Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia - Part Nine

Lunch time. Today it was to be pulled pork on garlic bread (or garlic toast as they call it these days) and now I was part of the ‘Shuffler’ post-op veteran group. At the table, I was alone, for a short while, until a chipper 40 something banker, who probably went to Western for economics and then to a local branch, until the majestic MBA was earned from Queen’s, and then he worked on the 28^th floor (out of 60) in the Red tower on Bay. He was on his way, as it were. He was earnest, tall, with long fingers, but he had a profound dullness in his smallish grey eyes that told me on the 28^th floor he would remain. Tactically competent, amiable, but ultimately without guile and ingenuity, he would remain pliable in the machinations of the wolves on the 32 floors above. The Top Floors: Where problems were solved, where the counsels and the investors and the preferred stock-changers and the moneyed descendants of the family compact sat in the drammed infused warm edifice that looked out into the beige-soot smeary smog horizon over Lake Ontario. The Top Floors: Where the sky remained a horizontal abode for those who rarely, if ever, had to look down, and surely never had to look up. But the Oakville banker was unaware of all of this; he merely wanted to ask me about the ‘procedure’.

“Well”, I began, “its OK, they drug you, they bring you downstairs, you lie down for a while, then they fix your hernia … it should take less than three hours in total.” …

“They said only about 45 minutes.” He replied.

“You mean the actually surgery, I meant the whole routine, you know, waiting, drugging, fixing, stitching and wheeling takes three hours.” I tried to explain.

“Ok, huh, so three hours and then you are up?”

 I realised I had made a mistake for changing the accepted parameters of discussing the time frame for someone who lacked a certain touch of mental elasticity, a trait common in everyone who want to conform the world to their narrow minded set piece vision, rather than understand the world for what it is: an impossibility that we must adjust to. So instead of interjecting that actually one must add four hours of lying down to the three hour actual operation procedure, I simply replied: “Yes, just the three hours.” He was somewhat mollified but I could sense that he was repressing anxiety under that visage of a man who wanted to be back in Oakville with the sales-guy neighbour, with ribs and beer.  I wanted to be in Guelph, with the sales-guy neighbour, with ribs and beer, but through the haze I knew it would be another 48 hours until my first taste of salted pork and the gallons of hops that followed. We continued, or he mainly, continued the conversation about how one got one’s hernia. He exclaimed he saw a young guy do a ‘lift and jerk’ weight lift and wanted, in a pique of middle-aged anxiety, to emulate the motion. He managed only to place a weight on one side of the bar, and as he tried to pick up the cylindrical weight for the other he felt a terrible tear on his right side and wham! He was brought back to the fact that he was 45 and not on Daytona Beach back in that glorious February of ’89, with Poison blaring in the background and gyrating in front of that good lucking, if somewhat slutty American girl from Akron in the High Hip bikini bottom and the midriff exposed “Ferris Bueller” promo-t-shirt…with Budweiser in hand (or was it Coors light? Jeez, such a long time ago)…and then the horrific realisation came to him that his 14 year old daughter was sexting during spare and perhaps was not actually going to Hot Yoga at night, but somewhere far more nefarious, something he caught a glimpse of through the light blue glow of the device his daughter clanged on incessantly: “meet me with the others at night-stream… we have all the snappies… the Blazer with the whippets are go…u down for it Madison?” or some approximation of the illiterate nonsense that the jacked-up, brainless, sociopathic and narcissistic little punks use throughout their insipid young lives as their parents rogue ahead, so self-involved that they don’t notice the pimples that are not pimples, they don’t notice the empty gaze, they don’t notice that they don’t notice that their kids don’t notice that their teacher’s don’t notice the world collapsing all around us. Lunch was over, and I got up and said “Good Luck” (as if he or I have any input regarding the outcome of the surgery) to the Middling Banker, and I passed the glowing screens of the one’s who will ‘work through’ their stay at the Hospital in the Lounge and up, slowly, painfully, the stairs to the third floor lounge.

            I went back to my room as it was now the time for the first set of metal clips to removed from our wound. I had not yet looked at the gash on my right side for it was too painful to lift, or drop, any part of body without reason to. But, a very large (Height, structure, not Fat), and very good looking nurse, who’s descendants I would argue came from the Gold Coast of Africa implored me to “Drop it like its hot” and I gladly obliged. Upon first looking at my wound I was actually bemused, it was ugly, it was Ugly, and on the ridge were the clips (12 of them) of which 6 were to be removed by the obliging Doctor who was to come soon.

“So, this is fine?” I said to the nurse.

“Oh yeah, no big deal, you are coming along well Mr. Goodwin”.

Then, Doctor so and so came in and removed half of the metal clips and immediately I felt better and the tearing sensation that accompanied every movement began to abate. Lying in my increasingly sanguine mindset, I heard a small commotion, merely a disagreement over procedure, emanating from the room across the hall. A young chap from Alliston was telling his surgeon that: “Hey, this cut is going pretty close to my ‘area’, you know what I mean, what the hell is this??” ..  to which, the surgeon, with a great Indian accent coupled with the dismissive verbal delivery that only a snobbish MD can deliver, replied: “Well, obviously the hernia was slightly larger than you claimed, therefore we made the appropriate adjustments and had to cleave the incisions longer than the length initially scaled, it is of no real concern”.

“Oh really?” came back the young man, “it’s gonna be a concern when I can’t get it up, or can’t have any kids, how do I know that it isn’t [messed] up?”

 “Please sir, we have made all the correct accommodations for your procedure, you will be healed and will continue with your very normal life”

 “What is that supposed to mean…ouch, watch out with those clips eh?”

 At this point, I was trying not to laugh, the interaction was amusing but laughter was an unacceptable outlet because the pain was too great…but at this point, the unthinkable happened, to manoeuvre the discussion beyond simple disagreement over bed-side manner into the realm of absurd hilarity. The poor chap from Alliston sneezed in the midst of his complaints and semi-valid concerns. The scream that followed the sneeze would fit nicely on a scratchy old Halloween sound effect 45, then, as if it was meant to happen, the young bogan punched the wall. I had tears of laughter and lunacy running down my gaunt and black-ridged face and eyes. I heard the doctor leave as the nurse from Cote D’Ivoire soothed the poor Alliston boy across the way. “Fking C—ks—cker!!” was the last missive I heard from him.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia - Part Eight

At 6:00 AM on the 16^th began my first (of two) remaining days in the hernia repair centre and therefore was my first day of ‘Recovery’. An older Jamaican nurse came into the room and said “Rise and Shine Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Roommate, time for your pain medication”, which was, I believe, extra-strength generic Tylenol. We were then told that we were expected at Breakfast that morning. Back downstairs, but now I was not a New Guy, gone was the jaunty quick step, gone was the impatience and annoyance of the ‘smell’ of the lounge. Gone, was the self-confidence of rebellion against the mavens of the hospital, gone was any self-assurance, self-reliance. I was broken like a circus animal. I was now a Shuffler myself: a farty degenerate crank on medication, moving slower than Evolution, thinking about nothing except the next meal time or the prune juice between them. Black lines began to surface under my eyes, I did not understand time or sleep, I would not engage in conversation with others unless prompted. I would acquiesce to every whim and demand from staff and nurse. I was cheerful at the slightest suggestion or activity.

