Hospital Diaries VI: The Overflow

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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. 

I had been in the gurney hall for two days. Every move I made was painful and I still did not know what I was suffering from. It had all started with a gout attack but then I was told I had twisted my knee and had torn some ligaments. After being admitted to the hospital, doctors talked about arthrosis, spinal stenosis and a neurologist I nicknamed “the Seagull” insisted I needed back surgery.

Lying on my gurney I was pondering about how difficult it is to establish an accurate diagnosis. In all fairness I could not blame doctors for failing so far to identify the cause of my handicap. In a way, I felt it was like an evil genius, some kind of Keyzer Söze from the movie The Usual Suspects, was living inside my body, wreaking havoc at the expense of doctors/detectives who were completely baffled.

Only in literature and movies the issue is finding the “true” culprits. In real life, detectives and doctors are content to find a convenient suspect – all the best if it’s the real guilty party – to lay charges on, close the case and move on.

Those were my thoughts as I watched the hospital chaplain offer his sympathies to the family of a dying patient to whom he had just administered the last rites in one of the private rooms of the gurney hall.

At that moment an attendant showed up and began to place my personal belongings under my gurney. I was terrified she was going to take me against my will to the operating room for spinal surgery. I nervously asked her where we were going.

“I am taking you to your room sir.”

I could not believe my ears! Finally I was leaving the noisy gurney hall with its blaring bells and alarms! As I was profusely babbling my thanks to the attendant, she curtly said:

“I’m just doing my job sir.”

After I was wheeled into my new room, an orderly slid my body to a wider gurney with a thicker mattress. From the conversation the orderly and the gurney attendant were having, I understood that I was now in a place called the Emergency Overflow, a somewhat “underground” department set up for patients who had been residing in the emergency ward for at least 48 hours. This was the way the hospital had found to avoid the heavy fines that were imposed if the ministry of health’s performance goals were not met.

Mankind is obsessed with order, yet lusts for chaos. Maybe that’s why bureaucracy was invented. Bureaucracy is a form of labour organization purposedly designed to effectively achieve a cost-efficient use of resources in a rational way. However tremendous effort and considerable ingenuity are needed to get around bureaucracy’s cumbersome rules.

I owed my escape from the gurney hall to this paradox.

I was now in a no man’s land of a sort, some temporary quarters run by a minimal staff. From time to time a nurse would come by to take my vital signs and ask me to rate my pain on a scale from zero to ten and an orderly brought me my meals.

In Canada, hospital menus are designed by dieticians. Low-salt, low-fat and low-sugar meals usually taste like cardboard. If the food is not particularly tasty, it is however very healthy.

Everyday I had a visit from “the seagull,” the neurologist who was convinced I was faking my illness since I would not agree to have back surgery.

“Come on! Show me what you can do! Get up on your feet and walk!” the seagull would mock me.

I was nearing rock bottom. Having been confined to a stretcher for almost a week, I still did not know what I was sick from, my doctor was treating me as if I was imagining my ailment and I was taking painkillers that had no effect on my pain.

When my friend Lucide came to see me, she brought a bottle of Ibuprofen. I quickly took two tablets and hid the bottle in my bedside table hoping no overly conscious nurse would steal it away from me again.

While I was waiting for the medication to take effect, I told Lucide about my frustration and despair.

“Hmm… I saw three empty wheelchairs in the hall as I was coming to your room” said Lucide. “Maybe if we could borrow one and go to the cafeteria it would lift your spirits a bit.”

US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life after being struck with paralysis during a vacation at Campobello Island in New Brunswick. Still today doctors disagree about whether FDR suffered from poliomyelitis or Guillain–Barré syndrome.

My friend is a genius. I rang the nurse right away. After about 15 minutes of waiting, an orderly arrived and I asked her if I could have a wheelchair to go for a stroll with my friend.

“I’ll ask your nurse,” she replied.

Lucide and I continued our conversation for about 20 minutes and having no news from my nurse, I rang again. When the orderly returned, I asked her if the wheelchair I requested was coming.

“I’m sorry sir, your nurse is taking a break and I haven’t been authorized to give you a wheelchair yet.”

That was too much. The frustration that had been building up in me for the last week overflowed.

“Listen miss: are you telling me there is only one person in this ward who can allow me to go down to the cafeteria in a wheelchair to have coffee with my friend? This is a simple request! I’m not asking for a liver transplant! All I want is a wheelchair! This is not the third world, is it?”

My outburst took the orderly by surprise. She began to cry. Her sobs alerted her supervisor who rushed into my room.

“What have you done to my employee?” he enquired uneasily.

Ashamed, I told him what happened while a nurse was taking the orderly to the hallway to comfort her. Five minutes later, the supervisor came back with a wheelchair in which he helped me sit. Lucide wheeled me to the elevator to go to the cafeteria.

Still astounded by the drama that just happened I was nevertheless ecstatic to be sitting, moving away from the confines of my room.

Lucide and I got some coffee and I asked her to take me outside to smoke. It was a cold January night and at minus 20 degrees I was shivering. It was the first cigarette I had had in six days. It felt like I finally had found relief for my pain.

