I am a sufferer from osteoarthritis of the spine. It comes in various types of afflictions and various intensities of pain. Because the cause of the pain is invisible, most people do not believe in its reality – particularly when it is at its most intense and when it’s at its most intense it eclipses kidney stones (which I have also had and my Dr. (a mother) once told me that kidney pain was worse than childbirth). We are talking about the realm of screaming.

In the early spring of 2019, it manifested itself in me as, at first, a tingling in the left leg which began to be painful, which I duly reported to my GP. “Ah”, he said, “we must get it mapped.” He gave me a referral to the Jewish General hospital, where they do that sort of thing. I went and had a number of electrodes attached and shocks given to my legs. Then, a needle was inserted into various places in my leg and stronger shocks were administered. I met with a doctor who had little to say beyond: “You need to get a CT scan of your back”. So, that’s what I got and the results (several sheets describing the details with a lot of numbers like: “Grade 1 anterolisthesis of L5 over L4”) were not terrifically enlightening. So, I telephoned the specialist for information. He informed me that he ordered the scans but it was not his job to read them and he could not suggest anyone who could.

So I went back to my GP and he told me that I had “in General” Osteoarthritis of the spine and that he sort of recommended Physiotherapy. (“Well, what do I do?” “I guess you could get some Physio.”) This is the sum total of information that I got from my GP and the specialist in the field – nothing and I guess, Physio.

So then, I went to a physiotherapist – after reading a number of books on the topic of osteoarthritis and getting terribly depressed at learning that there was no cure and not much in the way of treatment beyond exercise and a vast amount of quackery and near quackery (eat tomatoes: don’t eat tomatoes). Now the thing about physiotherapists is that they have a MD in Physiotherapy which sounds impressive but only means that they have taken a one-year course which costs them about $1500 or less. Even Google warns: “they are Doctors but not Physicians.” (Some have a BSc. in Physiotherapy, while others just have a DEC.). So, when it comes to this specialty – caveat emptor.

I finally found a couple of what seemed to be decent therapists, although one of them was almost incapable of verbal communication and that is something to avoid as it leads to mistakes and doubt. Gradually the sessions and the exercises began to help and I began to recover from the pain (usually 5/10 at the worst. I was told by my second physiotherapist that walking was the best thing I could do – so I walked. By the early summer of 2020 I was walking 2.5 to 3 k’s every morning. Most days began with my walking down to the river and watching the sun rise.

The interesting thing about physiotherapists (and not just physiotherapists) is that they see what they expect to see. My first physiotherapist told me that my problem was not osteoarthritis, it was an injury, because that’s what he was used to: injuries. My second physiotherapist– although I gave him a copy of the CT scan – saw a muscular problem, because that is what he knew. My GP saw arthritis because he was used to nothing of a specialized nature and he was better trained.

Then the hammer fell. On December 2, 2020, I went swimming for the first time in months and the next morning everything had changed. The trouble had shifted from my left side to my right and the pain was worse than it had ever been before. I took painkillers – Robaxacet is a combination of Tylenol and muscle relaxants sold over the counter – and soon I was taking them to excess. Double the dose and twice as often. But it worked for a while and I staved off the pain and still walked a little. But it was very short-lived. I began hearing things and hallucinating and the pain was growing in intensity. One day, I found myself in the position of having to go to our apartment in the city because I had ordered groceries to be delivered there and the pain was bad and I took, god knows how much Robaxacet I took and I took the train there and I tried to cancel the grocery order but I locked myself out of my laptop and then I locked myself out of my phone and then the order came and I put it away and then I took the train back to our local station and then I drove erratically home and then I was done. Just done. There was a radio show about something British running in my head 24/7 (possibly Coronation Street!) and everything I saw was framed in a paisley border. I was completely done. I could no longer stand up or sit up without considerable pain. I lay on the couch and only got up to crawl to the bathroom for Tylenol.

I called the doctor. “I need help Doctor”. “Can you come in now?” “I’m not sure I can handle the stairs”. “But we have an elevator”. “No, I mean my own front stairs.” My son had to drive me. My son had to put on my shoes. I owe my son big time for that one. Pain-wracked and stoned; there was no positive there.  