The largest case in point was the “Exercise Routine” at 11:30. If one needed the ne plus ultra example of the nagging suspicion that one was perhaps not in the sanest environment devised, this was it. The PA rang out with a message from the saccharine voiced nurse: “Come, all those who have had surgery, to the second floor lounge for exercise.” Great, I thought, will do, yes, time to walk there. Upon feeling out the best place to manoeuvre I gazed upon our “fitness instructor”. She was a nurse in her late sixties and was to ‘fitness’ what a pedophile would be to ‘early child development.’ She put on Elvis and began to move in ways that were obviously coming from the top of her head. She jerked and manovered in ways Margie Gillis could only dream of. Randomly, she seemed to think, “OK, better move some other way”…she put her arms outstretched and began to rotate and then, OK, now she laterally moved her arms, now she bent over, but, no, oh wait, now she was twisting to and fro…I imagine this actually put back my healing timeframe by three weeks, but in my Tylenol 3 stupor (I also suspect the food was sprinkled with sedatives) I was on the verge of hysterical laughter and popped and twisted with the ‘nurse’ when all of a sudden, the most absurd thing I have ever took part in (and I was at a ‘Pots and Pans’ themed music party in University, and a ‘Dog’ themed university party where two Labradors did battle in a one bedroom apartment with 15 other people): The fitness instructor cued up the theme song from the “Bridge over the river kwai.” The song is a marshal ditty with whistling and drums and fife, and all the stuff that one associates with 1960s war movies set in the Pacific theatre of World War Two. She then extolled us to, and I quote: “Kick up your heels and clap your hands above your head! Yeah! Let’s march around the second floor lounge, keep it up and push yourself!” Thus began the parade of ludicrous madness. I was second in line from an older effeminate Japanese man who really seemed to channel George Takei while marching. He was, as it were, “in the moment.” The gentlemen was kicking his legs, tilting his head like a dancer in a Bolly-wood four hour long monstrosity while laying on the mustard thick with his fleshy hand clapping. I was trying not to laugh as I could feel my abdominal muscles searing painfully in my brain…so I focused on the sights and my movements…”To hell with it,” I thought, “I can march with the best of them.” I tried to goose step and with mixed results, the mixed results being I almost kicked the man in front in the head while at the same time doubling over in shocking idiocy induced pain. The long snaking rubric of madness continued unabated behind the pied piper and now I could see the rest of the line behind me. Grimacing zamboni drivers who were supplementing their old-age security cheques who got a hernia from clearing some ice from the boards were trying to lift their legs in a futile attempt to ‘exercise’, or the bookish civil servant who was trying his best to ape the movements of the nurse, thinking that one must follow “Correct Procedure” without realizing this whole production was based on whim and craziness and had nothing to do with Work Place Safety, or C-456 Forms, or Measured Improvements, or Benchmarks, or Year to Date progress, or Statistics or Stability or Upward Mobility. No, this was relentless nonsense, as his forms and figures were, in the end, also nonsense. I knew all at once that if someone drove up the plush wooded estate and entered the white washed wooden edifice of the hospital and knew nothing about a Hernia Centre and merely watched the nurses interacting with the patients via the PA system about meals or exercise, about seeing shuffling zombie-like patients with empty grey-black eyes, about catatonic like husks of men watching hour after empty, insipid hour of Sports on the HD TV, of seeing this absolutely preposterous spectacle of men and one woman marching to the Bridge over the River Quay or Kwai one would come to an immediate and implacable conclusion: this is a proper Nuthouse. This would have been correctly perceived as a hold-over from the good old days of the proper welfare state era of the just society, when crazies and people who needed a good shot in the arm (as it were) would be fed, housed, and corrected in an edifice catered to the purpose. Would not have this been better than drop in centres and half-subsidized medication depots where homeless men and women thinking that Jesus talked to them through the microwave in the Junior ‘B’ hockey arena visitor lounge could get their Schizophrenia pills? I am not sure, the experience at the Hernia repair Centre has complicated the debate and I was becoming increasingly confused in my politics of care as the days rolled on under watch of staff, camera, stupor and self-regulation (the last was a fleeting notion as I retreated into self-oblivion). The music stopped and sure enough, it was lunch time, the nurse disappeared, the radio was put away, and I was shuffling, empty eyed and empty brained, down into the lunch-room, as I noticed a thirty-something man, well dressed, collared shirt, khakis, as he bound up the stairs almost knocking me over…”Bloody New Guy”, I muttered.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia. Part Seven

The rest of the 15^th was awash in strange and unfocused activity. I remember distinctly disobeying the ‘four hour’ lie down rule, or at least trying to, by telling myself that the hockey game must be watched. I Must represent minority hockey rights (read: not be a Leafs fan) in the TV chamber. I tried to move, a burning pain shot throughout my entire body, a purposeful tearing sensation screeched in my groin…”oh boy, well, I am half way there”…meaning, I was half way to sitting up on the bed, let alone any standing on my own accord or any success in shuffling to the toilet. Sitting on the edge of the bed became a problem immediately…waves, waves of nausea not unlike those created by the eruption of Krakatoa were sent upwards and reverse peristaltic reactions began in earnest…”back down, back down, back down, ok” and I went back to the opiate induced stupor.

Throughout the initial aborted attempt at movement, and all subsequent aborted attempts at movement during those tenuous hours on the 15^th, I could hear braying chatter emanating from the left side of the bed-chamber. My procedure ended at around 3:00 in the afternoon and therefore right in the middle of the first round of visiting hours (2:00 – 4:00). I knew this would present an interesting situation as I was already familiar with the parents of Roommate. He was, as mentioned, a chap of 19 (born in 1992) and therefore still in the bosom of the 21^st century of the Cradle to Grave Hellaparent. He intimated to me that his mother was texting incessantly regarding absolutely everything and anything related to surgery, a hospital, walking, eating, personal hygiene, breathing, moving one’s eyeballs, existing, you name it. They were in the room when I arrived, the parents I mean, and they were really en place, as it were. Roommate was well solidified by Mommy’s insistence that the clothes were well placed in the closet, that the entire table was well engrossed with the personal effects of Roommate. Forget three days in a hernia hospital, this chap was outfitted for a ninety day slog with Wolseley to put down that irascible Riel across the Great North West. You would think he had ten sherpas popping out of his bag with steaming Ceylon tea and a birch bark canoe to paddle down into the OR. Only ten years ago, a boy of 19 would be perspiring with embarrassment at the intrusion, yes, intrusion of mommy and daddy in preparation for surgery. I would probably have received one phone call from my mom…she loves me, on that score I am certain, and I her, but never would she have been so involved with a 72 hour sojourn into the Herniated unknown. But, I imagine in this age of festering narcissism, it never occurred to parents and child that anything was out of the ordinary. I could see a nurse eyeing all of this and muttering to herself: “uh-huh, white boy problems”. Or maybe I am just bitter, maybe I was bitter because no-one called me, no one visited, I am not sure people even knew I was in the hospital. Or, maybe because of years of self-imposed exile and a well-known streak of high-minded misanthropy, coupled with a Total and Unrelenting Hatred of personal communication devices, I could not communicate with anyone, nor really wanted to. I mean, really, what could I articulate in a fog of opiates that could not be inferred by anyone realizing that I came out of surgery only an hour ago. What really would be on the docket of conversation? Let’s see, down to brass tacks over the euro-debt problem, or that latent homosexual optometrist in Syria, how do we deal with such an effeminate tyrant? Or, oh wait, I can’t even sit up!