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To be continued in Hospital Diaries VII: The Sweet-Smelling Ward

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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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Electronic Smoking

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Version française

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Back in 1980, a friend of mine went to France for three weeks to pick grapes. She returned a year and a half later after having travelled throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.

On Friday nights she would come over to visit me and we would play Scrabble and cribbage for hours on end while drinking wine and coffee.

Those are good memories.

One night as we were opening a third bottle of wine, my friend, whom I had never seen smoking, took out of her purse a pack of Egyptian cigarettes which she had brought back from her travels, and lit up a cigarette. I was not a smoker, however for fun I asked her to give me one. I was 25 years old and this was my first smoking experience. I enjoyed it so much that a month later I was smoking a pack a day.

I like the smell and the taste of tobacco. It reminds me of my grandfather who smoked Canadian tobacco that he purchased from farmers. It reminds me of my father, who before my parents’ divorce, when I was a child, would send me to the store to buy Sportsman cigarettes for him.

I like the gestures that come with smoking: opening a pack, taking a cigarette out, lighting it up while protecting the flame of the lighter or the match from the wind, holding a cigarette between my fingers, feeling the cigarette dangling from my lips, deeply breathing in the smoke and enjoying the taste of tobacco.

These feelings are irreplaceable.

At university, I had a non-smoking girlfriend who, when she woke up before me in the morning, would light one of my cigarettes and place it between my lips to awaken me. This is one of the most sensual memories of my youth.

Everybody smoked back then; it was the quintessential social activity. We shared cigarettes to get acquainted, to make a conversation last, to prolong an evening, to muster up courage at work. And drinking coffee or alcohol without smoking is just not the same thing.

In Jim Jarmusch’s excellent movie, Coffee and Cigarettes, Tom Waits manages to convince Iggy Pop that the beauty of quitting is that then you can have a cigarette, because you quit...

Everything is different now. First, governments implemented regulations to make cigarette packages less attractive. Then, they raised the price of tobacco products by applying whopping regressive taxes that sparked contraband and created a new underground cigarette manufacturing industry.

At work, employees were first relegated to smoking in badly ventilated rooms, then forced to smoke outside 30 feet away from the doors. The most basic principles of hospitality and health were ignored. Patrons of bars and restaurants would be subjected to the same predicament a few years later.

Which is the biggest threat? Catching cancer after decades of smoking or catching pneumonia after a few days or weeks of smoking outside in -30 temperatures?

To spare myself from having to smoke outside during the harsh Canadian winter, I decided to try switching to electronic cigarettes.

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigs, were patented in the United States in the early 1960’s. At that time, the negative effects of smoking were not generally recognized so the product was a marketing failure.

An e-cig is about the same size and the same weight as a pen. Its components are an LED light to indicate when it is activated, a battery with the relevant electronic circuitry, a vaporizer and a cartridge containing a liquid that produces the taste and mist.

E-cigs are activated by inhaling from a hole at the end of the cartridge containing a liquid after it is screwed to the rest of the contraption.

This liquid contains propylene glycol or glycerin. These chemicals are often found in atomizers used to produce relief from asthma. It also contains food additives or nicotine although the importing of nicotine-based e-cigs is not authorized in Canada. Otherwise, it is fairly easy to find non-nicotine e-cigs.

I spent 10 dollars for a food additive-based e-cig that was supposed to provide me with the same enjoyment I would get from smoking two packs of regular cigarettes.

Unfortunately it was not to be.

While this e-cig gave me the impression that I was smoking “for real”, I was disappointed by the taste and smell of the cigarette. The device produces a sweet, herbal odour and taste that reminded me somewhat of the mixture hookah pipe smokers use: you know, the herbal stuff that tastes like apples or jasmine. I was never fond of flavoured tobacco; I prefer a strong bitter taste.

I also found the weight and size of the e-cig uncomfortable. It is impossible to let the cigarette hang from your lips because it is too heavy. Its length makes it awkward to handle.

Finally, the electronic cigarette produces a “smoke” that is really only a mist. It results from the evaporation of the liquid from the heated cartridge. In public, that mist is conspicuous and it might annoy oversensitive non-smokers or former smokers.

Since we are constantly bombarded with anti-smoking messages, it is hard not to be aware of the negative effects of this habit on the heart and the lungs. However, I am of those who believe that there are two sides to every coin. To every Romulus there is a Remus; to each Cain there is an Abel. If smoking is still popular despite the huge deployment of efforts to eradicate it, tobacco must have some benefits, benefits strong enough to resist advertising campaigns heavily subsidized by governments, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry.

Maybe we could learn some useful insight into the virtues of smoking from the Natives in America if we cared to listen...

In Canada, an often disgusting photo and a threatening warning about the danger of smoking must be displayed on half the surface of a pack of cigarettes. On the side of a package is a list of toxic products it contains. This kind of warning is likely to appear someday on restaurant menus, entrances to public buildings, cars, etc. Because, let’s face it, about everything we ingest, every location we visit, all consumer products we use and all of our activities constitute a health hazard of some kind.