I found myself in my doctor’s office getting myself checked out. I was pronounced “stoned” and “high as a kite.” My ears were checked – I guess to eliminate Coronation Street – I was taken off Tylenol and all over-the-counter pain reducers. I was put on – well – nothing. My doctor declined to prescribe anything for my pain. My guess is that the Opioid epidemic had made him very nervous. I got a steroid for 10 days and that was it – I was on my own.

So, there I was (early December) lying on the living room couch, unable to walk, except bent over at the waist at a 90-degree angle. And the pain that came with movement was pretty fierce. The medicals love to ask “On a scale of 1-10, your pain is what?” and I would answer “23”.  I planned my suicide. You can’t imagine how hard it is to commit suicide when you can’t go out or even walk.  I am still in awe of the trip I made to the Montreal apartment and what I achieved simply in getting there and back. By January 6 it was so unbearable and everyone was suggesting emergency room so on an impulse I finally called an ambulance.

Here’s the thinking (if you can call it thinking). I need to go to Emergency because I am not living in any meaningful way and I am always in pain and my normal medical route through my doctor was not getting me anywhere.  But if I could manage to get driven to emergency (and just getting out and into the car was absolutely excruciating) I would have to sit through the car ride and then sit for another 6-8 hours in emergency. And sitting was the most painful position of all. But if I call an ambulance and get on a stretcher, then I am lying down until a doctor sees and treats me.

This was at the height of Wave 2 of Covid in Quebec, so the ambulances were being heavily used and it took quite a while to arrive. When it did, I was informed that my front foyer made it impossible to bring a stretcher in and I would have to be carried out in a special chair. The pain of this process had me wailing so loud that I think I frightened my adult son. But when I was placed on the stretcher, and was lying flat, the pain disappeared. I was loaded into the ambulance, waved goodbye to my son and we were off to the world of medical salvation, except…

First of all, I was informed that because of Covid, they were not allowed to go to any Montreal hospitals, so I was shut out of the English Health-Care system, the hospitals that I knew and my regular Doctors. The only place we could go was the Suroit Hospital in Valleyfield. At that point I had no idea what a bad idea that was. Also, for some reason, the monitor in the ambulance was showing my heart rate at 200, which was ridiculous as I was so calm it surprised me. It stayed at 200 the whole trip there, even though my Garmin wristwatch said 60.So, by the time that we reached the Suroit I was pegged as a coronary case and my pain was forgotten by everyone except me. And it stayed forgotten (by everyone except me) for most of my stay there, even though I reminded them repeatedly.

I was admitted to emergency and because of the ambulance monitor I was consideredt o be a cardiac patient. The fact that I already had a pacemaker to control atrial fibrillation didn’t help matters. I was all monitored up and they took bloods and there I was in emergency; and anything that I said about my back and about pain was simply ignored.

Let me say a few things about the Suroit Hospital emergency department (without prejudice). The emergency room was quite small and, like most emergency rooms, over flowing. This was, again, at the peak of the second wave of Covid and Suroit had been declared a non-Covid Hospital. Any patients who arrived there were tested and if they showed any signs of Covid they were sent elsewhere. Non-Covid emergency patients from Covid Hospitals were being sent to Suroit and other non-Covid hospitals. In the time I was there – the two times that I was there – the emergency section of the Hospital bloomed and grew throughout the first floor of the Hospital until it grew more than eight times its original size in less than two weeks. So, I was never in a regular emergency room bed.

I was not nervous being in emergency. I had been in emergency many times in my a-fib days and also for three days when my heart medications were screwed up and I filled up with water and had to be drained back to baseline. So, I felt like an old hand, with the exception of being in an unfamiliar hospital and not being allowed to see family because of Covid. I wasn’t even particularly concerned about being in the French system since my French was fairly passable. I was, on the other hand, immensely relieved to be in medical hands and I felt that my back problem and my pain would finally be dealt with.

