Salt of the earth

I've been trying to figure out a way to describe last Sunday night without sounding like a total snob. On Sunday afternoon, Diane and her son took me out for my first spin with the wheelchair. It was both horrifying and exhilarating: horrifying to think I'd come to need a wheelchair, and exhilarating to lumber along the sidewalk in the spring sunshine, and feel the breeze on my body, and get gouged at the Big Carrot. It felt very freeing. Most people in stores were kind and addressed me to my face. And, most important, the chair (with an Obus lumbar-support attachment placed upside down to prop up my shoulder blades) seems to be comfortable to sit in and doesn't make my back feel worse. Still, perhaps because of the chemo, or perhaps because I'm lying around too much, I felt seasick both in the car and in the chair.

And then pains began shooting from my Porta-Cath site down my arm. I went home and phoned the home-care nurse, who said I shouldn't be able to feel the Porta-Cath at all, but since the morning I had become very conscious of the tube in my neck vein and I'd noticed it hurt a bit when I rolled over in bed. The incision was a little redder, too. The nurse suggested I head to Emergency. So Diane and I gritted our teeth and she drove me to the hospital.

We were there for the expected five hours. And the scene in the waiting room was like something from a bad sitcom. Somehow we got seated next to four pathologically friendly, talkative people. They were lovely and kind, but I found my urban reflexes completely at war with my small-town background. The more they said I had lovely skin and their dad had survived cancer and where was I from and what was my name, the crosser I became. There was a very well-preserved and clearly lonely 80-year-old woman with a walker who was hemorrhaging; to call her gregarious would be an understatement. Then in walked a man my age who was visiting from a smaller city with his 13-year-old son, who had twisted his ankle. Finally a man in his early 70s who said he'd been an entertainer (and he did look awfully familiar) joined our little gang.

The man with the son was a clone of my late and lamented uncle, who would talk to anyone and wanted to be their best friend within five minutes of shaking their hand vigorously, slapping them on the back and asking all manner of semi-personal questions. (It didn't help that when he initially saw me from behind, he asked Diane if I was her son, but when I turned around he decided Diane must be my daughter, though she's only seven years younger than I.) When he got wind that I was a writer, he became obsequious to boot, which I hate. I felt a little like Steve Martin bunking in with John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, though the guy was well-intentioned and good humoured, and appeared to be a devoted and affectionate father. After he'd shaken my hand numerous times, and sat practically on top of me, I went to the washroom and scrubbed my hands, only to find he'd sent his little boy to hold my hand and help me walk back to my seat. I'd never felt so conflicted in my life. It was such a sweet gesture, but I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE EXPOSED TO GERMS!

The entertainer began trading bad jokes and riddles with the 13-year-old, and then told us a long and sad tale of taking his wife from pillar to post with various medical complaints, only to be rejected, lied to, repeatedly misdiagnosed and hospitalized for months, whereupon she finally died. He seemed to have been a gentle and attentive husband and nurse (had served as a medic in the services), and I felt for him. But his story was soooooo depressing; by the time he was through, I had visions of myself meeting a similar fate, but without the loving husband to nurse me.

It bothered me that the poor 80-year-old woman was all alone in Emerg without one of her children, but one of the main reasons I had trouble dealing with her life story was that her voice was so soft and the Coke machine made so much noise, I couldn't hear her. I just nodded and smiled grimly as I watched her lips move. That's as much a mark of my own hearing loss as anything, I suppose; I've always had trouble hearing people speak in noisy rooms.

Diane was relaxed and friendly in the face of this onslaught of human connectedness, and normally, although I'm more reticent with strangers than she (I learned to be after I left Massey; or maybe that's why I left Massey), I would have been friendlier. I detest snobs, and I hate being thought of as one. I've always felt that when I moved to Toronto, I learned to act more Torontonian than the Torontonians, but deep down I felt my friendly, small-town demeanour was still intact. Maybe I'm wrong.

But I was not at my best. I was terrified that my catheter was about to explode in a staph infection, which would go straight through the tubing to my heart and kill me, and my low-grade nausea made me just want to sit still and be quiet. Plus after three hours it was hard to find a comfortable sitting position. Most of all, my habitual cheeriness in the face of what I've come to think of as my calamity tends to dissipate when I'm in the Emergency room. I become overwhelmed by the idea that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a hospital, that I'm going to pick up germs and end up like my cousin (who is recovering, thank God), that my life has been reduced to one big medical crisis. It's funny, I don't feel that bad when I'm anywhere else in the hospital; just in Emerg.

Finally, I asked Diane to get me out of there, and she urged the attendants to find me a room to lie down in. I had naively thought that if a 51-year-old woman walked in with chest pain shooting into her arm, she would be attended to quickly, but I was wrong. I would also have thought that a 13-year-old boy with a sprained ankle would not be made to sit for four hours with no attention; I would have thought they'd have given him a bag of ice and told him to elevate his foot and then made him wait for four hours. Instead he was limping around on it. They probably had to cut his running shoe off in the end.

Another two hours in an examination room and a chest X-ray resulted in a diagnosis of nothing. The doctors and nurse were great, and said it's likely that some people feel some discomfort with a foreign body in their chest. Makes sense. I went home and did what I should have done when I was deciding whether to get the Porta-Cath or the PICC line: instead of Googling Porta-Cath vs. PICC line, I Googled "Porta-Cath hurts." Sure enough, I came up with blogs and discussion forums in which several people claimed their Porta-Caths were uncomfortable. The pains are quite infrequent now, though it still feels yucky.

I feel ashamed that I was angry at my sick companions in Emerg, but I really wasn't feeling well, and I had a meltdown once I was alone with Diane. At 10 p.m. we got out of the hospital, went across the street to Fran's and had a terrible meal with terrible service. But the Pollyanna moment was that it was the first time in many weeks that I'd been able to just go out to a restaurant with a friend, and that felt nice and normal. Since then I've been to another restaurant with my wheelchair, and it helped a lot.