The World of Dentistry

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Version française

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The Bartlett pear (called Williams pear in England) is one of the tastiest and juiciest fruit in North American supermarkets. It’s hard to believe that by chewing on this soft delicacy, much to my dismay, I managed to break the filling on one of my lower molars.

Dental problems started to appear about 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped roaming the land to settle in villages and towns. At that time, mankind’s eating habits changed as our ancestors began eating more sugar, a leading cause for cavities.

Could it be that toothaches are God’s curse on the children of Cain for adopting their father’s sedentary living?

Cain was a farmer and his brother Abel was a nomad. Abel sacrificed the firstborns of his cattle to God who seemed to enjoy it. However, the zucchini, carrots and celery Cain offered up weren’t to the Almighty’s taste, maybe because Cain neglected to serve them with ranch dressing.

It took a long time for people to understand tooth decay. In olden times, cavities were thought to be caused by worms. In ancient Egypt, dental malformation in children was treated by feeding skinned and cooked mice to toddlers. In China, cavities were filled with bat dung. In Spain, frequent mouthwash with urine was key to good oral hygiene.

In the Middle Ages, tooth pullers began exercising their trade in public squares, promising their clients painless relief. Of course they were lying through their teeth but it provided great entertainment for crowds who had neither TV nor Internet to kill time. Tooth pullers also removed calluses.

In those days, dentistry and pedicure drank at the same well.

When Renaissance arrived, hairdressers joined the dental trade bandwagon. Noble ladies of Florence could thus have tartar removed from their teeth while getting a perm or having their hair styled.

In the 18th century, Pierre Fauchard, the “father of modern dentistry,” published The Surgeon Dentist in which he recommended the use of heavy metals for tooth fillings. He also endorsed regular mouthwash with urine.

A man collected his own urine in a bottle to use as mouthwash. Beware of unproven personal hygiene advice: it might just be a fad... especially if it’s gross.

Progress cannot be stopped but it sometimes takes a while to occur.

You can understand why I have always had mixed impressions about dental medicine. Should it be considered a science? An art? A technical trade?

With this in mind I began looking for a dentist. I chose a new dental office that had just opened in a strip mall close to where I lived, tucked between a video rental store, a pizza parlor and a realtor’s office.

Doctor Nguyen’s office was new, tidy, tastefully decorated and equipped with the latest technology. The good doctor was a pretty 30 year-old woman who had recently graduated from a Las Vegas dental school, a city that does not readily come to mind when you seek higher education.

I was told however that its dental schools have an excellent reputation.

After her examination, Doctor Nguyen told me that my decayed molar needed a crown but first I had to see a dental surgeon who would lower my gum, raise my jaw and perform root canal surgery. She would make the necessary arrangements for me.

Root canal surgery is a procedure in which the pulp of a damaged tooth is removed with files, reamers, drills and other precision instruments. Although this treatment sounds painful, the Polish surgeon I went to see possessed undeniable skills.

He first gave me a solid local anesthetic and then put on a blaring Johnny Cash CD to distract me from the abominations he was performing in my mouth using sharp objects.

I did not feel a thing.

When I saw Doctor Nguyen again, she worked for several minutes on my molar before saying: “This won’t do.”

She led me to her office. My mouth was numb from the anesthetic and I was still wearing the necessary bib that dentists tie around the neck of their patients while they intervene.

Doctor Nguyen turned on a giant screen on which I could see the digitized x-ray image of my mouth.

“You see, I can’t install a crown because your teeth are out of alignment, specifically here, here and here as well as on all this side of your mouth,” she said pointing at teeth with her laser pen.

“This is what I suggest: I will make a set of braces to adjust your teeth. You will wear it in your mouth for six to twelve months, long enough for your teeth to be redressed. This treatment will cost about $1,800. Your parents would have done well to take you to a dentist when you were a child.”

I refrained from telling her about my grandfather who lived the last 30 years of his life with only three teeth in his mouth and who saw a blacksmith when he had a toothache.

“Then I will install crowns on the teeth of your lower jaw which will no longer be aligned with those of the upper jaw. It’s about twelve crowns and it will cost $15,000 to $18,000. We can start the treatment next week.”

I asked Doctor Nguyen for a few days to think about it.

“You know, many people would not hesitate one moment to mortgage their house to receive such a treatment,” she said.