Now “medical hands” is a deceptive term. You might assume that it means a doctor’s care, or a specialist’s expertise, but this is not necessarily so. All these things do exist in a hospital setting, but the representatives of “medical care” that you deal with most often are orderlies. And orderlies do not require any education beyond High School and, in a place like Suroit, tend to come from small towns and farming communities with little exposure to the larger world except through television and Facebook. They are your day-to-day medical care and while many of them were truly wonderful, it is not part of the job description. I have had an orderly (at the Glen) who was sent to transport me on a gurney to x-ray and obviously didn’t want to push me, say to me, “why don’t you just walk it, it’ll do you good”. And walk (hobble) it I did while they trailed me, talking on the phone to a friend.. There’s good and bad everywhere.

So there I was in emergency expecting to be helped, relieved somehow, hopefully soon to be referred to a specialist in my area of affliction. I was in a corridor that led to some kind of reception room that had never been used for patient’s beds before. It took me a day or two to convince them that my heart was, if not fine, at least not the real concern. By that time, as I seemed to be less urgent to them, I suppose, I was moved further out along the hallway. In fact, I was fairly near an exit. All of this time, that is whenever I saw the emergency room doctor, I was pleading that my problem was my back and that it sent excruciating pain down my leg whenever I moved and could I please see someone about that.

After the second day it became clear to me that no one was going to listen to what I was saying and so the next time I saw the doctor I asked to be discharged – I was getting nowhere fast. The doctor said to me, “You can leave anytime – just have to walk out.” Then he walked away. And there were times, every hour, that I, in the dead of winter, in a hospital robe, barefoot, without any ID or money, seriously measured the distance to the door and wondered if I could make it. The only thing that stopped me was the fear that if I got off the gurney, I would not be able to get back on because of the pain and that they would probably leave me on the floor to teach me some sort of lesson.

After another day (I can’t be sure of time passage because there was no day and night where I was) I was moved right into the “reception room” and, I think, kind of forgotten. There were about four or five patients in there and a number of them seemed to be quite elderly – mid-eighties, I guess. There were a couple of them that seemed to want to get up quite often and orderlies came and told them they had to lie down. After a while, and it seemed to me later in the day although I could not be sure, a couple of patients were moved out and I was moved against a wall and a wall curtain, was pulled around me so I could not see very much. Shortly after that there was an enormous bustle in the room with furniture being moved and the tinkling of many glasses and other noises that I could not identify.  Then came shift change for the orderlies and nurses and I drifted off to sleep.

I woke a while later to a lot of strange noises. There were children’s voices and some low music and I heard the voice of the old man who, earlier in the day, had been told to stay in bed talking from various places as if he was walking around the room. I could see vaguely through the curtain that the room had a lot of people in it and there were kids zooming around on wheeled toys and people were eating and drinking. I could recognize a number of the “medical hands” who had helped me earlier. It was clear that the emergency room staff were having a clandestine party and that grandparents (including the old guy on the gurney) and children had been smuggled in to make it multi-generational. It was a large group and the party went on for several hours, until another shift-change when the partiers departed and things returned to normal.

Now it must be understood that is took place in early January 2021 at the height of the terrible second wave. This was a time when gatherings of any kind were against the law and health care personnel were pleading with the public NOT to gather. There was great fear that if people did gather the health care system would eventually be overwhelmed. And here were these health care people (emergency room health care people) “gathering” in large numbers, across generations, inside a Hospital. I gasped at their audacity.

After that things began to get a little hazy. It was discovered that I had picked up a hospital infection in emergency and my left salivary gland began to swell up. I developed a fever and I began to get IV treatment for the infection. Someone, and I don’t think it was the emergency room Doctor, ordered a barrage of tests: bloods, x-rays, a CT scan. As I was being asked to climb out of one gurney into another, I was racked with pain and I could not do it. “Ah-ha” thought the nurse, “he’s got something that’s causing him pain.” She proceeded to scan my abdomen and found some urine in my bladder. I had been unable to piss into the provided tube because there is no privacy in emergency and that’s a problem that I have: pissing in public, and where I was, was public 24/7. I tried to explain that the pain was from my back and….. But no, that nurse divined that the urine was causing my pain and therefore … I had to be catheterized! I protested that I had voluntarily admitted myself here because of back pains, I had no bladder problems and I objected to the procedure.  But no, I had not only to undergo catheterization but I had to apologize to the irate nurse for questioning her judgment. So, catheterized, I was sent off to get my tests.