Which brings me back to the original observation . . . even roommate was now getting annoyed at the shrill-hee hawing of Mommy in the room. After Roommate’s second Tylenol-3..he stated: “Well, I can’t really stay awake here, why don’t you guys head back to the hotel?”…Indeed, I thought to myself, please get out! I was not acknowledged, not really, and this was amusing to me, all I could think of at this point was, aha, yes, I can eat in peace once the nurses come. Come the night. I was in pain, yes, and I was nauseous, yes, but the last thing a man wants to hear is hard-edged bitching from anyone, and luckily, all of that manner of audible tyranny was put to rest as Roommate drifted into a fitful sleep. At this point, the meal cart came in and I enjoyed two sandwiches (Roommate could not keep anything down), a mug of coffee, the best cookie I have eaten up to this point (or so I thought, this was the first proper ‘unhealthy’ desert I had eaten in 50 days, and I was fairly high on the opiates) and raspberry Jello. By this point I thought to myself, “well, it must be around 7:00 PM and I must make my way to the TV lounge”. The time was actually now two in the morning and I realized that I was therefore not apparently conscious after that final bliss inducing swallow of Jello, the room was black, and there was no food tray. At this point, my bladder was explaining to my brain that after such a long relationship with coffee and litres of IV fluid, that it was time to withdraw all funds and close the account. So, it was up and at them time again, and I could barely shuffle into the bathroom…Discomfort was at fever pitch, I was completely nauseous, as one feels after an eight hour Scotch drunk, only to wake up half-drunk, with the room spinning, but also with the urge to pee…so, in this state, I had to sit on the toilet. I have never done this before, and felt Donald Smith look down on me, with those Granite Eye-Brows furrowed and dire, his mouth, hidden behind that mighty beard, pursed in a droop and his Blue-Steel Celtic eyes looking at me with shame and disdain..Yes, I felt ashamed, to pee sitting down for me was a nadir of sorts, a surrender to the mad-house, with the red-heat lamp seemingly filming the whole ordeal and bathing me in rusty embarrassment. After what seemed like three hours (and it may well have been this long) I used the hand rail (!) to stand. I pulled my smock pants up, with the effort usually required to design the CERN cyclotron, and tried not to vomit on the lengthy 4 foot trip back to bed.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia Part 6

As the doors opened to the pre-op room I knew immediately that all manner of deceit and lies were rained down upon us, the unsuspecting patients, to bring us down into the feeding pen, err, pre-op room. To lure us into this false-halcyon Hernia Hospital that was really a den of horror and impropriety, a bloody and turgid riposte of all things good, clear, and serene. The room was at best emanating the light worst associated with twilight, the kind of twilight darkness that looms in late November like the scythe of the reaper…the twilight that forces families to can and pickle, to batter down the hatches and prepare for two to three Canadian months of drunken, darkened depression. The effect of the darkened room was, I would imagine, supposed to elicit a reaction of serenity and calmness in the patient as they were led to their bed. But in me, nothing but jarring uneasiness crept into my brain, something was off-kilter and strange.

The room itself was long and disorienting. There were approximately ten beds on either side of the long hall and each was occupied by men (no women today) in varying degrees of semi-consciousness. The room reminded me of black and white photos from the field hospitals of the Great War. Tidy nurses with harrowed looks in their eyes, soldiers in remiss, pained yet trying to remain stoic with the knowledge that they were convalescing in one of the greatest gaping maws of horror that the world has ever known. I was led by my new nurse, and was laid into bed. So far I was still quite interested by the sights and sounds of the hall and once I was horizontal I looked up into a greasy looking light with thick glass (consummate with the look of a 1960s era hospital) that was auburn grain coloured such as the early dusk sun over the Huron. I looked left and saw the wicked reality, the end game of my raison d’être for being in the Hernia Repair Centre…I saw the operating theatres.

There were five in the hospital but I could only see three, all were a bee-hive of activity with groaning and insensible patients being walked in or wheeled out by rushing aides and nurses, by the moderated staccato commands of the physicians and surgeons….I looked right and saw a patient being led back into bed and the curtain being enclosed around him….”Tell the nurse to keep those metal clamps on the wound for the full duration…how is the pulse rate? Yes, he is stable, but I want him here for observation for at least an hour” said the surgeon to the obliging staff/nurse. The patient moans and I can tell he is fighting the confinement, he sounds like an octogenarian who got more than he bargained for. I thought of my late Papa (my father’s father) and reckoned he was comparable in age to this sorry fellow at the time of his hernia repair and shuddered, not a great thing to go through at any age, but at an age when you have built your whole life and saw the fruits of the labour in the progress of your children’s and children’s children’s lives…of the munificent example you set for all to follow, of the caring and loving wife that you have been married to for sixty years. Only to be reduced to a hacked-open and half sensible hernia patient being harried to and fro by insensitive staff obsessed with the margin, the bottom line, and efficiency. But that is life, and the great wheel cares nothing for the personal experiences of men and women, especially as the cruel task master prepares to extinguish their presence forever. My Papa did survive the surgery, but it was emblematic of the decline, the decline we perceive in our culture, a decline that usually is merely a projection of the knowledge that it is Personal Decline that is the final distributor of oblivion. He was a Catholic, and I miss him dearly, I try to suspend disbelief in a God for the benefit of my sanity, but that practice always fails. It failed in Mass when I was a child, I could never understand forever, the concept, the fact that it was expediently explained by a priest who could not know any more of its heavenly certainty than I, a child of six. I could never understand the purpose of death as a precursor for life eternal, the concept made and makes no sense at all. Why would we not simply be born into forever? Ah, these are troubling thoughts, thoughts that never get easier to remedy, not anyway, with the simple theological maxims of so-called experts or snake-oiled simpletons screeching from auditoriums filled to overflowing with the desperate and the over-extended, the helpless and the hopeless, the ones to whom the snakers revile yet fleece in a demonic orgy of self-congratulation and sublimeless and vulgar approximations of “Do what I am Saying, and Buy what I am Selling or Die Forever in Hell and Pain”. I am not sure what happens, I am not sure at all about many things, and my life’s trajectory reflects this stance.

I thought of all of these things as a nurse broke the spell by giving me three Ativans. I believe Ativan is a sleeping-pill although I am not sure. The drug, in a very insidious fashion, create a false aura of lucidity while in reality destroying all sense and sensibility from being emanated from my lips. The auburn light began to become increasingly glassy, the harrowing twilight began to become rounded and soft, my thoughts began to erode, not dissimilar to the fog of gin prior to the acceptable cocktail hour of five PM. Or when you are expected to attend a night lecture on the Peruvian Liberal experiment of the mid-1980s and in reality you can scarcely walk to the mail-box. When you began to drink beer prior to the concert at ten in the morning when suddenly you realize your grandmother is arriving to supper later and you stare at the frying pan uncertain how, what, and when, to fry and what to accompany in the form of starch or carbohydrate to ensure the polite progressions of conversation to feast, to tea and coffee afterwards. A strange and comfortable stupor in otherwords, that complements a knowledge that something terrible, uncomfortable, and painful is about to happen and you have prepared for it solely by destroying your wits. Or, in this case, having them destroyed by someone else . . .

Eventually, I had the brave idea of emptying my bladder prior to surgery, this was accomplished right after a large and powerful dose of Demerol was administered, via Massive Syringe into my buttocks. “Oh yes, I thought, this will help for surgery…I would hate to have to urinate during the facile repair!”…well I mentioned this to an aide and proceeded to get up…As I began to rise, the line from Todd Rundgren’s song, And all the children sing came to mind immediately: “Ain’t gravity a funny thing?” The ship began to sway back and forth, it was Southern Comfort in Grade 11 all over again. I was legless, the nurse came quickly to usher me into the scarlet lit bathroom and I had a railing to support me as I tried, with the power of concentration that I would imagine Oppenheimer had when the first Atom Bomb detonated or was being developed, to urinate accurately into the toilet, with less success than on the Nevada plains wrought by Scientists of War. After being led to bed, I began further to slip into a knowledge that I was absolutely out of it. But in my mind, the synapses seemed to be sending lucid signals to each other.

