July 25: Hospitals

 Tell you what, friends and neighbours. It's a good thing I don't have a real bad tummy ache right now. If I did, I'd have no choice but to tough it out. I'd have to go home and down a package of Eno. If that didn't work, I'd have to jump in my car and hightail it up to Hawkesbury, which is the closest 24-hour ER to where I am.

Now there is a hospital in the town where I live, but it has had to reduce the hours of its emergency room, at least on a temporary basis. If you've been following the news, you know the reason. Not enough nurses. They're burned out from working double and triple shifts in this whole bloody buggabugga pandemic. 

I have to go to the hospital tomorrow for some bloodwork. I'm going back on Aug. 10 for a checkup. I think I'll bring a couple roses. I'll give them to whatever nurse I see, tell him or her that I appreciate them. I think everyone should do that, actually. Nurses are over-worked and they're subjected to a lot of abuse too. I don't blame them for needing a break.

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The last time I saw my best friend, he was lying in a hospital bed. It was early March of 2009. Cold outside. My friend asked if I would bring him a case of Coke. He opened one, lay back in his bed, and told me he would never walk again. Cancer.

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I almost died when I was 10. Woke up in the Foothills Hospital. Apparently, the furnace backed up and pumped the basement full of carbon monoxide. I don't remember anything except that the sleep was very black and thick and dreamless. 

I remember an oxygen mask on my face, vomiting into a kidney-shaped pan, crying when the nurse needed to take more blood from me. My dad brought me some of my Star Wars action figures. He also bought me Mad Zaps the Human Race, a collection of Mad Magazine pieces by its star writer, Frank Jacobs. It kickstarted an obsession with Mad Magazine that lasted until William M Gaines died. 

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My kid was born in the Hawkesbury Hospital. Almost missed it. Don't need to rehash it here.

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For a very short time, I lived in Redvers, which is a very small town in southeast Saskatchewan. The population hovers just under 1,000. When I lived there (late 1998) there was a grain elevator, two churches, one grocery store, a school, and a hospital.

The presence of a hospital shocked me. I didn't think a town of 1,000 people could support a hospital but, of course, that hospital didn't just support Redvers. It also supported the hamlets and hundreds of farms that surrounded Redvers. I was in that hospital once. I can't remember why. All I remember is that it was empty. I walked down a hall that was immaculately neat and smelled like industrial cleaner. Most of the rooms were empty. In one of them, an old lady dozed beneath a thin white sheet. There was a television on but it was muted. It was showing the Price is Right. That seemed to fit.

I looked at that old lady for a bit. I wondered who she was. I wondered who loved her. I hoped there was someone who loved her. 

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Then there was the time we broke into a hospital.

Back in the mid 90s, a bunch of us were sitting around a party somewhere. Everyone was getting hooped except me, because I was the designated driver. Somehow the conversation got around to modelling agencies and how they were all scams. I said that I had been scouted by a so called agent named Anastasia in a nightclub a couple years ago. She gave me her business card but I never called it. I figured it was a scam.

One of the guys at that party went white when I told him that. He asked me to describe Anastasia. I did and he went even whiter, said that he had had a tryst with her about 10 months ago and had lost her number. Felt terrible about it.

I gave him the business card and he called the number and Anastasia's roommate answered, said that Anastasia wasn't there because she was in the hospital.

Five minutes later, I've got this guy in the passenger seat of my car. He was drunk and stoned about 20 minutes ago but now he's sober as all get out. "Pray with me, Steve," he says. "I know you're a man of God. Pray with me, please."

So I prayed and I drove and my new friend hollered and wailed in the seat next to me and we got to the hospital at two in the morning and the nurse told us that visiting hours were over.

I don't know how we did it, but somehow we snuck around that nurse and my friend managed to find Anastasia's hospital room. I don't remember a baby, I'm sad to say. I don't know if the baby was born or lost or given up. I do remember that lying in that bed, without her makeup or her fancy outfits, Anastasia didn't look anything close to what you mind find on a magazine cover. 

She recognized me. "Steve the magician," she said. "Now you know my big secret, I'm not pretty all the time."

"None of us are," I said. 

I let the nurse escort me out. She needed to do her job and I'd be the fall guy for my new friend, who may or may not have been a new father. I don't remember how long I waited in the car downstairs. All I know is that I never saw Anastasia again.