“Oh! I believe you!” I replied. “However, just to satisfy my curiosity, how much would it cost to have all my teeth pulled out to replace them with dentures?”

“About $10,000 but I wouldn’t recommend it,” she answered.

I thanked her, paid for the treatment I already had received and left her office, dizzy from novocaine and the astronomical amounts that she had quoted me for fixing my teeth.

A friend suggested I seek a second opinion and recommended a Swedish dentist for whom her sister worked as a dental assistant.

So I went to see Doctor Svensson, a middle-aged lady who looked in my mouth mumbling “I see, I see...”

Then she asked me:

“Is your dentist young? Her office and equipment, are they all computerized?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Dear sir, I think I can fit you with a crown. Would you prefer gold or porcelain? I believe a gold crown would look good on you. A gold crown costs $900, a porcelain crown, $1,200.”

“Gold would be nice,” I replied sheepishly promising myself to light a candle to Saint John Maynard Keynes who suggested the gold standard be replaced with the porcelain standard at the Bretton-Woods Conference in 1944.

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who played a key role in the signing of the Bretton Woods Agreement in New Hampshire. As a result of this agreement, the gold standard was dropped. The porcelain standard is my invention. If you exchange your money for porcelain, you will be disappointed.

Two weeks later I was proudly wearing my new gold crown. It felt good and I was relieved that I did not have to rinse my mouth with urine.

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Hospital Diaries V: The Seagull

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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.

When everybody around you is suffering, your own pain becomes less important. I quickly realized that my complaining and moaning weren’t providing any relief. I was only contributing to the overall noise in the gurney hall.

A nurse had taken away my bottle of ibuprofen and the painkillers that they had given me were totally ineffective. I was too stiff to move and the thin blanket covering me was not keeping me warm. I was in constant pain and felt helpless.

When another nurse came to check my vital signs, he noticed my distress and asked:

“How are you sir? Are you in pain? Can you rate your pain?”

I could not understand why nurses insisted on wanting me to rate my pain on a scale from zero to ten. I felt it was impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from such subjective impressions.

“It hurts a lot,” I answered.

“You were given a painkiller two hours ago,” said the nurse after looking at my chart. “Maybe it’s not pain you’re feeling but only discomfort.”

I was not in the mood to discuss semantics and I gave the nurse a spiteful glance.

Pain is a reaction to an unpleasant stimulus. Tolerance to pain can vary deeply between individuals. The most common tool used to measure pain is a standard scale graded from zero to ten. The accuracy of this tool is questionable.

“You’re probably right,” I said with sarcasm, “and I’m also very cold.”

“In that case I can help you.”

The nurse went away and came back with a warm blanket to wrap me in. I dozed off almost immediately.

During this first night in the gurney hall, my neighbour who had broken her back was transferred to an actual hospital room and I now had a new roommate who was retching loudly behind the thin curtain separating us.

When I woke up in the morning a tall slim man in a white smock was standing by my stretcher.

“I looked at your MRI results and saw that you have light arthrosis on two of your lower back vertebrae. That would explain your spinal stenosis and could be the cause of your paralysis.”

The hospital staff spoke in a strange language that I could barely understand. They also tended to show up unexpectedly and never introduced themselves. I found this extremely annoying.

“That’s interesting,” I said snidely. “Who are you sir and what do you do?”

“My name is Dr. Sharp and I’m a neurosurgeon. I doubt surgery on your spine would be beneficial. You don’t have severe arthrosis and I do not recommend this operation”.

Surgery is too often viewed casually by patients and doctors alike in the Western world. However there is something creepy in having masked strangers performing mysterious acts with sharp objects on sleeping people, don’t you think?

“Dr. Sharp, are you telling me I have arthritis?” I said confused.

“No. I said arthrosis. Arthrosis is a degenerative disease of the bone cartilage. Arthritis is a swelling of the joints. Arthrosis is a wearing down of the bone cartilage that often occurs with age.”

“And what is spinal stenosis?” I asked.

“Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal where the spinal cord is located. In your case, arthrosis may be the cause of that narrowing but as I just said I don’t think surgery will be helpful.”

“I’m relieved,” I replied. “Spinal surgery sounds risky.”

Unimpressed by my comment, the doctor gave me a blank look and added:

“In any case, I will discuss this with my colleagues and we’ll talk about it later.”

