Thanks to some timely string-pulling on the part of Dr. Ali, I was moved out of the bustling community cardiac recovery room and relocated to a standard-issue two-person room further down the hall. Instead of five roommates—the constant chatter, the beeping machines, and the public attempts to defecate into portable space toilets—I would now have just one person to concern myself with. This person was an older man. His hair was a dull, militaristic grey, shorn close to his pumpkin-shaped skull. He wore heavy eyeglass frames that made him appear curious and frustrated at once. He looked like an unemployed owl. The unemployed owl would not have…
My father and mother arrived on Sunday to drop off the paper at the hospital. My father was obviously excited. “I found a place that sells it for $6 instead of $10,” he said with pride. The $10 Canadian price of the NY Times vexed and mystified him on a very deep level. I knew the place where he’d gotten such a discount: the dimly lit convenience mart on Davie Street that had about a hundred hookahs in the front window, all decorated with dazzling sprays of rhinestones. I told him the store had been closed the year before for selling black market handguns. “Who cares if they sell monkey…
Visitors arrived on a daily basis. They wanted to look at me, poke at me a little. “How you doing, champ?” they’d ask, sometimes grabbing my foot like it was a phone they were about to answer. “You feeling better? You doing OK now? We were worried sick about you. You look great! Really, you do. You gave us quite a scare there, pal. Don’t do that again, got it?” Then they’d present an offering of some kind which, nine out of 10 times, consisted of reading material. Paperbacks, hardcovers, magazines, newspapers—if you could read it, the visitors brought it to me. An ex-girlfriend brought…
Each night I kept vigil for the constipated old woman the way Catholics watch the chimney above the Vatican for signs of a new pope. On Thursday, during the hour after dinner when the hospital begins to wind down for the night, the old woman suddenly felt that she might be able to go. (more…)
The next morning one of the beefcake male nurses at St. Paul’s toted an impossibly large, old fashioned scale into the communal hospital room. Once he had the scale situated, he cleared his throat and said, “Good morning, boys and girls. It’s time for your morning weigh-in.” (more…)
[Going back in time on this one, folks. Been talking things over with my writing partner, finding things that I never wrote about and probably should have. So I’m filling in blanks here. [Just to get you situated, timeline-wise: I’ve had the stroke, had the open-heart surgery, and now I’m in St. Paul’s for a month, recovering before I can be transferred to rehab. What you’re about to read happened in April of 2014 or so. [Got it? Good. Here we go. -Scott] The ever-present eternal question from both doctors and nurses during my month-long hospital stay was this: Are you constipated? I…
[Apologies for not writing sooner, folks. Been trying to get back to work, and trying to get back to work has taken a toll on me. I’m getting stronger, and getting stronger means that I’ll be writing regularly again soon. Thanks for your patience.] I woke up in a room which, for some inexplicable reason, I thought was the garage of my surgeon’s private home. I don’t know exactly what sorts of drugs the doctors had given me. Whatever they were, they were obviously potent enough to convince me that I’d woken up in the garage of my surgeon’s private home. (more…)
A warning: What’s ahead is probably the very darkest part of this miserable, goddamn, already-dark story. Turn back, if you like; I won’t blame you. My brain, at this point in my illness, was about as useful as a lobster forgotten in a steam pot. Then one of the imaginary cooks would say: “WHO LEFT THIS LOBSTER IN THE STEAM POT? BECAUSE IT’S COMPLETELY USELESS NOW. GREAT.” And he’d be right. In fact, instead of reading this section I suggest finding a quiet ice cream parlor and treating yourself to a bowl of strawberry ice cream. Strawberry ice cream never tastes better than it does in…
There was a bit in the last section that I’d like to reclaim. I used the word “frightened” to describe myself in the moment when I saw my mom and dad’s faces for the first time and subsequently interpreted their appearance as a symbol of how dire things were for me. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t believe that I ever felt scared, or frightened, or sad, or angry, or anything that a healthy person would probably have been feeling throughout this. Inside me, there was only this: a static indifference. It was like a white noise, like a box fan being run at higher…
Everything around me in the hospital was cast in a kind of perpetual, shimmering twilight. Sounds fruity to say that, but it’s true. It would be twilight as I was falling asleep; I’d wake up and it would somehow still be twilight. No matter what time of day it was, the shadows were always long and dramatic in St. Paul’s, the sun outside always seemingly close to going down. I didn’t understand it then, but I was becoming more and more untethered to time. I was leaving behind the things that normally bound me to the world—clocks and calendars and the Internet and so on. I…
