I brought reading material with me to the ER. All my life I’ve habitually brought reading material—usually an excess of reading material—no matter where I’m going. I can’t even run a simple errand without having at least one book and two or maybe three magazines on me. It’s something I learned to do as a child, back when we lived in a small house in the woods in Upstate New York. Living in “The Woods” meant that I spent a significant portion of my childhood—maybe 20 or 30 percent of it—in the boring backseats of cars as my parents drove us to nearby cities—either Rome (20 minutes), Utica (45 minutes) or Syracuse (one hour); and, yes, we lived near three depressed and crumbling metropolises, all with ridiculously Homeric names—for groceries, or perhaps to wander around a department store to look at items that we couldn’t afford. From the age of four until 16, I probably read a couple thousand books in the backseats of cars.

But instead of perusing the reading material I’d brought with me to the ER last week—or, more accurately, trying to peruse; because of my brain troubles, I’m not the strongest reader these days—I did something that, ethically speaking, I probably should not have done: I eavesdropped on other patients.

Behind the curtain next to me an old woman (I couldn’t see her but her voice sounded old) told the doctor that she was from Kazakhstan and that she was suffering from extreme kidney pain. “Ma’am? That’s back pain. You have back pain,” the doctor said calmly and confidently. “Not kidney pain.” “But eet iz een kitnee airy-ah!” she argued. She was obviously stubborn in the ways that old women usually are. I pictured a witch who lived in a house built exclusively out of candy. The doctor told her to leave a urine sample in the small cupboard in the bathroom. “Fill it up to here,” he said. I imagined the doctor pointing to a mark on the sample jar. A few minutes later, I watched the old woman hobble down the ER hallway. A younger plump woman with blonde hair as shiny and as golden as a sunbeam accompanied her. The younger woman was the Kazakh’s daughter, I guessed. The old woman walked slowly and deliberately, not unlike Yoda. She even had a cane.

Next, a baby-faced grown man with brown skin and a mustache attempt spanning his upper lip—I saw him before the nurse pulled his curtain closed—complained to the doctor of severe stomach pain. He, too, spoke in heavily accented English. “Did you have a bowel movement today?” the doctor asked. The young man answered so quietly that I couldn’t hear his response. The doctor, not understanding the man either, repeated his question. “Did you POOP, sir?” “Poop” is obviously a more universal term than “bowel movement.” If non-English speakers are familiar with any English word, any word at all, it’s usually “poop.” How can it not be “poop”? It’s a strange, fun, forbidden word that features a pair of identical vowels—those “o’s”—sandwiched between a pair of identical consonants (the p’s). I can’t believe that “poop” is legitimately a word sometimes. The man, not surprisingly, immediately understood the doctor. “Ah! Yes!” he said. It seemed that he had, in fact, pooped. The doctor continued his poop interrogation. “Was the poop SOFT? Or was the poop HARD?” he asked. “SOFT…? Or, HARD…?” The patient lowered his voice to what sounded like an embarrassed whisper. “The poop was very hard,” he said quietly. “Very, very hard.” The doctor told him that he would prescribe him some pills that would bring him relief.

A few minutes later a stocky white woman with a decorative kerchief tied around her dreadlocks explained to the doctor that she and her husband were in the middle of an epic cycling trip along the West Coast. They had been passing through Vancouver when she had suddenly come down with an extremely severe sore throat. (Note: everything it seems is “extreme” or “severe” in the ER.) She told the doctor that she had been tested for lyme disease back in the U.S. but that the results from the test had not yet reached her. She asked the doctor if the sore throat might be related to the suspected lyme disease. “Listen,” the doctor said, “false-positives are extremely common when it comes to lyme disease tests.” Which surprised me, because I didn’t know that false-positives were extremely common when it came to lyme disease tests. Her throat, he said, did indeed appear to be sore, but not sore enough for her to interrupt her West Coast cycling trip. The sore throat, in his opinion, wasn’t enough. And neither were the nonexistent results of a lyme disease test, the results of which may or may not even be valid.

Ten minutes later, once the woman with the kerchief had departed, presumably to resume her bicycle trip, I heard the doctor quietly say to another doctor, “I told that woman to get out there and enjoy her trip, to enjoy her life, and not to worry about some goddamn lyme-disease test results which might or might not even be genuine. You know?”

The two doctors enjoyed a quiet laugh together. You rarely hear doctors speak like that. It was strangely comforting to hear.

As for me: over the seven hours that I spent eavesdropping (and not reading at all) in the ER, I learned, on the downside, that my INR test results in recent weeks had been all over the map. The ER doctors were concerned about those uneven results. An INR test—done by drawing a vial of blood and sending it to the lab—quantifies how much the blood is capable of clotting. Healthy people are fine with a 1.0 INR. But for a person who has a mechanical heart valve, like I do, my INR results should ideally be between 2.5 and 3.5. In other words, my blood needs to stay a little bit thinner than a regular person’s blood so that a clot is less likely to form in the machinery of the mechanical heart valve. And, in order to thin my blood enough to get it into the 2.5 to 3.5 INR range, I take a blood thinner (18 mgs. of Warfarin, every day, with my dinner) and I have to monitor my diet.

Considering my aberrant INR’s from the past month or so, the ER doctors prescribed an echocardiogram, a visit to my cardiologist, daily and not weekly (certainly not monthly) INR tests until further notice, and, for the next four days, dalteparin shots, which were to be administered each day at around the same time. Where would I get the dalteparin shots? I’d get them right there, back in the St. Paul’s Emergency Room. “We give people dalteparin shots all the time!” one of the ER doctors explained to me. “Just tell them at the front that you’re here for one when you come in. They’ll take care of you.”

He made it sound as if getting the dalteparin shots would be as uncomplicated as getting stung by a cute, friendly little bee each day. (I would soon learn that it was not.)

Back on the street, I was startled to discover that it was dark outside. The sun had gone down. Of course the damn sun had gone down; this was February, in Canada. The days are damn short this time of year. An entire Sunday was gone now, left behind in St. Paul’s; certainly not the first Sunday for me, and probably not the last. I didn’t realize until that moment that, like a strip club, there are no windows in the St. Paul’s ER. Because there are no windows, you have no tangible indication of what’s happening outside. You have no sense that an entire Sunday could be quietly slipping by you like this.

I got some takeout chicken from a place on Davie Street. Then I walked home and took off my pants. I like to air myself out when I first get home. Like reading in the backseats of cars, the “air-out” is also a habit that I’ve had all my life. I sat in a chair in my living room in my underwear. I put my feet up and ate my takeout chicken. I watched a few episodes of Seinfeld on the DVD’s I bought at a Boxing Day sale. I was due back in the the ER tomorrow morning where I would deal with whatever was next, no matter what it was. But tonight? Tonight I’d enjoy this chicken and my TV shows and call it a day.