I was never to see Dr. Sharp again. I often wondered if that hospital didn’t hide some kind of “Bermuda Triangle” that mysteriously swallowed up doctors.

The Bermuda Triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda where many ships and aircraft have vanished. Some people believe that the Earth’s magnetic field is to blame for these incidents. This might also explain the shortage of doctors in hospitals.

That morning my friend Lucide called me on my cellphone to see how I was and to find out if I had been given a room. I took the opportunity to ask her to bring me some ibuprofen to relieve my aching body.

While I was on the phone a man with dark hair and bushy eyebrows rushed in.

“So, are you ready for your surgery?”

“What surgery?” I said, startled.

“Well, the operation on your spine to get rid of your nasty arthrosis, of course!”

“I thought this procedure wouldn’t be necessary! But first of all, who are you sir?”

“My name is Dr. Backridge and I am a neurologist. Who told you this operation would be unnecessary?”

“Erm... It was doctor... Huh... I can’t recall his name but he was some kind of brain surgeon who came to visit me this morning,” I said, befuddled. “You’ll probably find his name in my file.”

“I never read patients’ files, they’re totally unreliable,” the doctor said with a twitch. “So? Do you agree? Can I book the operating room?”

I felt cornered. I am not impulsive by nature and, right at that moment, I did not have all the information to make such a serious decision and weigh its consequences objectively.

The doctor was rocking nervously on his heels while tapping with a pen on a clipboard.

“Dr. Backridge, can you guarantee arthrosis is the cause of my illness?”

“A 100% guarantee? No, I can’t say that for sure but it’s a possible cause.”

“Doctor, I hope you can understand how I feel. Right now I can’t walk and I’m afraid that if I get this operation I will never be able to walk again.”

The doctor gave me a fierce look.

“Listen sir, don’t waste my time. If you don’t agree to this surgery, I can see only one explanation...”

“Which is?”

“You’re putting on an act! You’re faking!” he snapped.
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He then turned and left abruptly, his white smock flapping behind him like the wings of a giant bird. He made me think of a seagull that comes out of nowhere, making a lot of noise, shits everywhere and leaves as he had come without ever accomplishing anything.

“I would not mind if this doctor got lost in the Bermuda Triangle,” I thought.

Seagulls have existed for at least 30 million years. This bird with the obnoxious squawking can be found anywhere there is a lot of water. It will eat anything but seems to enjoy feeding on human garbage.

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To be continued in: Hospital Diaries VI: The Overflow

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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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Hospital Diaries III: Incubation

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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.

Parked in a wheelchair at the hospital’s emergency ward, I soon understood why sick people are called “patients.” Patience is the ability to wait in silence while surrendering to calamity.

Unfortunately, the young lady sitting in front of me did not grasp that concept. With her cell phone glued to her ear, she was ranting over the senselessness of the health care system.

“I’ve been waiting for five hours! I’ve had a splitting headache ever since I got vaccinated last week and I’m leaving for Thailand in two days! Why is nobody taking care of me? Don’t they realize this is an emergency?”

Many people think that all emergencies require immediate action. This is not so. There are different levels. Some emergencies need to be addressed without delay, others can wait a little while. Few are a priority.

While driving me to the hospital, my friend Lucide tried to reassure me about my stay at the hospital by telling me the difference between private and public healthcare systems.

“A private healthcare system sees patients as a source of revenues whereas a public system – such as the one we have in Canada – views them as expenditures. A public system aims at getting you well enough to send you home as quickly as possible in order to minimize costs. You’ll see: in a snap you‘ll be back in your apartment, happily cleaning it up.”

I was not as optimistic as my friend. I believed that the waiting time at the emergency ward could be long. That’s why I asked Lucide to prepare some supplies for me before leaving my place.

In a shoulder bag I had a sandwich, some apples, an orange, a few biscuits, a water bottle, two packs of cigarettes and a small jar of Ibuprofen, the muscle relaxant I was using as a pain reliever.

Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory drug used to alleviate fever, pain and swelling. One can say it is basically a “super Aspirin.” Ibuprofen is included in the core model list of essential medicines published by the World Health Organization and should be part of everyone’s medicine cabinet.

The enraged Thailand traveller was furiously pacing when I was called on the intercom.

