The next day we were all careful to give due respect to Sun Rapids’ now infamous canoe-eating boulder. It wasn’t difficult to spot, given the fact it was the only rock in the river with a wide strip of red paint on it. While the others lined the canoes down river left, I cautiously navigated my vessel through a kayak-friendly channel. The ensuing Barrel Rapids was also handled with kid gloves.
At last we arrived at the marshes of Peterbell, home to a wide variety of northern Ontario flora and fauna and the border of the Chapleau Crown Game Preserve. Years ago Peterbell was a thriving logging outpost community, but now it is completely devoid of human inhabitants. A VIA Rail train passes through it three times a week, and if a canoe party is waiting by the tracks the train stops and picks them up. We dragged our provisions ashore and set up camp in a field. Our plan was to get up early the next day and schlep our stuff to the tracks. When the train made its scheduled mid-morning appearance we’d be home free. We got a good blaze going, ate supper under a molten sky and traded war stories about prior canoe trips.
At 10:30 that night, Larry, Will and John turned in. Yves and I were still wide awake, so we stayed up late kibitzing. Shortly after 11:00 Yves stepped beyond the perimeter of flickering light cast by the fire to empty his bladder. A minute later he was back.
“I just saw a dog,” he said.
“Yves, we’re at least a hundred klicks away from the nearest house. Are you sure it was a dog?”
“Uh-huh. I think I’ll go call it. Maybe it’s hungry!”
Before I could say another word he turned around and was engulfed by the darkness once again.
“Here, doggy, doggy! Here, boy! Here… . Sacré bleu!”
In an instant he was back beside me. He looked totally freaked.
“What?” I asked.
“That was no dog!”
“What was it?”
“A wolf!”
“Yikes!”
We put another armful of dry logs on the fire and stayed up an extra hour before retiring to our sleeping bags.
At 0-dark-30 hours I was awakened by the sound of Larry climbing back into our two-man tent after the traditional early morning if-I-hold-it-any-longer-I’ll-explode pee.
“Hey,” I mumbled groggily, “While you were out there, did you happen to see that wolf?”
“What wolf?”
Just then a piercing, high-pitched howl began. It was so loud, it sounded like it was coming from the outside flap of our tent. Larry’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered.
“A wolf. Yves saw it last night.”
The howling stopped abruptly. The sudden silence was almost as jarring as the unexpected wolf call had been.
“Should we – ?”
The howling began again, except this time it was eight times louder because many new voices were participating. The blood-curdling, ululating chorus went on and on, from every possible direction. Then it ceased, leaving echoes ricocheting around the insides of our skulls.
My heart was jack-hammering in my chest. Talk about a dramatic wakeup call! If those critters were hungry, our thin polyester tents weren’t going to be much of a deterrent to them. We armed ourselves with flashlights and unzipped the tent flap.
Yves, Will and John spilled out of their tent just as Larry and I emerged from ours. It was still dark enough to prevent us from seeing much past the glowing embers in the fire pit. Larry flicked on his flashlight and cast its beam of light northward into the gloom. A pair of green wolf eyes stared back at him. He aimed his flashlight south. Another wolf. East, west and several ordinal points in between – you guessed it. We were surrounded by a wolf pack.
“Say, guys,” I said, hoping no one noticed my voice’s sudden ascent to castrato. “Do wolves ever, um, eat people?”
“I… don’t think so,” replied Will.
“Are you sure about that?”
“No.”
The wolves stared at us silently for a long time before melting away into the shadows.
Not surprisingly, no one wandered off by themselves to wash their face in the river that morning. Instead, we skipped breakfast, set a new world record for disassembling a campsite and double-timed it to the train tracks. We were all very happy campers when the VIA train finally appeared in the distance.
Can’t wait for next year’s trip!
Tabula Rasa
Could someone please remind me why we strive so hard to keep Harry alive?
Harry is a severely handicapped middle-aged man. Cauliflower-shaped tumours burst out of his scalp and protrude through his patchy hair at irregular intervals. He grinds his teeth incessantly. It’s a loud, grating noise that makes you want to scream.
He has no intelligible speech. To be honest, he has nothing even vaguely resembling any sort of communication. He is unable to use his limbs in any purposeful manner, so he is permanently diapered and confined to a wheelchair.
Despite his group home attendants’ best efforts to feed him carefully, he still has frequent episodes of food aspiration and chest infections that leave him wheezing and gasping for air. Whenever this happens, he is immediately brought to our emergency department for treatment. We dutifully admit him to the medical ward and start him on oxygen, regular suctioning, bronchodilator inhalations and intravenous antibiotics. Sometimes he becomes so ill we have to intubate him and put him on a ventilator.
He has some relatives who have power of attorney over his affairs. They live less than an hour away. In the nine years I’ve known Harry they haven’t visited him once. I’ve called them on two occasions to ask whether they’d consider switching his code status to “do not resuscitate.” Both times their answer was the same: “Keep him alive, doc – we’ve been thinking about coming up to see him sometime.”