Then the Doctor came and I knew then that it was my turn on the table. He was on my left holding one arm up while the anathesiologist (or Nurse Practitioner?) named Anna helped me into a very large and Very bright (or so it seemed) room and I saw the green table, on which I would lay. I began to shiver, very very uncontrollably. Anna (who had the old style Soviet “Chef” cap that their doctors and nurses so proudly wore, I still prefer its stylizations to ours) put a warm blanket on top of me. I immediately thought myself as a basket of rolls being covered by warm cloth prior to being sliced open and buttered, only to be dipped in soup, or stew, or chicken sauce. Then, what at the time seemed like a gremlin, but in fact was probably an aged retired doctor (they called the gremlin doctor ‘so and so’) began to rudely slam an iv drip into my right hand, along with Anna putting on the obligatory index finger pulse monitor. I was on the verge of unconsciousness but was held at bay either by the design of the medication (probable) or by sheer tyranny of will (less probable). Anna began to stroke my head as she said, “Everything will be fine, just relax, why are you shivering?” and another nurse began to hold down my left arm, which maybe was beginning to act restlessly and on its own esteem as the doctor cut in. Well, so far so good I thought as I stared into the large operating lights above the green clothed screen that separated my line of sight with the hernia operation that was taking place. All of a sudden the darkest, the strangest, the most uncomfortable and dirtiest pain I have ever felt was beamed and blasted from deep in my bowels to the pain center in my brain. I pictured Mel Gibson being defenestrated in the ridiculous closing scene of Brave Heart. The pain was absolutely indescribable, things were being manipulated deep in my body, visions of Schwartz’s delicatessen whirled in my mind’s eye…I was the Brisket! How dare the Hernia Hospital ruin my visions and smells and sights of perfection that is a Montreal Smoked Meat Sandwich….and soon my brain was telling my mouth: “ANASTHETIC..MORE MORE MORE MORE..PAIN PAIN PAIN…FIRE BLOOD RAZORS RAZORS RAZORS”….soon my brain told my feet to shoot up in a jagged and uncoordinated movement…soon my mouth did try to speak..and the sounds that came out was: “CROOBLE…CRAN CORAN BLABBB..IMMURGANTRY...Flabble! Flannnn..jerbal…grunnnnnnnnnn”…the surgeons reply…not to me personally of course, was “Ok nurse, please administer more anaesthetic.” Oh yes, as simple as that. Soon the room was Grey…I felt molestation in my abdomen, but now it seemed a faint and benign game of ‘Operation” was being performed with robotic dispassion on my right groin. I was in and out of the picture, the dirty and gritty gray mind-dull encompassed me completely. I could barely hear the radio play in the background and yet could feel the soothing caress of Anna on my head and the side nurse holding down my appendages in order to avoid the surgeon’s hand slipping with scalpel slicing some artery into shreds.

Eventually, after what seemed like ten eons of geo-graphical time rolling out consecutively I began to feel myself, and my right groin specifically, to be sewn shut. It was like a shoe being tied on my body and the Angelic Nurse of the Post-Op (same as pre-op) told me to get up off the operating table. I was completely out of my mind by this point and robotically hopped, yes hopped, to the chagrin of the doctor and Anna, onto the floor and narrowly fell into the wheel chair back to my room. I saw orange Hunt’s Spaghetti sauce like splatter on the floor and on the table…was that me? I thought, was that the disinfectant….but more pressing was the knowledge that I could not hold myself up…the knowledge that I felt as cold as a old Innu matron floating to oblivion, naked, on an ice flow…all of this as I was placed inside the ‘seat-belt’ of the wheel chair and was trying to make small talk (A skill I am utterly lousy at in ordinary situations that now was an impossible feat). While being rolled up stairs…”Thuurrrsss a game on tanaight….habs and Brains…I mean, Bruins…I need ta watch thisssss thingggggg…I don’t need four hours on my back?! Foaaaget it!”…”Oh really?” said the nurse with humourous incredulity and soon I was in bed…filled to the brim with opiates and witnessing Roommate in a similar state with his parents. The operation was over but the Madhouse was coming into its final stage of fruition. My first though lying back in bed was…”That lying Polish MMA Bastard!”

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia. Part Five

Roommate was already asleep as I walked into the double occupancy room that we shared. I was exceptionally lucid and calm, the latter not being a character trait that I am associated with. I undressed, turned out the light and began to think of how relaxed I was about surgery. “Piece of Cake” I murmured to myself as I heard the roommate’s phone vibrate and whirr, probably a late good luck message from his girlfriend. I turned my thoughts to what the Polish MMA chap said at dinner and was again confident about tomorrow’s event. “What would Donald Alexander Smith think?” I asked myself. He would consider the surgery a minor triviality in a lifetime of hard-work, fighting adversity and acquisition through skill and fairness…to die with Stainless Integrity.

Lord Strathcona, after Smith was given a baroncy, is the closest approximation to the Canadian male archetype. He and Pierre Berton are personal heroes of mine. They represent, in my opinion, a disappearing breed of Sangfroid Optimism and Resilience. Smith was a Scot who immigrated to Canada in the mid 19^th century and worked for 25 years in the Labradorean outback where he rose to the top of the HBC. Not only that, he saved all of his pennies and slowly built up majority stock control of the company and with his growing wealth, also managed to finance the building of the CPR. Indeed he drove into the ground the Last Spike (on his second try, he was a Klutz). His intense blue eyes, staring out from eye-brows that could easily anchor two tug-boats, were something to behold. The stare of profound intelligence with a hardened but not unfriendly look of determination…Craichallachie indeed!

Pierre Berton, my Canadian hero of the 20^th century, was also a determined and resilient optimist. He wrote incessantly about the same men and women I admire who built this country from a windswept, rocky, and intimidating claw, into a windswept, rocky, and intimidating community of divergent interests, complex opinion and passions of many kinds. A tapestry of culture that superseded the nascent British antecedent into a profound and truly Canadian continent that only recently has begun to erode by the intellectual truncheon of reaction and pure ‘market forces.’ Market forces that do not echo a grand vision of capitalists as Smith, or of CCF hard working writers as Berton, who both knew personal responsibility was a hand maiden of communal success and not merely a tool for personal, mammon inculcated greed and avarice in the “’ME ME ME’” and everyone else can eat CROW” mentality of the new Libertarian. . . .

All of these thoughts were swirling in my head until the lights came on in an abrupt flash of supreme efficiency. Indeed, the Shaving Lady had come to wake us up. The Shaving Lady was, I believe, a recent immigrant from the Philippines who was friendly and perfunctory. It was 6:00 AM and I was awoken by the neon light above my head (behind the bed on the wall) and the inevitable brilliant supernova that explodes in the retina and the neurons being blasted by the information detailing: “BRIGHT LIGHT..AHHH..SLEEP IS OVER.” “Gooooooood morning Mr. Goodwin, how are you?” said the Shaving Lady as she concurrently sprayed what seemed to be glacial imported water directly onto my groin area from a spray bottle…”Brahhhhhhhh” went my mind as I struggled to answer….”Uh, good good good, how are you?” … “Fine Mr. Goodwin, sorry to rush, but had to get the kids to school and the husband was late from his night shift, so I need to hurry in order to not hinder the first surgery of the day” …. She had a quick staccato English delivery, the diction was not imperfect and she began immediately to begin shaving all of my midsection for the surgery that was to follow. “Okay Mr. Goodwin, you are OK now? The nurse will be in later to take you downstairs” … in my mind I thought I was also ‘OK’ prior to being sprayed half awake and raw shaved but no matter, I was quite OK now, and may have even lost some weight in the process. I also thought about how many people have seen my penis in the past three months, I would argue that at least 5 times more people had seen its middling presence in this amount of time than in the past 30 years of my life (unless there are photos online that I am not cognizant of). The loudspeaker called out at 7:30 AM that aside from those involved in surgery, everyone else was “Welcome to join us in the Lounge for some breakfast!”…the message was always cheerful in saccharine rich voice not unlike the matrons from “Girl Interrupted”..a factor of the nut-house that was becoming all too familiar.