Clumsily I wheeled my chair to an office where a nurse was waiting for me to check my “vital signs.” It took me a minute to understand she wanted to take my blood pressure and my temperature.

The nurse tightened an armband on my upper arm and stuck a thermometer in my mouth under my tongue.

Fever is measured by inserting a thermometer into the mouth, the rectum, the ear or under the armpit of a patient. It was only in the 19th century that doctors realized that fever was a symptom, not an ailment. Besides their taste, there is no difference between an oral and rectal thermometer.

While she was writing down the results I asked the nurse if she knew how soon I would see a doctor.

“Not right away. We’re very busy now. We will call you to let you know which cube you should go to.”

“A cube? What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled.

“That’s what we call our consultation rooms. Now if you could please return to the waiting room, I have other patients to see.”

I was not thrilled by the idea of being “incubated” at the hospital. I was also less than elated to wait for ten long hours until I was called to Cube 67. During this waiting time, several patients – including the traveller to Thailand – grew tired of waiting and left the ward without seeing a doctor.

I had been looking at the walls of Cube 67 for twenty minutes or so when a young doctor showed up. I told her why I had come to the hospital. I explained my gout attack, the torn ligaments in my twisted knee, the weeks spent in bed at home and my paralysis.

She wanted to examine me. To do so she had to call two orderlies to lift me up from the wheelchair and sit me down on a bed. I painfully took off my jacket and my shirt and put on an open-back smock that one of the orderlies tied at my neck with a lace.

After the doctor checked my knees, my hands, my wrists and my arms, she left the cube without a word.

I could hear her talking with a man on the other side of the door:

— “He’s well over 50, he can’t walk and he has trouble moving. I wonder if...” she said.

— “He’s got all the symptoms, said the man, it could very well be spinal stenosis.”

— “That’s exactly what I thought,” she concluded.

Those were the last word I heard from her and I was never to see her again.

After 30 minutes, a nurse came into the cube carrying a plastic basket filled with small glass bottles and stickers.

“I need to take some blood samples, she said. Please roll up your sleeve, sir.”

I obliged half-heartedly. The nurse filled 31 vials with my blood then left.

There I was, alone in my cube, sitting on a slippery leatherette and foam mattress. I was cold. My arms, my shoulders and my legs were sore. What would become of me? I did not know what “spinal stenosis” meant and I was afraid.

One of the most widespread myths of modern times is that medical officers specializing in nerves and the spinal cord are called “spin doctors.” Because of that belief, people think that spinal stenosis means these doctors write down their observations using shorthand. However, spinal stenosis is really about an abnormal narrowing of the spinal canal running through the backbone.

Shivering, I managed to stretch and pick up my jacket that the orderly had left on the wheelchair. Despite the pain, I put my coat on, lay down on the bed and dozed off.

When I woke up, a man dressed in tan scrubs was putting my clothes, my shoulder bag and my shoes under a gurney. He then proceeded to skillfully slide my body over to the stretcher.

The attendant opened the cube’s door and wheeled me out to the corridor. I asked him where he was taking me and he replied:

“Where am I taking you? Why, to the gurney hall, of course!”

A gurney is a wheeled stretcher used to take patients on a journey. It is often equipped with a hydraulic system for raising and lowering patients so the attendant does not injure his or her back and develop spinal stenosis.

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To be continued in Hospital Diaries IV: The Gurney Hall

The Encyclopædia

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I was home one evening in 1986 getting ready for a writing session when the doorbell rang. Suzanne Vega was singing Marlene on the Wall on the stereo and I turned it down before opening the door to a 50-year old stranger standing awkwardly in front of me in a jacket and a tie.

He was selling the Encyclopædia Britannica.

It was not clear to me how he knew that I was a budding editor but he was quick to point out that a young man of my profession needed reliable reference material.

The 15th edition of Britannica had been published a year earlier and with 33 volumes it boasted that it held “the sum of all human knowledge.”

Those were the days before the World Wide Web and Google. Searching for information meant spending hours in a library instead of simply firing up a browser.

I did have a computer back then, an Apple Macintosh Plus, which was sneered at by my colleagues who considered it just a toy. They all used Micom 2000 word processors to write.

