Toronto General ER

The ER at the Toronto General, or anywhere in this city for that matter, is utter bedlam.

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.