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Barbarella

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Version française

For Dick
Special thanks to Matthew and his Facebook friends for bringing back the memories

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Kids should never disobey their parents even though in the end it becomes unavoidable if only for the sake of emancipation. It is part of growing up and finding our own identity.

We start life as little beings completely dependent on our parents or caretakers. They provide a warm and safe shelter, they feed us, they keep us dry through seasons and despite the whims of our digestive and urinary systems.

And they teach us basic skills. When and what to eat and drink; when, where and how to move around while controlling those pesky sphincters; how to get dressed for warm and cold weather.

Eventually we grow up, until we’re old enough to eventually wear out from too much living.

In the process of growing up as kids we conveniently forget that somebody taught us the basics and we only remember the practice time we spent on our own or with our peers perfecting our life skills. We ignore that we become the sum of the knowledge, the wisdom, the habits, good and bad, of our parents and their ancestors.

They say parents only die when their children die and even then, not really: they just become part of a more or less anonymous data bank from which their grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on thoughtlessly draw information.

But I digress, let’s go back to emancipation.

At some point when we grow up, we develop desires and needs our parents forgot they once had. One of the needs my older brother and I discovered in our early teens took a very specific form that we knew our mother would not agree with: Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy.

In the 60’s and early 70’s, we were raised on French comic books and magazines, at a time where the genre was swiftly acquiring its status as a valid form of literature. We were aware of Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella original serial comics and had seen some of the strips. When Roger Vadim turned the comics into a movie in 1968, casting a very pretty pretty Jane Fonda, his third wife, as the galactic heroine, my brother and I knew we had to see it.

Jean-Claude Forest (1930-1998) was a French illustrator and writer who created the Barbarella character in the early 1960s. Published originally as serials in V-Magazine in 1962, Barbarella became a runaway best-seller translated in dozens of languages.

Unfortunately, the movie had not been a commercial success and did not linger in cinemas. This was many years before VCRs, DVDs or BitTorrent and it would take a long time before whomever picked movies to play on Canadian TV could see enough artistic value in such a film to broadcast it.

Yet, the movie had everything to appeal to 14 and 15 year-old boys: a Catchman who hunted children; flesh-eating dolls; Leathermen guards shooting laser rays; a bushy-eyebrow villain named Durand Durand who invented the Excessive Machine, a kind of organ designed to kill through orgasm; a blind angel who lived in a nest and re-discovered how to fly after being introduced to carnal pleasure by Barbarella; and a lesbian one-eyed unicorn tyrant (played by Anita Pallenberg, then Keith Richards’ companion).

And of course, there was Barbarella, wearing tight-fitting revealing clothing that kept being torn off so that she could change more often.

The sets and props were typical 60s pop-art. Andy Warhol’s influence was everywhere. Barbarella’s spaceship was made of plywood, rubber and plastic, materials that didn’t burn out plunging through the atmosphere in 1968. The floor, ceiling and walls of the cockpit were covered with shaggy carpeting since back then allergies did not exist and mildew did not cause respiratory problems.

Times certainly have changed.

You can picture our excitement when my brother found out in an underground newspaper that a small theatre would be showing the movie one time only on a Friday at 11 PM.

But there was a problem: this was past our curfew and our mother would never allow us to go out at night to the shady part of town where the cinema showing the erotic movie was located.

We decided to sneak out of the house when my mother was sleeping.

So there we were, lying in bed with our clothes on, listening to my mother’s breathing in her room, impatiently waiting for her to fall asleep, fearing her reaction if she caught us leaving the house or worse if she got up in the middle of the night to find we were not in bed.

When you’re 14, disobedience is quite exciting.

Finally my brother whispered “let’s go!”. Carrying our shoes in our hands, we tiptoed our way to the door, careful not to cause the floor to creak and hoping that the door lock would give way quietly, that the door would open silently.

Outside we sat on the steps of the porch to put our shoes on and walked away without a word. My brother and I had become Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on our way to spend an evening with the Queen of the Galaxy before she became an anti-war activist, a feminist, a fitness video guru and a born-again Christian.

Before the advent of VCRs in the 1980s, a movie could be headlined at the same theatre for months. When video cassettes appeared on the market, there was an outcry from the industry saying that it would be the death of movie theatres. Thirty years later, video cassettes are gone after being replaced by DVDs which are in the process of being supplanted by films in the Cloud. Movie theatres are still around.

Once on the bus, my brother and I discussed nervously how we could explain our absence to our mother if she ever found out. So it was with a sense of impending doom that we entered the near-empty movie theatre.

Then the lights went out, the curtains parted, the opening credits started floating around, Barbarella removed her spacesuit at 24 frames per second in zero gravity... and I forgot that I even had a mother.

When the movie was over, my brother and I realized it was too late for buses to run and we ended up walking the five miles home in the cool spring night.

If my mother ever noticed our little escapade, she never mentioned anything. Maybe because after all she knew about the importance of emancipation.

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