I had a long stay in the Toronto General back in October and it wasn’t much fun. You feel interred when in hospital, and for a quite a stretch there it seemed as if I didn’t have very much to be encouraged by. The days, enveloped by a fog of confusion, frustration and dread, were very long and very slow, and I found myself looking forward to dinner, imaging it might be a little clearing in the woods. However, nothing could have been further from the truth.

The meal, delivered wordlessly by a stranger in a hair net, would arrive with the loveless flat, slap of a plastic tray. The food itself, alien, was a visual insult, a slushy confection that had been poured from one container into another, a reminder that you had absolutely no control over this life you now inhabited. I found it all inexpressibly demoralizing, so I began to order food in whenever I could.

I wasn’t much good at providing the delivery service accurate information about how to get to me. The Toronto General Hospital is a monster. It goes on forever, in every complicated direction and level you can imagine.

It’s disorienting, like a space station made by a long extinct civilization, and having been moved a half dozen times since my admittance, I didn’t have any practical understanding of where I was. I simply could not give instructions as to how to get to my room. I didn’t have a clue.

All the same, I was in a ward with three other men on the 14th floor of the thoracic/respiratory wing of the hospital, and it took the delivery man ages to find the place. He must have travelled all over the hospital, unwittingly engaging in a tour of all the grief and suffering tucked away there from public view.

Across the hallway, a woman wept loudly, as she did every day at that hour. An elderly man lost to dementia, roamed the corridors a muttering shadow. Family members, huddled and speaking in quiet, hollowed voices stood by the ice machine trying to devise coping strategies.

Our room was dark but for the glow of my tiny tv set, but still, at a glance you could tell that everybody in there was pretty deep in the woods and not going anywhere soon. The delivery man, who probably wasn’t expecting this intimate and difficult a journey when he started work, brought the food to me. Looking very emotional– for reasons that I am sure ran deep and mysterious on this Thanksgiving weekend– he said a quick prayer in a language I didn’t understand, and then petitioned me to get well, “You must get better, sir, you must, there is so much for you, sir!” and then nodding toward me, his palms pressed together, he returned to his life, and out of ours.

We weren’t best pals, but we spent an awful lot of time at the campus pub—The Slick Rooster—cutting classes and drinking, and I suppose we formed a bond, a bond that has surprisingly remained intact over the years. Recently, I got an email from Rob after he heard about my heart surgery:

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Little Buddy:

Holy shit storm!!

I had no idea your ticker was F’ed! You were always so skinny, you’d think it would have hit a bigger, heavier, more powerful guy like me, but hell, it just goes to show that you never know what’s going  to happen in this crazy world. Who knows, eh? I might still end up with Jennifer Aniston!

If I did, I tell you, we would become a political force that could never be stopped.

Robiffer: A fucking juggernaut.

Who was it you were nuts for? Oh yeah, Demi Moore! You wanted her so bad!! You saw that movie Ghost 8 times!

Remember that pottery scene? That was boner city, man!  Demi Moore reminds me of a lady soccer player. It’s the short hair, like she’s a boy only with really hot boobs and a fine, fine ass.

Have you been watching the lady soccer? No, me neither! LOL!!

Hey, gotta change the tone here for a sec, get heavy.

As you know, I spent some time incarcerated in the hospital, too. Unbelievable that a guy as vital and straight-shooting as myself would get the Big C, but I did. Not stopping me, though. Gotta have a positive attitude, little buddy. Just charge through it like you were a big lineman ploughing through a bunch of nerds, or in your case, a nerd beating on smaller, weaker nerds. What’s beneath a nerd on the totem pole of cool anyway? I mean, who do nerds bully? Do you just throw rocks at animals, or are there actually people you can push around? Interested to know as I always try to relate to my constituents. Wanna speak their language, even if it is Nerdlish.

How were your nurses?

Hot or Not?

That was a game I played to pass the time. I would look at each nurse and ask myself, “Would you do her?” I’m not sure what the percentage was, but it was pretty high. There was one little sex bomb name Sylvie.

( .Y .)

 Jesus. They couldn’t let her work on the cardiac floor because she’d send all her patient’s blood pressure through the roof!  LOL!! Shit brick house, that one, and an accent that was better than any porn film I’ve ever seen. Always asked her for a sponge bath– once, I even offered her three hundred bucks for one, but I don’t think her english was too good because she never responded. The city of Toronto has to legislate that everybody fucking speaks and understands ENGLISH and that it is their ONLY language.  Those that don’t comply? Fucking deported.