Prior to surgery I was told that I would be the last patient of the day. A fact that was explained because I was apparently the healthiest patient to be operated on that day. Well, this was an interesting development, would the surgeon be tired? I thought to myself. Would the surgeon be thinking about the new girlfriend that he just started dating? Well, as long as the wife didn’t know, who cares right? Would he be worried about the fact that his daughter is not marrying a Sikh…but some Tamil rabble who was not worthy of the substantial dowry of a well established abdominal surgeon! The shame. Distraction…that was the handmaiden of the end of a cycle of routine. Distraction was the trait that ruled the roost of the human mind at the end of day. I am not immune to this harrowing deficiency of the brain…I would often think of the fire-brewed Stone Hammer Dark Ale to be enjoyed after many hours of filing farm insurance claims or of the triple gin and soda after rustling up the pickers on the night shift in the heart-blackening warehouse job in Kingston after a 15 hour day. The difference of course that if my mind slipped into distraction and I mis-filed a claim or short-talked a subaltern in the warehouse the slight could easily be remedied with a file audit or two medium cups of coffee with a makeup-chat respectively. A surgeon being distracted by the confines of the mind at the end of a 25 surgery a day routine could lead to an artery being severed, a testicle being lopped off, a urethra being infected, a bowel being punctured, a level of anathesia being administered at too high, or even more unnerving, too low a level…an instrument being used that was un-sterilized from the last surgery, a groin area being opened on the wrong side, etc etc etc….these were the concerns as I reached for the Toronto Sun in order to distract me from the notion that my surgeon would be distracted during the hernia repair…hoo-boy, I was becoming slightly un-hinged but I quickly put these fears to rest by reassuring myself that the surgeon was a professional, this was not some bush hospital in 1876 Sudan, this was a modern facility, in Canada no less, and I was certain everything was to go according to plan at 2:00 PM, no big deal. I laid on the my bed doing the cross-word as Roommate was interrupted from his 3500th text to his Girlfriend or Hockey-Buddy or Gym-Buddy or Helicopter Mom or Weather Reporter or Professor or TA…(who knows) by the angelic nurse of the pre-op and was walked away with a rather tentative look on his face. It was around 11:30 AM and the obligatory PA system message for Lunch rang over the airwaves in my room (Please join us, except for those with surgery today, for a lunch filled with fellowship in the lounge..etc etc), I was not terribly hungry as I ate five muffins (3 Bran, two Cranberry) at the 9:30 ‘snack and bitch’ the night before and I continued to peruse the Sun with increasing annoyance at the obvious Republican-Populist-Libertarian Drivel that continued to distort reality and convince the every-man to continue to vote against his interests, to continue the ‘forward’ march into free-avarice oblivion that will destroy the social-contract, will destroy the boring, plodding, prudent, yet incredibly fiscally and socially successful Canadian model of private-public synthesis that marked our greatness for 150 years. No no no, why worry about the collapsing of the Ontario manufacturing sector or the surgical sausage incremental politics that are eroding our freedoms? Why worry about that when we can be amused and emotionally invested in the big If…could Toronto Mayor Rob Ford really lose the weight in his self-administered challenge? Yes, it seems that Distraction is the constant in all affairs these days, although some things are never new under the Sun.

As my mind was melting at the asinine incredulity of today’s idiocy in all levels of public and private life, the Angelic Pre-Op Nurse (I forget her name) came into the room and told me it was my time to be brought Downstairs to the Pre-Op area. She smiled with a strong caring apprehension, not apprehension in the worry that my procedure, and that of all the other patients would go awry, but with a apprehension of profound and genuine empathy…this nurse was the Real Deal, she obviously truly cared about her charges or patients (or she was an actress worthy of high acclaim) and she gingerly yet gently brought me downstairs while concurrently telling me what was about to happen. First, once we arrived downstairs, I was to be placed in a comfortable bed and would be administered ‘medication’, after which, she stipulated the time frame would be about 35 minutes to an hour (was I ordering a Pizza?, I thought). Then I would be brought to the operating table for the ‘simple’ hernia repair that would itself take ‘around fifty minutes’ to complete. So, the sojourn seemed to be a rather easy affair, the Polish MMA guy must have been correct in his debrief about Surgery Day, all was to be well and good. We were in the elevator (the nurse and I) and she pressed the button to the floor of the first floor lounge but pressed the button that opened the back of the elevator, the button that required the key to operate, the opening salvo of the Surgery was ominous and unsettling.

Perdition: Thy name is Hernia. Part Four

I was feeling confident about surgery the following day and decided to go back to the third floor Shufflers lounge and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs face-off against the exciting 2012 edition of the Calgary Flames. There are two observations to be made about the TV culture in a Hernia Hospital. The first is that I would not want to be a female patient within the confines of a hospital that caters to Hernia repair exclusively. The reasoning is simple, men suffer from a much greater instance of Hernias (my source is observation, please refer to a medical journal, and/or I will insert proof later), I would reckon that the ratio is 30 men to 2 women. This makes for female consternation with regards to TV watching, to the scent of the place, to the manners at the dinner table, to the overall functionality of the place: it caters to men. The TV problem really takes precedence over all other facets of male-dominance in the hospital. The only thing on was sports, it was absolutely the only thing that was apportioned onto the luxurious 65 inch digital High definition screen. I must confess that I am not a die hard sports fan, I like Hockey, I like skiing, some soccer, figure skating (Yes I do), proper boxing, and most individual sports. But not religiously, not in the manner that others do. I don’t analyze the standings, I don’t know immediately who was traded where, I don’t know about the assault charges or the drug addictions (although that would be interesting), I thought March Madness had to do with exams. So, it was with bemusement that I took in the real face, the true essence of the sports fan, but more than that, I witnessed the Leafs fan in action.

Back to that later, firstly though, the women who ventured into the TV area of the lounge usually lasted for, well, 35 seconds if they did not have the usual electronic appendage in the form of blackberry or Ipad. She walks in, gives the look around, no one acknowledges her presence, she asks, “So, whats on?”, ”…” , “uh, OK, well, hmm, just like at home eh? I don’t have the remote! (Nervous Laughter)”, “…, yeah, you know how it is with men (Confident laughter of men overcompensating/ trying to be apart of the ‘brotherhood’ of powerless fools)”, “ah, well (sigh, she resigns herself to her personal glowing screen and/or moves into the table and chair section)”. I say nothing, I acknowledge nothing, I look around quickly, I see failure and fraudulent bonhomie, I see men with no power, I see women longing for a strange likeness, something to validate their presence in this enclave of stench and corroded dreams. The husbands of the women eventually come, with their sons in their hockey coats, and the husbands, the visiting husbands, now take their place in the ring of hockey watching, in the ring of silence, the stubborn, bitter silence, that the wife never bought into, that this hapless family, dad driving the forklift between midnight and eight, thinking and planning for his sons eventual success in making it to the ‘show’, sometimes fuming at the son “why didn’t he take that pass right…jeez. I flooded the bloody backyard and I ran plays for five hours…and I work ten hours a day, all for Todd and Blake to screw up?! They won’t make it past ‘C’, c’mon!” All the while the wife comes home after taking calls at the insurance company, taking the “Yogurt Challenge” or some other insipid grasp at meaningless and vapid self-improvement…watching her life vanish before her eyes, the moment never even passed, it was never there. And so, she sits now, at the card table in the Hernia Hospital, playing solitaire, and staring out the window while her husband, not a patient, stews in front of the Leafs.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a hockey team in the National Hockey League. Their history, to a certain extent, is illustrious, but moreover, the team has been unlucky. Unlucky in management, unlucky in outcome, unlucky in coaching, unlucky in mentality, and most importantly, due to, or the reverse of these former facets of unluckiness…the team is unlucky in their fan base. Yes. I grew up on the West Island of Montreal, a veritable enclave of middle-class meritocracy and a joyful mix of Francophone, Anglophone and smatterings of Allophone 15 minutes west of downtown. I knew one Leafs fan growing up, a great friend and a hot tempered man of Irish extraction now living in Chicago, and I am not certain he remains a Leafs fan now. But really, the majority, and I mean 90%+ of my contemporaries were Habs fans..(another beast that has recently begun to turn ugly and bitter). Some friends, those who liked to turn the screws of the Habs fans..were Nordiques or Bruins fans…both were considered maladjusted contrarians and welcomed with open hearts into our circle of friends. Anyway, the point is that I knew very little of Ontario culture, and the culture of “Leafs Nation”. I have lived in Ontario in a more or less permanent fashion since the fall of 2003 and have, for the most part, tolerated the experience with fairly moderate enjoyment (I believe this is the default setting for living here).  I was friends with Art-Types and Music Geeks, and my best friend from university, like me, is a current affairs/ Personal Computer game nut and we watched sports at no time. Therefore, my experiences with the Leafs fan began only in earnest when I moved, with my girlfriend at the time, to Guelph, the town in which she grew-up.