I have to interject here, that this Hospital and it staff had a real passion for catheters and I was given the procedure so many times I cannot count (and I include “in and out” emptying with no bag attached). Eventually it would develop into an automatic decision, made by nurses and orderlies – I never saw a urologist – that I had a serious urinary problem and that I would have to be catheterized for life. But more of that, later. In the interim I was catheterized by practically everyone (often at the orders of a then-mysterious Dr. Sun, who I had never seen) and many of those catheterizers had no idea how to do it, which resulted in multiple, painful, failed attempts. It took me about nine months to recover from all that.

It was determined, finally that I had a bacterial infection of a very nasty kind: staphylococcus aureus – one of the most dangerous of the bacteria resistant hospital infections, the kind that you usually pick up in a …  hospital. It was then I began a 3 month IV drip (3 times a day) of anti-bacterial medication. For the next 3- or 4-days things were a little hazy as I was running a high fever. Oh, and they took the first catheter out – that’s fun too.

As I said, things got a bit hazy then. I saw a Doctor from Ear, Nose and Throat and then two Doctor’s from infectious diseases, one of who was the near-mythical Dr. Sun and the other a Dr. Vegeant (although I heard the name as Dr. Vison). They had developed this weird theory that this bacterium may have been lurking in my back (they had heard about my back!) and causing my pain (they had heard about my pain!) and so a bunch more tests were ordered but I was not complaining because at least my back was finally part of it. I was removed from emergency and given a bed in a double room, 5^th Floor, surgical recovery. The guy in the bed next to me had had most of his intestines removed but he seemed quite chipper. My winter coat was dumped on my bed on top of me and a nurse told me I should stop carrying my wallet around in my hand – I would lose it – and I should put in safely in the pocket of my coat. So, I did that.

In the morning I was moved again to the strangest hospital room I have ever seen. It was enormous, obviously converted from some other purpose and on two levels. The lower level was occupied by a patient with dementia who was woken to be fed and woken to take meds and otherwise slept all the time. This hospital (I was later to discover) had a lot of dementia patients who were obviously heavily sedated since they were hardly ever conscious and hardly ever troublesome, not a happy final fate and tremendously depressing to watch.

I was in this room for the rest of the day and the night, seeing only an orderly, and then when I woke the next morning, everything on my bed (including my coat and a bag of clothes that had been delivered to the nursing station by my wonderful wife – no visitors allowed – was soaking wet. My saline drip had become disconnected and had emptied all over the bed. My coat was taken away to be "dried out" and I never saw it again – or my wallet, including all my ID – and I was moved again, to the 3^rd floor where I remained until my final escape.

I got my coat and wallet back 2 years later after the other patient in the room died and they cleared out all his belongings and found my stuff in his closet and sent it to the his son, who found my wallet and called me. I had repeatedly called the hospital after my escape and told them about my coat in the room and they claimed to have searched it carefully and found nothing.

In this new room I began a series of what were either dreams or hallucinations. I dreamt – let’s use that word – that I was dreaming that I was asleep. Then I dreamt that I woke up and looked at the ceiling and realized that I was not at home but I was in the Suroit Hospital, and a great despair filled me. Then I stopped dreaming and woke up and looked at the ceiling and saw that I was in the Suroit Hospital and an even greater despair filled me. This was a constant until I escaped, although by then it was not just the daily waking that filled me with despair. In the meantime, I was in and out of reality due to the infection, the fever and the medications. I imagined that I was in a hallway again and that they had placed my bed next to the door where the personnel exited. I thought that there were various entrances and exits to my room that did not really exist. All this time I was getting IVs every 4 hours and my life revolved around that and the fact that the medication gave me loose stools and I was put in a diaper and told that I should behave myself. I learned what it was like to have your bottom wiped by someone who clearly held you in contempt. I was losing all my dignity, my privacy, my gravitas, my sense of being a person. I was becoming a child/moron.