The Apple Macintosh Plus micro-computer made a significant contribution to bringing computing to the masses, as long as they could afford the over $2,500 purchase price. Public domain photo provided by Apple Wiki.

Listening to the salesman I could not help but be seduced by the opportunity to have a vast amount of general information at my disposal in the comfort of my home. However the steep $1,800 price frightened me. I am not the kind of man to make a major purchase on impulse.

I told the salesman I would think about it and call him to let him know of my decision. He gave me his card and left disappointed. I then went back to writing my story regarding the structure of the new National Gallery of Canada which was under construction. To me it looked like the skeleton of a dinosaur.

From a distance and with some imagination the granite pillars of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa can look like the ribcage of a dinosaur's skeleton. The glass walls demonstrate that it is easier to achieve transparency in architecture than in politics.

The next day at work I told my friend Aaron about the surprise visit from the encyclopædia salesman and that I was hesitant to disburse such a large amount of money.

“You should buy it,” said Aaron. “Knowledge is priceless. Did you know that if you read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica the University of Oxford will give you a degree?”

“Is that true?”

“Of course it is, don’t you know anything? The Encyclopædia Britannica is a British institution! Frankly, I don’t know why I waste my time discussing with a peasant like you who does not understand the value of learning!”

Aaron’s argument made an impression on me and I decided to invest in perfecting my knowledge.

Of course, I know now that nobody ever received a free university degree by reading a complete encyclopædia.

I also learned that Encyclopædia Britannica is actually a Scottish institution (established in Edinburgh in the 18th century) and that by the mid-1980s it had been owned by American interests for over 60 years.

When I called back, the encyclopædia salesman was shocked that I had kept my word. I told him that, yes, I was ready for enlightenment and that I would buy the leather-bound gilt-edged onionskin edition.

At its peak, Encylopædia Britannica employed up to 2,300 door-to-door salesmen among which Empire of the Sun author J. G. Ballard and actor Woody Harrelson's father.

For years my encyclopædia sat proudly in one of my bookcases and although I did not read it from beginning to end, it gave me hours of intellectual satisfaction.

When my wife and I divorced in 2000, we sold the house and I prepared to move to a small apartment. Looking at all my belongings, I knew I needed to get rid of many of the things I had acquired over the years.

But before I moved, a friend came to visit from out of town and stayed at the house for a few days. To thank me for my hospitality, she gave me the Encyclopædia Britannica on CD-ROM, a $50 value. I thought this electronic version would be adequate for my newly restricted living quarters.

I packed my leather-bound encyclopædia and took it to a used bookstore where I was offered $25 for the complete set of 33 volumes. I felt insulted by this contempt of knowledge.

When I calmed down, I decided to entrust my literary treasure to a small library I knew in the countryside, close to the haunted house I once owned.

I drove there only to be turned down by the librarian who claimed she did not have the shelf space. I then offered it to a literacy organization which also rejected the donation.

I regretfully realized that my initial $1,800 investment in knowledge was actually worthless.

And then it struck me: I had been totally mistaken about this prized possession of mine. An encyclopædia is not knowledge, it’s merely information. Information becomes knowledge only once it’s processed. How many people have owned encyclopædias without ever reading them?

Now that the Discovery Channel was available for all to watch, my beautifully-bound encyclopaedia, was perceived as not only cumbersome but useless.

A week later, I was visiting my old friend Asaph Mikhailovich, a well-read man cursed with a crippling affliction. I told him how I had been trying to dispose of my encyclopædia. He quietly looked at me and said:

– You know, when I want to consult Britannica, I have to ride my wheelchair ten blocks to the public library.

Not anymore.

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Ghost story

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Version française

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I was 32 years old and I was tired of the city. The noise, the smell, the heat and the humidity were getting on my nerves. I could no longer tolerate living amidst the concrete and glass skyscrapers.

Highrise buildings are sometimes the only way to multiply effectively real estate within city limits. Centuries from now, historians might wonder what kind of people lived in those man-made caves built inside artificial mountains.

I went for a ride in the country. I saw an old house for sale, I made an offer and six weeks later I said goodbye to the city.

It was a large house built in 1925. There was a glassed-in verandah on two sides of the house, the kitchen, dining room, and living room were large, and there were four bedrooms. Furthermore the price was very reasonable.

It was an estate sale and the notary responsible for liquidating the assets told me that the previous landlord, Alberic McGrath, was too old to properly take care of the property before he passed away.