But, really, only at the Hernia Hospital did I witness the Leafs fan in his true habitat, in his true essence. Diane Fossey would have swooned at the prospect of the experience. The game was part-way through as I lumbered gingerly onto a corduroy easy-chair and began to soak up the madness. “Ah”, I thought to myself, “excellent chairs, really plush, but not too soft, not much give, perfect really” and suddenly a man began to have, or so I thought, a terrible fit of Tourette’s: “For F__K’s Sakes..do it right you f---ken f_g_ot! Godamned fkin idiot, whadda piece of s—t…nice one Burke, great fkin job there, ya fkin f-g!!”…Whoa, what was that? A smallish red-faced man, sporting the accent of the eastern reaches of Ontario, I would say he worked in a warehouse between Brockville and Cornwall, was spouting these incredibly ridiculous and abhorrently offensive epithets at the passive and indifferent television. Then I realized, in my mirth regarding my chair, that the Flames had scored, I believe Cammalleri provided the play or set-up, and the leafs were down a goal, or something like that. He was favouring his groin, this crazed maniac, but the grimace on his visage was beyond mere pain from surgery, no, this was Twenty Year Hate, Twenty Year Bitterness….he could not have been older than me, that is to say, 31…and I would say he was happy for the first ten years of his life . . . Until that one fateful day when his grandfather and he went to the Maple Leaf Gardens for a night that would change everything, it was the winter of 1991 and the Leafs beat the North Stars 6-1. The young chap from between Brockville and Cornwall became, therefore, essentially possessed, in the demonic sense, by the demon ‘Leafs Fan’. They came close in those years, to, you know, Winning It All, as they say. But they never did, and for the next Twenty Years, picture the mug-shot composites that the police use in Oklahoma regarding the downward spiral of meth-use. The boy’s face began to harden into a grimace of absolute sour-bitterness. The Leafs fan, not the casual fair-weather fan who trades stocks in the day and rents expensive women from the Belorussian consulate at night in Toronto. No, the real fan is the guy who works a crap job for 80 hours a week with no pension, a Sour Bastard without equal. Other true blues began to start weighing in with equally incisive commentary and soon I was surrounded by a maelstrom of seething men, screaming, grunting, gesticulating, bashing, and abruptly leaving from the scene. I tried to hide my amusement and horror and I think I succeeded, my chair was in a darkened corner of the room, and besides, I was still one of the new guys, and my opinions would count for nothing in any event. However, the dark cloud of insight and realization began to pour into my mind, as it always does, and I thought as I quickly looked over at the 500 piece puzzle box with frayed corners and the ‘bookshelf’ with battered condensed reader’s digest novellas. I flashed back to the angry, bitter, and radically unhappy hockey watchers…and the insight came in strong and true: This is a Madhouse. I was to ascend out of my own chair, I was the last one in the lounge, or at least the TV area, and walked back to my room. Preparing for sleep before the Big Day, or as some of my follow patients would probably call it, Game Day.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia Part Three

The Hernia Haven’s interior had not changed since it was inaugurated in 1970 and that did not bother me. In fact, I enjoyed the atmosphere immensely until I realized that the medical technology had not progressed either . . . First came another blood test, but since they had already performed a test on me in January, I could see those results. Not a very good situation for a Paranoid Super-Hypochondriac. Well well, my White blood cell level was .1 too low!! IT WAS FLAGGED. Oh no, not the usual reaction, such as, “hmm, maybe I cannot get surgery treatment,” for me, the reaction was “NO! CANCER! CANCER! CANCER! CANCER! I have CANCER! This is soooo typical, just so typical…go in for surgery, end up with BLOOD CANCER...I smoked that long?! It couldn’t have been that long! I am too young, this is not real. I’m fine, I’m fine...hooo…ok ok ok ok.” I mentioned this to the nurse who was too busy obtaining more blood to notice my green pallored skin and profuse sweating. “No no no old boy, mustn’t give away the game here..SANGFROID, yeah, be cool, they cannot know your possible condition.” Another blast came through though. I had lost 24 pounds in 40 days and immediately I received a mug for the ‘accomplishment’ which read “I did It!” on its side. I am fairly certain this mug is usually given to harried and nose-grindstone men who take no quarter but was finally brought to bear by a wife who poured all the Canadian down the drain saying “Just once Harold, just once, you need to do this for me! Get that weight down, fix that damn hernia and stop bitching about the Leafs!” So I, a borderline maniac with a pulse rate of 150 after looking at the blood report, smiled and said to the nurse: “Well you know, it’s a New Year and everything, haha, good excuse to get into shape.” A knowing smile as a response, a promise of a soup and sandwich after the admission procedure and by god, I was on my way.

Hernia Heaven has three levels. The main or second level holds the ‘public’ area: the main reception, the waiting room for all of the initial prospective patients who need check-ups and after noticing the price for the stay, twenty percent begin to express agitation and proceed to waddle out of the hospital as indignant as an obese flier denied three plane seats for the price of one bottom. Some are barking out orders for getting the ‘deal’ done, as if they are back in the corner office, looking down at the merciless crawl of the United Nations of Toronto, “No Assan, not twenty percent! I told those greedy bastards 19.899…do you get the difference?? That is a three million dollar margin! You want chicken feed!? No…I want a 7:45 tee-time, you know how the sun is at the Granite! You call him an ‘Asper’?! Jesus….he can’t run a treadmill!”. Quite interesting stuff if you think about it . . . The lower lever holds another ‘lounge’ which houses a Tavern Shuffleboard table (another hold over from the 70s. It’s actually a very fun game, the only other place I have seen this contraption was in a pub in Chester Nova Scotia, which I would recommend to anyone in the town to visit, and in a tavern in Westfort ON, which I would not.) The lounge also had a piano and an acoustic guitar…although I must confess the artistic types had languished into oblivion, I would have liked to have seen the lounge in 1973, yep, there is Arlo on the Guitar…shame about the Hernia though, he really should have not tried the Streaking Leopard position with Shanie that night….and, oh snap, there is Rick on the Piano, speed-balls and the Big Pink marathon sessions caught up with him, and that last bassline was once strum over the line. “No more Cane on the Brazzos,” that was a classic night in the Hernia Lounge, Rick, Arlo, and Randy (what a bore!) reminiscing about the CN Festival Express (Randy always tries to pretend he was at the venue…at least this was before the radio show), about you know, Janice, the Texas Mickeys, the smoke, the fire…all gone.

But back to 2012 where the lounge was filled with glowing screens of various sizes, bleeps, personalized ring tones, scratches, grunts, murmurs, furrowed brows, PRESSURE. No music, no smiles, no laughter, no conversation…hard looks.