Loved the drugs in hospital. Hydromorphone.

They’ll tell you to only take one, but screw that, take two, maybe three, for a good high. You will float right to the fucking ceiling and then have the best sex of your life with that goddamn ceiling. It is that good.

It will bung you up eventually, but it’s still worth it.

Get well soon, Little Buddy!

Big Rob

I had major, very complicated surgery, and for two weeks after the operation– first thing in the morning– the attending nurse would always ask me if I knew where I was. It was a simple question, one that I found a little bit insulting even, but the truth was that I just wasn’t sure.

I mean, I knew who I was, that I’d had heart surgery and was in hospital, but I wasn’t clear on what hospital, or where this hospital was located. Some days I thought I was in Montreal, other days Ottawa, sometimes when I heard the rhythms of an African tongue, I believed I was in Cape Town. Depending on the accents, language and ethnicity of those around me, I imagined I was in India, Australia or China, occasionally, even in Toronto, the city in which all of this was unfolding.

Each day was like waking into a dream, a realm where things were still being shaped. The people moving about in my field of vision were distant from me. It was like they existed in another dimension, and communication was mysterious, even impenetrable, as if something fundamentally untranslatable existed between us. I was, I guess, still disconnected from the conscious, living world and through fogs of trauma and medication, remained a spectator to the existent.

I communicated with very few people during this time, but I did send texts to my wife Rachelle. These are some of the ones I sent to her during the early stages of my recovery:

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Very thirsty. Want popsicle but they won’t let me have popsicle. The nurses are all very mean! Don’t understand. Please bring popsicle. CHERRY.

Why are you not here with popsicles? Very lonely. Very lonely for popsicle.

I love you.

Did I miss the spring?

Why are we in Africa? Were we visiting Douglas?

Oh. Not in Africa. Nurse said that, but thought she was lying.

Am scared when the machines beep. They are sounding an alarm to say that something in my body is broken or on fire.

I miss your blue, blue eyes.

My nurse is an assassin. Cruel eyes and self-loathing. Might be a serial killer. Am terrified when brings me my pills. Must kill her patients and then gets drunk at night, feeling powerful.

I want to be in a lake. Dog just about to jump in from the dock.

What’s going on in Game of Thrones? Has everybody been raped and killed or do some survive?

Food here not made with love. Sort of thing you give jailed enemy.

Do I have jailed enemies now?

Would like to have several jailed enemies. That would be AWESOME.

Brian and Laura should be thrown in tower.

Never heard a word from them. They only care about volleyball and renting house for Pan-Am games.

Is Hunstman spider fastest land creature? Can’t remember.

I want to sit on a sloped field of green with you and our son Jones, drinking lemonade on a checkered blanket, the world around us.

She was young and pretty, a student studying to become a dietician, and her youth, cast amidst the somewhat resigned and much older counterculture of porters, seemed to make everybody a little giddy. Her innocence and simple optimism was a narcotic, and all the men stood a little straighter and attempted to make charming remarks around her. She cheerfully pushed me about in my wheelchair as if it was some high school game and not life on the slippery slope, and it made me want to be outside, in the sun of some past, leaning back and resting my head against her and the limitless smell of her hair… but no, no– there is much work to do.

We pass so many people in the hospital corridors. The always smiling Happy Cancer Ladies, who’ve either discovered their bliss through illness or are frozen in panic, unable to move their focus from the positive for one second lest they shatter into a million pieces. Gratitude radiates from them, and they smile at me as if I’m a precocious child, making gentle, almost holy room for my slender passage. And then suddenly, I was part of a long procession of wheelchairs passing by—bald and pale cancer patients, a girl burned with acid from an honour attack and an elderly man with skin so thin you could almost see into his past. The Happy Cancer Ladies stand aside and beam, practically applauding, they’re so sincerely proud of us.

Men who wear brown coveralls run the elevators. All day they live in these boxes, these boxes that open and close like respiration. They sit there, flipping through the Toronto Sun and wondering what else the world might have to offer them, and when the new porter wheels me in, something happens. It’s like everybody has had three drinks and is now wearing their favourite shirt. Conversation pipes up, and everybody is talking and laughing and flirting, dispensing wisdom and jokes about the myriad complications of negotiating the underground tunnels.