So the battle to save Harry continues. Day after day I go into his room and watch him struggle to breathe. It’s a Greek epic being played out in a hospital bed; an endless tragedy with a cast of one, viewed by an audience of one. To me, Harry embodies the combined suffering of Prometheus, Tantalus and Orpheus. Sir Laurence himself couldn’t evoke such pathos.
He cranes his head to the side in an attempt to look at me whenever I place my stethoscope on his misshapen chest. His moist, cow-like eyes roll in all directions. I often wonder if he’s going to bite me. It’s an irrational thought; Harry is wholly incapable of aggression.
Does Harry have thoughts? If so, how does he perceive this world? Is it a magical place or is it an unending horror? Are we his saviours or his tormentors? Does he admire us or despise us? Does he hope for life or death?
It may well be that his mind is a blank slate. If that’s the case, perhaps we shouldn’t stand in his way the next time we see him lumbering towards the brink.
Some Patients Are Never Ready
Two years ago Max noticed a trace of blood in his stool. Colonoscopy revealed bowel cancer. Staging investigations didn’t show any evidence of tumour spread. It was felt he had a good chance of surgical cure, so arrangements were made for a bowel resection.
The surgery went well. To everyone’s relief, the sampled lymph nodes came back negative for cancer cells. In the weeks following the operation it became evident that his surgeon and his oncologist held opposing views regarding the potential benefits of adjunctive chemo. After carefully considering both options, Max declined chemotherapy.
Six months later I was in the radiology suite looking at a surveillance x-ray of Max’s chest when I noticed a small lesion near the apex of his right lung. Uh-oh. Hard times ahead.
“What does it mean?” he asked when I saw him in my office the following day. “The cancer hasn’t come back, has it?”
“I hope not, but it’s possible,” I answered evasively. “I’m going to send you back to the cancer clinic. They’ll run some more tests and then do a biopsy.”
The scans confirmed our worst fear – the spot on his lung looked cancerous. No other traces of malignancy were f
ound, though. The chest surgeon was hopeful the lesion was a new primary rather than a metastasis. If it had arisen de novo, removing it could be curative. If it turned out to be a metastatic subsidiary of the original cancer, his long-term prognosis would be abysmal.
Max’s lung surgery was uneventful. A month later he was back in my office to review his pathology results.
“Did they get it all?”
“It looks that way, judging by the reports.”
“Was it related to the first cancer, or was this one brand new?” His voice quavered slightly.
“They’re not sure – the pathology findings were inconclusive.”
“How could I have gotten lung cancer, doc? I never smoked a day in my life!”
“Well, every once in a while a non-smoker gets lung cancer. Just bad luck, I guess.”
“What happens next?”
“Chemotherapy.”
The chemo left Max weak and hairless, but he didn’t care. Anything to reduce the chances of a recurrence.
Six months later an abdominal ultrasound picked up a new lesion on his liver. Max nearly cried when I told him.
“What do we do now?” he asked. I sent him back to the cancer treatment centre. The chemo regimen he was given failed. So did the next one. After the third failure I tried to gently broach the topic of terminal cancer and palliative care, but he recoiled. “I don’t want to know how long I’ve got. I’m not ready to die yet.”
Max has undergone many more chemo and radiation treatments. Each successive scan shows more lesions than the one before.
My patient now weighs about 90 pounds. We’ve run out of treatments to offer. Although his emaciated body is riddled with cancer and his candle is slowly guttering, he’s still not yet ready to talk about dying.
I don’t think he ever will be.
Shotgun Bubba
“My husband and I are worried about Bubba. He’s been acting really weird lately and we think his schizophrenia might be getting out of control. He’s got this idea there are people hiding in the attic and they’re plotting to kill him.”
“Gee, that’s too bad. We may have to increase his antipsychotic medication.”
“Thanks, doc. Things have gotten so out of hand Bubba’s even refusing to go outside because he’s worried he’ll get kidnapped.”
“That sounds pretty paranoid. Is he saying or doing anything that makes you feel nervous or unsafe in any way?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, come to think of it, a couple of nights ago I was sitting on the toilet in the middle of the night when all of a sudden the bathroom door banged open and there he was with a shotgun in his hands!”
“A shotgun?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it loaded?”
“Oh yes, we always keep our guns loaded. Sometimes we get bears on our property.”
“Good grief!”
“Since then he’s taken to walking around the house with the shotgun all the time. He says he’s seeing spooky faces in the windows and holding a gun makes him feel safer.”
“Your paranoid, psychotic and hallucinating brother is patrolling your house night and day with a loaded shotgun and that doesn’t worry you?”
“Why should we worry? He never points it at us.”
Disneyfied
Little Tiffany’s dad has brought her in for her four-month well-baby check. She’s been healthy and so far everything looks normal. While I’m examining her eyes I ask her father: “Do you have any concerns about her vision?”
“No doc, as far as we know, her eyes are fine.”
“That’s good,” I reply.
“And she sure loves her Disney!”
“What?”
“Disney movies, doc. The cartoon ones! She just loves them!”
“She watches Disney movies?”
“Yeah, she can’t get enough of them!”
“But she’s only four months old! How long has she been watching television?”