Next to the lounge lies the ‘cafeteria’ where once admitted, the patient receives his/her initial soup and sandwich, and thereafter dinner, breakfast, lunch, and the 9:00 PM snack. I sat here after kissing my wife and daughter goodbye and thoughtfully enjoyed my first taste of bread in 40 days (Turkey and Lettuce, no cheese, no mayo .. this was not a choice) and an excellent Potato and Carrot pureed cream soup with a mug of coffee and the silent call of past glories and strange adolescent memories that tend to always emerge in these moments of bizarre loneliness and sterile surroundings. The sandwich went down easy with a cup of black coffee brought to the table by a young chap with two scars running length-wise on the left side of his neck…hmmm, I would imagine that the supple life of coffee pouring may not echo the previous life of distributing other forms of stimulants, it also could simply been a case of misadventure, a mere glance, benign in intent, to a hard ruffian on the other side of Isabella. Then, in his mind’s eye it seemed like an eternity, the other youth charged across the street, and the tell tale glint appeared in the sunlight, the awful reflection of cheap Chinese stainless-steel in the midday sun and ‘whisssshh’, two quick flashes and my kind ‘coffee-man’ was on the run, blood leaping from his neck as he screamed and lurched towards the nearest clinic. Or not.

These musings come and go, and I soon realized that my orientation was about to occur on the third floor, the realm of the shufflers, or patients of the 7500 per year hernia procedures. I took the stairs, unconsciously relishing the last 24 hours or so of relative freedom and sound mobility. The stairs were carpeted and I soon came in contact with the lumbering masses of men (and some women) slowly moving up and down the vertical thoroughfare. Their eyes were strained, but the Sangfroid of these chaps was encouraging, it was similar yet certainly not equal too (not by a long long long mile) the congregation of men in wartime, everyone knew their number could be up at any time, their boots and puttees were filled with blood, grime, rot, grease. The conditions were rat infested, they were in constant discomfort, but so was everybody else, so why bitch about it? Well, this was the third floor, this was the place where I would remain, more or less, for the next 80 or so hours. The first thing that I could discern was a scent, it was different from the usual hospital variety of pot-pourri, and it was unmistakable. Feet, or more precisely, the scent of stewing and unwashed feet, the kind of scent that would greet the industrial bowling shoe cleaner or the scrub boy at the local mosque, the thick musk of feet coupled with the faint scent of anti-septic and the bowels of 72 hours of opiate induced constipation (more on that later).

I could see the nurse’s station, manned, as it were, by tough, semi-sterned looking hearty women who would not be unlike their counterparts in the doukabour communities of the northwest or the Hani peoples of the interior Chinese province of Yunnan. These women were hardened by years of dealing with cranky, farty, delirious, elderly, diabetic, filthy, sloven, leaking, foolish, absent-minded, irascible, idiotic, sometimes bigoted men who sometimes were grateful, sometimes thankful, but mainly stupid and brutish. Some men demanded cigarettes right after surgery, or stormed out of the hospital still bloodied and in their pathetic smocks, crying out that the whole thing was a scam and they deserved better, only to find themselves back in the hospital one hour later, somewhat repentant but thoroughly embarrassed by their childish explosion of infantile pouting. If anyone wants to smash the union of nurses or diminish their importance, or cut into their salaries or treat them like simple minded hand maidens to the physicians they should spend a week in any hospital but specifically spend a week in the Hernia Repair Centre and perhaps they will realize the absolute angelic disposition these women possess to deal with the horrors of the XY on a day in and day out (really, night in and night out as well) basis and will give them the respect and the Money they soundly deserve. I will be out there if any government (I give none any quarter) tries to cut into the nurses, they are amazing and I will gladly stand shoulder to shoulder with these granite souled women against the rising tide of the neo-libertarian madness that has hijacked any semblance of common civil synthesis and balance that once sustained this country though thick and thin.

But back to the third floor and the orientation. It was 4:30 PM and the ‘new guys’, e.g., the bright eyed, naïve chumps, resplendent in dress shirts, belted pants, and a haughty disposition (thoughts of the new guys were that of disgust at the unwashed veterans: “Jeez, can these guys put on some clothes, or have a shower for goodness sakes!?). The nurses shooed out the old guard and forced them to turn off the soccer game they were engrossed in watching (‘C’mon’, ‘the orientation doesn’t even matter!’, ‘who cares about the TV, they can’t even hear it’ came from the mouths of the grisly post-surgery patricians) and told us about the next day: the day of reckoning. We could not eat after midnight, no big deal for me, since I was basically not eating at all for the four or five weeks during my ‘reduction diet.’ We could not get up after surgery for four hours (‘pffft’, I thought, what nonsense, this is non-invasive, I’ll be up in 20 minutes, I have to watch the habs play the bruins’). We had to go down-stairs for ‘pre-op’ 1.5 hours prior to surgery in order to be sufficiently non-sombulent for the ‘harrowing’ surgery (‘ya right’ again I dismissed the procedure as nothing but a mosquito sting), and of course, we would be shaved and scrubbed in the AM of the Day (‘hee-hee’ went some of the boys). And that was it, we were left to our own devices until dinner was called (5:30 SHARP as I recall). Ah yes, the first meal, the chance to speculate on the next day with the new guys and also to build ‘fellowship’ with the grisly guys in track-suits and baggy work-out clothes, although there were some, ahem, ‘Mediterranean’ types in seemingly gold stitched house coats who talked into their cell-phones…Think Frank D’Angelo slanging powerdrinks at Copps Coliseum and you approach the comical disposition (inadvertent) of these legitimate businessmen.

My roommate, a 19 year old gym enthusiast from the Ottawa region, sat down and tucked into a pan-fried white fish filet (actually surprisingly excellent, as was all of the food at the hospital) with three flash-frozen white buns (think Swiss Chalet) heated just right, watching the butter melt into these buns was similar to first seeing Scarlett Johansson in Ghost-World, I was transmogrified, I was titillated, I was in a state of sensuous delirium that I sensed the Bodhisattva escalating me towards the outer rim of nirvana, and the first bite, well, that was it. Between trying to hide my ecstasy of the White Bun, and my glee at watching some of the gentlemen in their house-coat finery, my roommate got into brass tacks with one of the old guard at our table. He appeared to be a MMA fighter of Polish extraction (we all had name tags) from Toronto. He was going home the next day, so he was at the end of his cycle, tour, or stay. Roommate asked him what all us bushy-tailed new guys were thinking about, the Surgery. “Well” started Polish-MMA, “its no big deal, you know, they kinda drug you up, and they walk you into the OR and put you onto the table, you are really out of it and boom, its done, back to your room and you just sleep it off, not too bad.” Well then, that’s a relief! The curious factor throughout his explanation of how the whole operation was ‘no big deal’ was that he was holding his lower side, he kept on adjusting his loose gray sweat-suit, he had a slight grimace on his face when he reached for the pepper, his eye-brows were slightly furrowed and his eyes were tinged with the slightest evidence of blood-shottedness. At the time though, I thought not much of it, I just thought we was a ‘junk-adjuster’ that is ubiquitous in the MMA or jock trade. Not a slight mind you, just a personality trait consummate with the breed. At that, dinner ended and we saw the MMA-Polish shuffle (another red-flag ignored, hmm, maybe that’s how 911 flew under the radar, jeez, so this is what it’s like to get it wrong in the CIA) off into the ante-chamber, or the music ‘lounge’ previously explained. Roommate and I were now almost cocky about tomorrow, we thought this was going to be an absolute cake-walk, in, out, I be back jogging 10KM in less than a week…Hoorah!