The exterior of the house was acceptable but inside it was in bad shape. The varnish on the doors and wood trims was peeling, the bathroom appliances were stained by the well’s hard water and the kitchen had only two cupboards and a tiny counter. Instead of a sink it had a tub like those that are found in coin washes. A few essential things had to be fixed before I moved in.

There was also a huge pantry with deep shelving on three sides. In the country, people make preserves and they must be stored somewhere.

In the two weeks before I moved, while I was taking care of repairs and upgrades, I realized my new neighbours thought I was strange. Why would somebody from the city want to live in the country? What a weird idea!

In the 1920s in North America people built verandahs around their houses for health reasons. With increased industrialization and urbanization, respiratory illnesses were on the rise. Home owners would move the beds of sick people living in the house on the verandah so they would breathe fresh air. Nowadays, properly upgraded, verandahs make quaint features for older houses.

I went to the village to buy some supplies for the repairs I was making. When I told the clerk at the hardware store that I had just bought Alberic McGrath’s house, he gave me a suspicious look and became awkwardly silent.
I felt that I would not win a popularity contest.

I also had to be very obstinate with the phone company to get them to install a private line instead of a party line. Despite all my efforts however they would not give me a second line for the fax and modem. “Nobody uses a computer in the country, sir,” the lady from the phone company told me curtly.

Anyway, I had other challenges to tackle because moving in to a new house requires taming a new environment. You need to find a place for everything. Sometimes it is easy: pots and pans in the kitchen, clothes in the closets, beds and dressers in the bedrooms, couch in the living room, most things have a natural place to go...

But there are all those things that we cannot find a place for. They must remain in boxes until we find the will and time to put them away or discard them. Since I had lots of room, I turned one of the bedrooms into storage for a dozen boxes and other odd objects.

One night, as I was reading in bed, I heard a faint chime or rather a tinkling, like two glasses coming together. I listened carefully without being able to deduce where that strange noise was coming from. There was just one clinking “ting!” then nothing.

In the following weeks, I heard the same sound several times. I checked the plumbing and the heating system but found nothing unusual.

I had started to go to a bar in a neighbouring village called Chick’s Bar Saloon. On Saturday nights there was a country band whose 78 year old guitar player named Harry Jones introduced me to Hank Williams’ music.
One night, Harry and I were talking during his break and I mentioned I had bought Alberic McGrath’s old house. Harry started laughing and said: “You bought the sorcerer’s house!”

He then told me that Alberic McGrath had a reputation as a warlock and everybody in the area feared him; they said he talked to crows and wild animals and that they would answer him. He apparently could make milk turn bad and crops rot in the fields. He was praying to the moon and stars at night. He gathered herbs and plants to make potions and ointments that he would keep in his large kitchen pantry where his body was found several days after he died.

“Is that true?” I asked.

– Who knows? What I do know is that he could hold his drinks! He liked his gin!

With this, Harry finished his whisky, excused himself and went back on stage.

On my way back home that night, I thought that this could explain why my neighbours were giving me the cold shoulder. For myself, I am not superstitious and I thought this legend was adding to the charm of my new house.

A few days later, when I heard the noise again, I said to myself: “There’s the ghost of Alberic McGrath having a drink somewhere in the house!”

I poured myself a glass of wine and drank to the former owner’s spirit.

The next time my girlfriend was over to spend the weekend with me, I told her jokingly what I had learned about the house and about the ghost that I heard every night.

“You shouldn’t joke about that,” she told me gravely. “I always felt strange coming here. Now I know why. Please take me home, I won’t be able to sleep in this house.”

I was not expecting this reaction from her. I tried to reason with her but she would not listen to me. Against my will, I drove her back to the city.

On my way back, I was swearing against Alberic McGrath who could make cow’s milk turn bad and sour lovers’ hearts.
The next day, being still upset by what happened the day before with my girlfriend, I decided to empty a few of the boxes stored in the spare bedroom.

While I was working, I heard the eerie tinkling right behind me. I quickly turned around and saw at the bottom of a box I had just opened a small digital clock programmed to ring once every hour. The sound had been propagating gloomily around the house through a nearby heating vent.

That was the ghost I had been hearing.