“Oh, since she was about a month and a half. We put the TV right up beside her crib and prop her up on a pillow. Sometimes she’ll watch an entire movie! You should see her smile!”
“Um, several studies have suggested it’s better for kids to not watch television until they’re at least a year old.”
“Those guys don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Slippage
Things are slipping. It’s a steady, relentless process. Every day another inappropriate behaviour crawls out from under a rock and suns itself in plain view. What’s going on? And where will it end?
Not that long ago even the snarkiest adolescent would at least have made a token effort to not swear within earshot of an adult. My, how times have changed. Some of the language you hear from kids nowadays is harsh enough to make your ears bleed. More than once I’ve had to hastily round up my children and flee a playground in order to escape the profane chatter exploding all around us. I’m not just talking about the odd expletive being lobbed around. That doesn’t even make me blink anymore. No, I’m talking about the air being saturated with verbal shrapnel from continuous f-bombing. It’s like a sonic blitzkrieg. I’m no choirboy, but I’ve got my limits.
Where are kids learning such extreme language? Everywhere. Reality television, ultraviolent video games, laxly-censored movies, gangsta rap, shock radio… . The vulgarity envelope gets pushed a little further every day. You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to recognize the linear relationship between unsupervised access to certain media and Potty Mouth Syndrome.
To make matters worse, there doesn’t appear to be a lower age limit to this worrisome phenomenon. Last fall Ellen started grade four. One day she was helping out in a kindergarten classroom at lunchtime. One of the littluns she was in charge of made a mess and casually strolled away from it. When Ellen reminded him to clean up, he glared at her and told her to f**k off. What’s next, fetuses cursing in utero?
Generation Z also seems to have no qualms about littering. It’s hard to believe the amount of garbage strewn around some playgrounds and schoolyards. The same can be said about the routes along which kids walk to get to school. The elderly widow across the street from us allows neighbourhood kids to cut through her yard on their way to and from school. How is her kindness repaid? Every day her property gets littered with empty pop cans and junk food debris. I’m surprised she doesn’t complain. Maybe she’s afraid to.
Our daughters get frustrated whenever they see people litter. Once Alanna asked a classmate why he dumps his trash on the playground every recess. His reply? “Someone else will pick it up.” I shouldn’t demonize kids who litter, though. Children learn through instruction and observation. A few months ago I went to the washroom at a movie theatre. A little boy and his father were standing in front of the urinals. The boy was holding a Kleenex. Try as he might, he just couldn’t manage to unzip his pants while maintaining his grip on the tissue paper. Eventually he asked his dad for help. “Just drop it on the floor,” his father advised. The boy complied. It was still on the floor when they left.
Recently I was waiting for a bus in Toronto when a pack of pre-teen girls carrying bags of McFood emerged from the subway. They leaned against a nearby retaining wall and proceeded to wolf down their pink-slime burgers. Despite the presence of a large garbage can a few feet away they all threw their leftover food, condiments and cups on the sidewalk. Partway through their feast the city worker responsible for keeping the area clean came by and swept up the mess. As soon as he was out of sight they tossed the rest of their garbage on the sidewalk and howled with laughter.
Yesterday I was out running when I came across an ice cream bar wrapper on the sidewalk. There were still flecks of unmelted ice cream on it, so I figured it must have been discarded only moments before. Half a block ahead of me a 12-year-old boy was pushing his bicycle up a hill. I jogged over to him and asked: “Did you just eat an ice cream bar?”
“Uh
-huh.”
“Is that the wrapper back there on the sidewalk?”
“Yeah.”
“You shouldn’t throw your garbage on the ground. That’s called pollution, and it’s bad for our community.”
He thought about it for a second and then grinned.
“Okay.” He rode back to the wrapper and put it in his pocket.
Perhaps there’s hope for the future after all.
My Organic Patient
I’m back in the emergency department, my home away from home. Run, rabbit, run… .
Mrs. Organic and her 14-year-old daughter are waiting to see me in cubicle B. Organic Jr. has a suspicious-looking mole they’d like to have looked at. It’s black, irregular and raised. Lately it’s gotten a bit bigger.
“Well, I think this mole needs to be removed. It’s a little too busy for me to do it right now, but if you like I can take it off tomorrow afternoon.”
“How is that done?” O.J. inquires.
“I inject some local anaesthetic, remove the mole with a scalpel and then sew up the skin.”
“How is the anaesthetic developed?”
“What?”
“How is the local anaesthetic manufactured? Do they use any live animals in the testing of it?”
“Our little Organic Jr. is very much against anything that’s bad for the environment and endangered ecosystems,” her mom pipes up. She’s practically glowing with pride.
“I have no idea how it’s manufactured.”
“Do you think I could have the procedure done without any freezing?” O.J. asks hopefully.
As long as you don’t wiggle around and scream too much! Your Birkenstocks might fall off!
“I wouldn’t really recommend that – it would be quite painful for you.”
“I think I’ll research it on the Internet and then decide.”
“That sounds like a great idea! I’ll await your call!”
The Wonderful World of Golf
Dude, Where's My Stethoscope? Page 17