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!