Dr. Vision came to visit me and told me that he thought that the virus might be lurking in various parts of my body. It was his theory that it might be in my spine and it might be the source of my pain. He was going to send me to the Glen by ambulance to have a PET scan. Then he said that at a later date, I would have to have a trans-esophageal ECG. Then he left. The next day Dr. Sun showed up and announced that the transport for McGill was ready and that they could take no chances with my bladder and I would have to be catheterized for the trip – “No arguments!” So, I was and it took two orderlies and several tries to do it to me. The people at the Glen, however, were great and the test was very quiet and pleasant.

The results from the Glen were negative, there was no staph hiding in my spine. However, bacteria was in my blood and I was put through a hurried series of procedures. I had a second CT scan and I had a pic line inserted in my upper right arm. I was to be put into the position that when I was discharged from the hospital, I could self-administer an anti-bacterial transfusion three times a day. This was a godsend if, and only if, I could get out of that place. But every time I asked, I was told to be patient, no one could say when yet.

Each time I was moved, to be taken for a procedure or hoisted onto the CT machine for a scan, I was asked (often, multiple times, by the same person) if I could sort of “hop over” onto the cart. And when I told them that I had too much pain to be able to do that I got a reaction that was somewhere between “oh shit, I’ve got to lift him again” and “you lying bastard”. In general, I’ve learned that people do not believe that pain from an invisible cause can be intense and unendurable. Even people that I know well feel that I am exaggerating my pain or even making it up. I felt this the most at the Suroit Hospital. Even the emergency Doctor seemed to deny it. I asked what he could give me for pain, and he had answered “Tylenol”. I said, “I’ve taken Tylenol, it doesn’t do anything.” To which he responded, “but this is MY Tylenol,” and walked away. And I checked, and it was just regular Tylenol, and did nothing. There were times when I would be in such agony that they would relent and give me Dilaudid – but I had to beg. This all only served to make me feel guilty for having pain – which is ludicrous. But this is the kind of thing that happens in a medica lestablishment where the “professionals” do not listen to the people who know what they are going through.

After all the procedures, tests, drawings of blood, I was still lying in a hospital bed, no visitors because of Covid, unable to escape, constantly being tested for retaining urine, being catheterized (final estimate – about 12 times).Finally, after ten days, it was determined that I could be released to self-administer the anti-bacterial, so I could be signed out… “but wait! What about my urine problem.” I would have to see the Urologist. But the Urologist was not on duty until, let’s see, oh yes, Monday. I would have to wait until Monday.”

So I snapped. I had come into this place resembling Dante’s Inferno in order to have my back pain dealt with and I lay therewith a pic line for a bacteria that I had picked up there and now a Urology problem that I had never had before entering their portals and they had done NOTHING for my back pain for twelve days except for two half hour sessions with a physiotherapist who was clearly totally out of her league. I could barely crawl to the bathroom for a piss and the bathroom had no door to deal with. I had had my self-respect stripped from me and I was reduced to a position of absolute vulnerability. My life had become a visceral nightmare. I wanted out now. I wanted to see the Doctor in charge of the floor NOW.

And so, the Doctor came in. He was very polite. He was that kind of polite that makes it clear that he is only being polite to mask his anger; that kind of polite that makes it clear that it’s an important part of his job description and not his actual feelings; that kind of polite that masks his contempt for a patient who is not doing what he/she is told and speaking back to a Professional; that kind of polite that was a close approximation of the kind of polite that I was feeling. I made it clear that I wished to be discharged, have my wife called so she could come and get me out of there, I was not going to lie there for two days to see an unnecessary urologist. He stood there and said to me that it was within my rights to discharge myself, but if I did, I would lose the right to all the treatments I was receiving, I would leave with my pic line disconnected and no prescriptions or referrals or follow-ups. It would be his version of being thrown naked out the door into a snow bank or, like the emergency room doctor had said: “I could leave any time, I could just walk out.” And because I did not have the knowledge and the certainty that he could not actually do these things without serious legal repercussions for himself and the hospital, I backed down and agreed to wait for the urologist. That smug, lying, unprofessional bastard had won. I was left there for another two days.

