarine warfare. It was later found to be quite suitable for Search and Rescue (SAR) operations. Image: Tom Curtis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My girlfriend was heartbroken and I felt compassion for her as I left for work. She was so devastated that she took the day off.

My office was abuzz with the news of the wedding. Women were mourning or just plain furious while men secretly rejoiced that they would no longer have to wonder if their spouse was fantasizing about a Nova Scotia lawyer while they made love.

I called home a couple of times during the day to try to cheer up my girlfriend. She was laconic at the end of the line.

On my way back from a smoke break, a security guard told me that he thought Peter MacKay was a fake.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“When Belinda dumped him, you remember the photo they published of MacKay with his dog?” he said.

“Of course, who doesn’t?” I replied.

“Well, it wasn’t his dog. It was some dog that he borrowed for the occasion because it would be a good photo-op. The whole thing was staged to attract pity for him!”

I went back to my desk, wondering if this was true and, if so, was amazed that someone could be so devious.

At home, I found my girlfriend red-eyed and still in her housecoat. While I was preparing dinner, I noticed the empty cookie dough ice cream container in the trashcan. My throat tightened and tears welled up in my eyes as I felt the pain my girlfriend was going through.

This could not go on, I had to do something.

After dinner, we watched a Seinfeld rerun. Although she let me cuddle with her, she was unable to pay attention to the show. That’s when I decided to intervene.

“You know the photo of Peter MacKay with his dog they published when Belinda Stronach broke up with him?” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she said absent-mindedly.

“Well, I heard today that it wasn’t his dog but somebody else’s that he borrowed because it would make a good picture,” I continued.

Her cheeks flushed and she reacted instantly:

“How can you say such a nasty thing!”

“No, no, I think that was brilliant! And I think he did the same thing with Nazanin, he did not really marry her, he just borrowed her,” I concluded.

She looked at me, tilting her head, puzzled:

“You really think so?”

“Of course! Politics is like show-business. It’s just to produce an effect, to keep people interested, to entertain them to help them forget about the real issues!”

She swung her arms around me and started kissing me frantically.

“Oh you! You! I should have thought about it before! Of course you’re right! You’re always right! I love you so much! Thank you! Thank you!”

At that moment, I knew I was going to get lucky that night and I couldn’t care less if, during our love-making, she was thinking about a dog-loving Nova Scotian rugby player.

While rugby is a violent contact sport played without any protective equipment, it is not the most injury-prone physical activity. Apparently injuries occur more frequently playing basketball, football or bicycling.

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Rola, many thanks for the ideas.

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