From a Different Country

About a month ago, while in Ottawa visiting my family, I had a heart attack. It was unexpected, but it was small, which was good. Unfortunately, during the angiogram, where they diagnosis the problem and usually solve it with stents, an unknown and utterly tiny stomach ulcer began to bleed. This caused me to cough up blood, which in turn caused me to choke and stop breathing. The procedure, only partially completed, was aborted, a tube was put down my throat and a coma was induced for about a day. When the tube was removed, I had pneumonia due to the blood that had gathered in my lung, apparently a relatively common occurrence for people who have undergone the process of intubation.

In all, I spent nearly a month in hospital, and a very long winter just became very much longer and stranger. I was on a staggering array of medications, drugs that served to lend an already dislocating and vulnerable experience a trippy, unreal quality, more dreamscape than actuality. To compound matters, I spent about half my time on the rehab wing of a Francophone hospital where all of the other patients were about 30 years older than I was. Separated from language and the tribal, cultural connections of people in your age group, I drifted about in a hazy, timeless limbo.

At any rate, I returned home to Toronto on April 5^th, and on Sunday Rachelle, my sister and I drove down Queen Street to Trinity Bellwoods Park, and as we were passing familiar landmarks, it felt like a million years since I had last been in Toronto. It wasn’t that things looked different, but rather distant, remote as if seen through a smudged lens, and the feeling extended to my own life, too. I felt like a lived in a different country, even from myself, and the best I could do was quietly watch those in the midst of their lives.

The park was full of hopeful people, all there to soak in the first hints of spring. However, the park was barren, an ugly, pre-spring absence of colour, and everybody was colder and less comfortable than they thought they’d be, but they were there all the same, and so was I, all of us waiting for the light to fill us once again, and that, that was the important thing.