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!”
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