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 A tapestry of culture that superseded the nascent British antecedent into a profound and truly Canadian continent that only recently has begun to erode by the intellectual truncheon of reaction and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.