“I was her mission, “ I say, “I am the treasure she has returned with.”

The young girl laughed because that is what she does, but the elevator man seemed intrigued, “You are a treasure?” “Yes,” I said mystically, “I can grant you a wish. You tell me what you want and I will make sure you get it.” I expected a joke, but I could see in his face that he would not let this happen. He looked at me, stating plainly, “I want my mother to be here with me.”

I put my hand on his forearm, ” You have to close your eyes and imagine her, thinking of the best, safest times you spent together, and through this you will summon her, and you will feel her touch upon your skin, her scent returning…”

It cast a little spell, this, and the girl made the sound of a small animal that wanted to be hugged, while the man stared off at a distant horizon. As I was being wheeled out, the elevator man wanted to tell me something, a message from a song by King Crimson that his language inhibited him from pronouncing, and as he leaned toward me trying to spell the title out, the doors closed, the potential of this information lingering between us for a moment, and then falling away.

This whole thing, this trek through the land of illness, has the definitive feel of an ancient Greek Odyssey, and I’ve come to believe that I’m on a hero’s quest.

Quietly, at dawn, as I’m wheeled down through the subterranean tunnels that connect the university hospitals, the porters serve as my guides.

Their various languages flock overhead, the mysterious syllables disperse above me and it’s like they’re communicating a kind of weather instead of words. Descending into this unexplored dimension we pass creatures and topography as strange and wonderful as mythology, my porter/guides taking me on obscure missions where I must slay monsters, solve riddles and exhibit great feats of strength and determination in order to inch closer to my destiny, to my ultimate goal.

And somewhere past imagination, our son Jones pours through space. Laid bare to mystery, he carries messages and lessons from beyond. He hurtles through the firmament now, our meteor, cresting planets with a fierce, unstoppable purpose– he’s everywhere at once, multivalent. He’s assembling in slow wonder inside my wife, while I, caught in a terrestrial and mortal struggle, battle to be present, hurrying to be there to catch him, when like some sort of impossible star descending, he falls into our life.

Every culture, language, disposition and illness imaginable was there, all lumped together. There were police officers guarding jittery prisoners, old, African women wearing tribal dresses spitting into clay pots, thick-necked Eastern European men with narrow eyes, a furious construction worker with a broken arm and a smirking teen with an infected belly button piercing. Nurses, tough as nails, stood like fire hydrants and shouted down anybody who tried to intimidate their way past triage, while cocky EMT workers, like bodyguards, struck poses around them.

A few affluent people who felt they didn’t belong there looked inconvenienced and glowered busily on their cell phones, every once in awhile looking up, hoping to find the eyes of somebody else who shared their dissatisfaction with customer service, while dotted amongst were the homeless, some of whom were just looking for shelter. They were aware of the disgust the entitled felt about sitting amongst them, and one of them, a holy and ruined man of 60, was an oracle. He issued forth a stream of undirected words, each one burning with some combination of genius, madness and menace, which then hung in the room like the smoke of prophecy.

Toronto, like a lot of cities, or at least by virtue of the way a lot of us assemble in cities, is a de facto gated community. Here, the gate was open. There was something almost Medieval about the scene, the squalor of it, our suffering so intimate and visible, our secrets now manifest. There was no separation of our humanity or of our innate and arbitrary vulnerability—we were all just there, hoping for intervention and mercy.

This, of course, is the destiny of each one of us, but it’s rare that we catch a glimpse of it. We don’t see or share in the suffering of other people on a daily basis. Those people, the sick, scared and wounded, are behind closed doors, and we just imagine that they don’t exist, or that they inhabit a land we will never visit, but this isn’t true.

I was driven to the ER by a cab that day, and I could see the driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror, concerned, looking back at me. (It turns out I had a respiratory virus that was making it very difficult to breathe.) I’m sure he could see that I was scared, and gently he began to speak to me, “It is okay, you are going to be alright, my friend, I can see that. You are going to be fine. Okay? No, I do not need your money. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to help.” He smiled at me and nodded his head, “Yes, go now, get better, you have a life yet to lead.”

It was as if a saint had taken me in transit, and his blessing, his encouragement was a beautiful miracle unto itself.