After two more days I was scheduled to see the Urologist in the morning. I waited all the morning, in barely controlled panic, to see someone who had my fate in his or her hands. No one showed up. I was at the point of attempting to crawl out when the floor Doctor showed up with my release papers in his hands. I was in tota lshock, but signed out, without a word about the absent Urologist (or anything else) – I was not about to fuck up my desperately longed for release. After it was all done except for the phone call to my wife, I asked the question:  “so, I don’t have to see the Urologist?” “

“You saw him this morning”, said the doctor of the floor.

“No, I didn’t”, I said, “I saw no one this morning.”

“But you must have seen him,” he said, “he signed your chart, made some examination notes, released you and left an appointment for you to see him in his clinic in a few days.” He looked like he had been pole-axed.

“No. I saw no one today. I have never met this urologist.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, and left the room. I waited fifteen terror filled minutes, thinking that I’d ruined my discharge.

When he came back, he was shaking his head. “Well, no one seems to have seen him at the desk,” he said, “but he clearly wrote notes, like in a normal exam, and signed off on your discharge. So, you can go. But it’s very bizarre.”

“That’s okay, I can live with it,” I said.

And that was that. Not a word from him about his earlier threat. Not a word that all of his bullshit about the necessity of seeing a urologist before leaving the hospital that was life or death for me. The signature on the chart had released him from legal responsibility and, clearly, that’s all he really cared about – and that’s all I cared about too. I called my wife and she said that she would be there with my youngest son in about an hour.

I started to pack my few items of apparel and my book when a nurse came in. This was one that I hadn’t seen before. She came in bearing gifts. “Hi,” she said, “I understand that you are being discharged.”

“Yes, ”I said.

“Great, ”she said. “The doctor has ordered that you will need to have a catheter and a leg bag when you go.”

“Which doctor.”

“The urologist,” she answered, with a smile. I knew I was in trouble.

“But I never even saw him. I don’t even know his name or what he looks like. How can he order that?”

“Well, he can,” she said, “it’s a condition of your discharge. You signed for it.”

“Oh my god,” I thought, “I never read the fine print.”

“When does it get taken out?” I asked.

“In two weeks when you see him in his clinic.”

“And what’s his fucking name?” I asked.

“Now, now. There’s no need for that.”

And she told me his name and I let her do that damn procedure so that I could get out of there. Afterwards I got dressed and she explained the leg bag and the large bag and how to switch from one to the other and then there was the orderly with the wheel chair and then I was out of the room at the floor desk and signing more things without reading them and then I was wheeled to the elevator and taken to the main door waiting area and left there to wait for my family to pick me up.

It was cold in the main entrance waiting room and I was wearing three layers of indoor clothing because my winter coat had been lost (with my wallet, money and ID) and I was hunched over in the wheelchair looking like an escapee from a concentration camp (how close was that to the truth?). When my wife arrived, she left my son at the wheel in the car and came in to get me and looked at me and walked right past because she did not recognize me. I looked exactly the way I felt. In fact, about four or five days later, I had my picture taken to replace my health card and driver’s license and I don’t recognize myself in that picture.

When I had been home for about a week, extremely run down and weak from the entire ordeal, but at least beginning to regain some strength – get in and out of the car to go for blood tests, climb a flight of stair very slowly to get up to the bedroom – I began to run a fever. My wife, always the professional, recognized that I had an infection that, given my condition and the fact that all my medical treatment had been at Suroit, needed to be dealt with at that hospital, and there was a very real possibility that it might be my bacterial infection raging out of control or it could be a urinary infection – the first in my life – caused by the catheter and all the catheterizations from before. And so, within a week I was back at Suroit once again. In my wife’s defense, I had not begun to tell her all of the horrors of my previous stay there. And, in fact she was also partly justified in that the one Doctor that had done me no ill – Dr. Vegeant – showed up in my Covid cubicle (that’s how they had re-made part of emergency) that very evening to see how I was. He was an odd little man and did something that I thought at the time was very bizarre: he pulled down my underwear and smelled my catheterized penis. Then he announced that it was his opinion that I had a bladder infection and the urologist must be called.