Perdition thy Name is Hernia: Part Two

But back to the Drive to the Hospital…

The morning of the 14^th of February 2012 began like most others during the fasting period prior to my hernia ‘repair’. A Seven Minute boiled egg, no salt, no bread, no butter, nothing but white and yolk. To be honest, it really was an excellent break from the countless bowls of salted oatmeal. Two mugs of black coffee and a nice 4027 Pink Grapefruit would have to fuel me until arriving at the “Hernia Repair Centre” just north of Toronto.

I was excited, not for the minor surgery (so I envisioned), but for eating bread. Yes, no mystery here, no backward or double entendre..I missed bread. Toast, rolls, cookies, buns, monte-cristos, rye, black bread, CAKE, SQUARES, YULE LOGS. Basically, anything made out of ground golden grains, I didn’t care which one, I didn’t care how it was put together! A Bagel? Sure! Unleavened Matzo? Why Not!

I also missed Pasta, another beautiful and unmistakably Bready accoutrement to any upstanding wine fuelled meal. And, you know perfectly well, as does anyone with any sound and strong north American sensibility, what best accompanies pasta…Garlic Bread. Yes, two bread offerings with one delicious and practical plate of food. These thoughts plagued me as I drove up the 401 to meet my fate. Thoughts, that really were benign and happy, ran round and round in my head. Not once did my usual Pessimism and Doubt, and Hate and Paranoia set in…in such thoughts as, “Hmmmm, I wonder if I am underestimating the surgical procedure?” or “Hmmm, are the surgeons trained in North American Medical Schools or at the South Manila School for Paediatric Para-Psychology?” or “Was it just me, or did the hospital website seem a little too ‘Experimental MS procedure’ and not enough ‘stolid medical claims backed up by peer-reviewed journals?”…Nope, just this recurring mantra: “Bread, Ice Cream, Chocolate, Beer, Wine, Scotch, Taco flavoured chips, Chips, Peanuts, Rum and Coke, Popcorn, Hot Dogs, Hamburgers! Poutine! Cake! Root Beer Float!”

I listened, with my wife and daughter, to Steely Dan. A wondrous band that echoes deeply and resolutely all of my prejudices and inferences about all things and twists such prescient musings with musicianship that is rarely matched. Good driving music too. The bass-line from ‘Peg’ rattling out and bouncing soundly, that only a Black Man (Chuck Rainey) on Bass can do (I don’t care if that is a racist statement....although not all black men can or should dance, just watch Monique…er, I mean Ice Cube, try and C-Walk on the ‘Up in Smoke’ documentary, and you will know what I mean). Those thoughts of food and lazy conversation filled the car-ride…the usual banter: crapping on the bad-drivers, railing against ‘texting’ in the car (The horror!), stupid merging lanes, Delivery Vans, the usual questions and complaints about the GTA such as ‘This monstrosity goes all the way to London, you know that’s happening, it’s totally going to happen in ten years.” Until suddenly, just after passing a huge Buddhist temple (we are talking Forbidden City Dimensions) with massive Chinese Characters written on a football length grass mound (reminded one of driving into Pyongyang) we pulled into the hospital grounds. The grounds formerly owned by a Globe and Mail publisher from the 1930s….A massive, plantation like mansion (similarities that would expand from mere architectural associations).

Yes, we had arrived at The Hernia Hut. I had been there before of course, as my preliminary examination fell in early December. I was looked over by a youngish homosexual surgeon, with immaculate hands and a finely honed moustache. He was impatient, and exclaimed that I was to lose five pounds prior to February or that I may be ‘refused service.’ Yes, my weight as my credit. As explained, I was put on a diet that emphasized the absolute negation of carbohydrate intake. This diet lasted forty days. I did not drink pop; I did not eat anything that I enjoyed. By day thirty-five of canned tuna or, god forbid, that grimy, greasy, sludgy, nastiness known as sockeye canned salmon, I was ready to commit all manner of atrocity to eat a hamburger, or to soothe my white rage with pint after pint of F+M’s Harvest Ale.

The break from beer was the hardest, most arduous task… We are talking about Western World problems, and quite frankly, they should not elicit any sympathy from any reader. The purpose of this project is to tease, to amuse, to formulate fun in the minds of an increasingly robotic, boring, placid, tepid, white rice, clear brothed, ‘team-building’, nanny-state inculcated species of post-human mediocrity. I will state now, and will state in the future: Reject the 21^st Century.

More on that later and back to the beer problem. As anyone who knows me can attest, to paraphrase an American writer of the last century, I have a “powerful thirst for the hops.” That would redefine the meaning of understatement, would expand the definition and nuance of understatement into a realm not yet known. To wit: A black hole to gravity as my magnetism to hops would approach a preposterous understatement. The thought of pints of beer danced elegantly in my mind at first, yet by the end, approached the fever of an Afghani riot in response to a garbage bag full of Korans having been burned by a mindless and ‘satanic infidel’ named Fred after a night of nachos and diet-Pepsi at Delta-Charlie District Camp 6, Kandahar. But, as I entered the Hospital on the 14^th I was ready for any manner of food and drink, calm and placid, time to get this thing out of the way. My next four days were to be woven by madness, blinding and masked pain, delirium, fear, doubt, paranoia, and the NHL.

Perdition: Thy Name is The Hernia Hospital

                                                        Perdition. Thy Name is Hernia

The 401 was filled with jumpy, illiterate texters as I realised that I had finished forty days of fasting, walking, hating, seething, and sitting cold and strayed from any semblance of solid drink, food, and thought that had usually placated my red hot madness in the face of some stupid obstacle that was brought forth by gas, or movement, or dancing, or by birth, or by shifting, by carousing, by reaching, by looking, straining, pouring, catching, or by bending, planning, grabbing, or doubting, by shouting, stirring, smoking, drinking, crashing, falling, punching, kicking, stabbing, screaming. By whatever means necessary to bring about the hernia.

The hernia. The hole in the abdominal wall. A ridiculous evolutionary runoff manifested for absolutely no good reason at all. A crass pulling demon totally unnecessary at any age. But especially at an age in a person’s life filled absolutely to the brim with failed aspiration and false self-censorship. This context is not relevant however, as any fly-choked child of any non-North American domicile will demonstrate. No matter, it happened in the autumn of 2011, after an abrupt fall out from a milque toast Master’s program at a Downtown University. A fashion filled menagerie of failed trusts and remote facilitation of easy tongued semi-professors in the climb towards tenure and empty skulled pan-humanists who believe initials bring forth true knowledge and tweet worthy insights into the predicament of those suffering the 21^st century anomie of “I know all about facilitation and the Israeli apartheid…and like, shit man, it was a total bummer about Jack.”

I don’t really care. Nor do I approve of any of the recent crop of politicians. I do not return in earnest from any trip with the wind of change, nor the paper of solidity. 

This situation has made the hernia a total necessity in order to ensure that a wave of strong bitterness and sobriety fell deeply and darkly on the winter of 2012.  Along with a total and complete aversion to public communication, thus making my inroads towards my hernia induced project of "giving back" to my city a complete exercise in selling shoes. Simultaneously, I knew the real reason was a half hearted attempt at finding employment with the city in general, e.g: a good benefit package, a career . . . I knew the remuneration was to be poor, but why not? I would work in the archives! Away from the soiled firmament of society, away from the chattering idiots replete with all manners of personal technological appenditures made up of precious metals mined dangerously by underpaid and desperate men from places they purport to care about. To actually marvel with a straight face, at a model globe of the Globe and tell their kids that “well, you know Gaia, we must be better stewards of this thing, we kinda hafta be, you know, like, really responsive to the needs of all of the various and equal demands on this creature”..all the while, rationalising and translating this nonsense into their mutual equity funds on even kilter with the purchase of foreign sovereign bonds that may increase their risk of exposure.

But, Back to the Drive to the Hospital…