When Robert Noyce (1927-1990) patented the semiconductor in 1959 he probably did not think that one of the most popular application for his invention would be the manufacturing of digital watches and clocks by Japanese industrialists in the 1970. He most certainly would not have guessed that one of these clocks would one day be mistaken for a ghost.

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Cannibals

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Version française

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My text had to be delivered by close of business Friday. Thursday night I was still torturing my laptop’s keyboard to make the deadline on time.

The article had to be original but I could not come up with new ideas. It was my third draft and still the story was not going where it was supposed to go. What is a creator to do when his work will not follow the mind of its maker?

Finally I decided to search countless pages of notes saved on hard disks, diskettes and tapes. Using an old Macintosh SE30, I dug through the innards of diskettes for 20-year old back-ups. Every time I found something reusable I transferred it to the laptop by modem.

And the clock kept ticking...

I butchered away through unpublished stories trying to make mine again the virtues of my past creativity. I chewed ideas that were too raw, making them fit for human consumption. It was messy but it was coming along...

At 3:00 AM, the laptop was overheating. I could feel the CPU boiling under the keyboard.

Then the computer started making strange noises: “Aarrrruuuh! Aarrrruuuh! Aarrrruuuh!”

I knew what it was: the bearings of the internal cooling fan were giving up. I had to turn off the laptop until I could replace the fan assembly.

A computer’s integrated circuits generate heat that would build up quickly without dissipating devices. In this picture, the copper pipe draws heat from the CPU and motherboard for the cooling fan to expel.

I opened the back of the laptop, removed the faulty cooling fan, and went to bed wondering where I would find parts for a five-year-old laptop.

First thing in the morning, I took a cab to a computer store that sold end-of-line equipment. The owner was not selling spare parts but suggested another store that might be able to help.

The fellow in the second store’s service department told me he would order the part but it could take a few weeks for delivery. “No can do, I said, I need it this morning.”

After some thought the young man said: “There’s a shop with which we sometimes do business that locates hard to find parts. It's far but it’s accessible by bus. I have to warn you though: this is a ‘peculiar’ kind of business.” I got the address and the directions, and hopped on a bus.

When I got off the bus, I was in the middle of a field. There was a wooded area behind me. I read the directions: “Go under the bridge and walk for five minutes until you see an unpaved pathway to your right.”

I looked around; there was an overpass to my right. I figured that was the “bridge”. I went under it and soon I saw a trail leading through an overgrown area. I followed it for awhile until I found myself in the middle of an industrial park.

The address was 1245 Industrial Road. I guess the urban designer who came up with that street name felt as creative as I was the previous night, tearing off bits and pieces from old texts.

Twelve-forty-five Industrial Road was a one-story building with grey siding behind an unkempt front yard. I rang the bell and waited.

A lanky young man with a shaved head, a nose ring and gouged earlobes opened the door. His bare arms were tattooed from shoulder to wrist. For some reason I thought of Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Moby Dick was a vindictive sperm whale chased by the equally spiteful captain Ahab. Native harpooners were often used in whaling expeditions. Europeans and Americans prejudiced against natives sometimes depicted them as cannibals. However documented evidence indicates that colonialists resorted to cannibalism for survival. The British members of Sir John Franklin’s expedition set to discover the Northwest passage in 1848, or the survivors of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse off the coast of Mauritania in 1816 are good examples.

I explained what I was looking for. Without a word he let me in and left me to wait in a large damp room that reeked of mildew. The carpet was dirty and there were gutted out computers piled up all around.

Through a door I could see in another room two black men busy dismembering desktop computers on a conference table. There were electronic parts everywhere.

Then it struck me: these guys made a living cannibalizing old computers.

A soldier is cleaning a part he just cannibalized from a tank during WW II.

Cannibalizing is such a gruesome word to describe an activity that is actually environmentally-friendly: re-using components to prolong the life of dying equipment and delay the moment parts are sent to landfills.

I guess doctors do the same when they take organs from cadavers to extend or improve the life of their patients.

Anyway, since the FBI unreluctantly resorted to a cannibal to solve their problem in Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, I figured it was OK if I did the same.

When the tattooed, shaved and pierced metal faced gentleman came back, I showed him the fan assembly. He took me into another room filled with shelving stacked with old laptop computers, dug out one from the middle of a pile and removed its fan.

I was back in business...

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