In fact, he was right, I did have a bladder infection that I had caught from being repeatedly catheterized – something else that I owed the Suroit for. Once again, I never saw a urologist. As soon as my Covid test came back negative, I was transferred down the long line of rooms that emergency had become to the room at the end – formerly a large waiting lounge with new, flimsy, curtained alcoves filled with patients that were clearly in the late stages of dementia – and me. And there I waited for the results of my blood tests. I was in the Suroit’s talons again but at least I had regained enough strength and lost enough pain to be able to use a portable commode – so the only embarrassment was having to ask for it. Shitting and pissing in public had become matters of routine.

I was very curious about how the nurses would deal with the dementia patients that made up the rest of the room that I was in. It was, essentially, one large room, partitioned by draw curtains so privacy was visual but not audible. The nurses (both men and women) called to the patient with terms of endearment, like “sweetheart”, “darling” and French terms that evade translation. But when they spoke about these patients to each other it was in a terminology of a different sort. They referred to the job as tending to their garden, and made comments like “the old one is howling again”. It was enough to make you greatly pity the “old ones” and live in terror of ever becoming one of them yourself. Although I never could confirm this, it seemed clear to me that these elders were taken in from the community, from families who, refused to send them to the government institutions where the covid death toll had been staggering and had then become terrified by having them home during the pandemic. Now they were sheltered from Covid in the safe refuge of the hospital. Otherwise, there was no explanation for their presence in an emergency room. What I was seeing was an act of community charity done in a rather uncharitable way.

When my diagnosis came in (bladder infection), I was started on a new round of medications in addition to my pic line IV. I asked to see the doctor. My wife had clarified my rights as a patient and I was in absolutely no mood to be bullied. This Doctor was female, very strict but at least rational. She said that the bladder infection was clearing up well and my other bacterial problem had not worsened – I should be out in a day or two. I said that I did not feel that a day or two was precise enough and that I wanted my catheter out immediately. She said that she would have to consult with the urologist. I gave her my opinion of the urologist and that strategy. She took it very well and said that she would “get back to me” and left. I was left with the poor souls who woke every twelve hours to call out loved one’s names and ask for their lon dead Mothers.

So, the war began again, me against the hospital; or rather, in this case, the Emergency Room Doctor. Eventually we came to an agreement. The catheter would come out and I would agree to see the urologist within two weeks of discharge. I agreed and was ready to leave. There was a last-minute glitch as someone decided it was time to use one of their handy-dandy ultra-sound units to see if I had any urine left in my bladder. I did, so there had to be another consult with the Doctor, another Covid test (I had at least 9 of those during the whole hospital “experience”) and then I was out and catheter free. My god, what a relief.

Now I have to tell you that I emerged from the hospital in far worse shape than when I went in. I was experiencing much less pain simply because I had lain on my back and rested and healed for 3 weeks. So, I could hobble for about ten feet and get in the car and then crawl up the front steps and hobble to the couch. After that everything was a struggle. I needed a chair in the shower and I had to be driven to blood tests and to have my pic line checked. I was administering IV’s to myself three times a day for another month. After that I got into a program with a physiotherapist who was expert (she had a real Science degree) and helped me a great deal. She connected me with a surgeon who actually explained that I had spinal stenosis (caused by arthritis) which constricted the passage of the nerves going from the legs up the spine and that was causing all the pain. Also, I had a collapsed disk which would have to be reinforced. Physio would never solve the problem, I had, literally, a broken back and I would need major spinal surgery – about 8 hours’ worth, was I willing? My odds of recovery were quite good. I said yes and that surgeon “saved my life”. I stood straight within 1 hour of waking up after surgery and with a great deal of physio – proper physio – I learned to walk again and started swimming and going to the gym. Arthritis never goes away and one day it will get me again but this is certainly better than lying on my back at the Suroit. I will never go back there – I even avoid going to Valleyfield.