My radio-host friend John Moore once spent a Friday night at a hospital emergency room, reporting on what he saw. Eighty percent of the patients, he told me, were there “because they did something to themselves.” Based on my own journalistic observation on Monday night, that percentage seems high, but not out of the ballpark.
I’d come to the emergency room of Toronto East General Hospital at 2:30am as a patient, not a reporter. But since no doctor ever got around to examining me, I’m counting the whole experience as work.
You probably think this is going to be one of those columns describing a Canadian journalist who gets sick, has a traumatic experience in a hospital emergency room, and then spins the experience into a 1,500-word denunciation of the Canadian health-care system. But I really have no complaints about what happened Monday night. I had an infection in my arm that was causing pain and swelling. But every time I was about to be examined, some bloodied drunk or quivering pill-popper would come stumbling into the ward, and the doctors would go rushing over, tossing my file back into the bin.
In other words, I was never quite deranged or beat-up enough to merit medical attention — which I guess counts as good news for me. (Insider tip: If you truly do want quick service at the ER, the best way to guarantee it is to break a bottle of vodka over your head in the parking lot, and then scrape yourself with the shards.)
I was surrounded by plenty of interesting specimens in the wee hours of Monday night. Sitting directly across from me in the small waiting room was a large South Asian man who’d suffered some sort of accident at the gas station where he worked (he was still wearing his Esso uniform). Holding court in the room, he told us cheerfully that he’d just immigrated from Karachi, Pakistan. And he had a message for we native-born Canadians complaining about the long wait: “You should be thankful you’re even in the hospital. Where I come from, they’ll throw you out if you don’t have money, or if they think you’ve been drinking — which is un-Islamic.”
At this point, the unsteady alcoholic sitting immediately to my left — a scrawny biker whose scent was like something out of a beer-store loading dock – assured everyone in the room that he adored the world’s Muslims, and regarded the Core-Ann as an inspiring text.
In the next, somewhat sacrilegious, breath, he bragged that the nurses had never seen anyone show up at ER with a blood alcohol content quite so high as his. He was specific and prideful on this point, claiming that he’d hit a BAC of 0.74% on his previous visit (a figure corresponding to about nine times the legal driving limit). “They couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t in a coma!”
He then began telling dirty jokes in a loud voice and I fled the room, along with a short, middle-aged friendly-seeming fellow named Gary who’d broken a bone in his hand.
The two of us sat down in a pair of chairs near the nurse’s station. By now, it was 4am, and I felt like dozing off. But Gary was chatty. He was concerned that his busted hand might compromise his career as an R&B guitarist.
I inquired about his experiences in the music industry, and he ticked off a list of Toronto bars where he’d played. The places whose names I recognized were all dives — the sort of bars that pay you with free drinks — and so I asked him if he had a day job.
“Well, I do house painting,” he added. “Also, I’m into the white supremacist stuff.”
He added this latter detail absent-mindedly, as if he were describing a part-time pet-grooming service, or an eBay store where he sold houses made of Popsicle sticks.
It emerged that the “Gary” I was talking to was Gary Schipper, a prominent member of the Canadian neo-Nazi Heritage Front back in the early 1990s. In those days, this fellow was quite literally the voice of Canadian racism: He personally narrated the daily outgoing message on the Heritage Front’s telephone hotline (this being the way that bigots social networked with one another in the days before the internet). In the process, he earned at least one criminal conviction on contempt charges.
Schipper explained to me that his career as an anti-Semite originated in the fact that he was an ethnic gentile who’d been adopted by a Jewish family when he was just 6 weeks old. “I didn’t look Jewish, you know?” he said, pausing so I could assure him on this apparently important point. “I just didn’t fit in.”
“There’s only one Jew who was ever gassed to death,” he went on. “That was Caryl Chessman — the rapist guy who went to the California gas chamber in 1960. The Auschwitz stuff is all BS.”
Throughout all this, Gary never stopped smiling. His only sour note came when he lamented the fact that Ezra Levant was getting all the attention for bucking the human-rights censorship system, something he’d been doing for years.
If I were a truly righteous Jew, I would have let the little bigot have it, broken hand and all. But at 4am, it wasn’t in me. The whole scene was just too surreal for an impromptu Holocaust-awareness lecture.
There are no real walls in the triage area: To the extent anyone receives treatment, it is behind a curtain, not a door. As Gary finally slept, I could hear the drunk from earlier on, now snoring it off next door. On the other side, a quiet-seeming fellow had just confessed to the room that he’d wolfed down 20 Ativan pills earlier in the evening. None of the nurses seemed particularly shocked or concerned by this — though they did summon a security guard to keep him on suicide watch. All part of the night shift, apparently — and all quite depressing.
But there are lovely scenes, too — even if the loveliness is well-disguised. At one point, a middle-aged man walked in with his mother, a confused but not altogether senile woman struggling with painful constipation. It was a while before the patient found relief through the various methods employed by the nurses. Throughout the entire procedure, her son ministered to her lovingly, without the slightest indication that he would prefer to be anywhere else on the planet. This filial devotion was truly beautiful – that is the correct word – to behold. How many of us can claim to be such good children to our parents in their declining years?
We arrive at the ER in our worst state. Everyone on both sides of the counter is overtired, or bored, or stressed. But despite this, you can see people demonstrating amazing strength and professionalism. The nurses in particular, who have to spend much of their time holding irate patients at bay until a doctor wanders by to press a stethoscope or feel a gland, seem superhuman to me — since they do a lot of the yucky stuff that doctors are too busy to do. Whatever these women are paid isn’t enough. They never seem to lose their temper — even when the alcoholic refused to take his meds, and urged them toward his gurney for some “party time.”
By 7:30am, I’d been in the ER for five hours, and no one could tell me when I’d finally be able to see a doctor. Part of me wanted to hold out for medical treatment, just out of pure stubbornness. But my infection had started to recede on its own, and sticking around seemed senseless. So I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to Gary and the Asian triage nurse (from whom Gary was happily, and very non-racistly, receiving treatment for his hand), and left.
As I did so, I felt curiously satisfied with the health-care experience I’d received, even though I’d really received no health care at all.
Despite all its various problems, our single-payer health system typically is justified on the basis that everyone should receive the same standard of health care. But there is another virtue to the system — which is that the country’s elites cannot hide from its defects. I won’t lie: If my neghbourhood had some gold-plated, private clinic where I could have shown up on Monday night and received instant care in an environment free of pill poppers and weirdos, I happily would have slapped down my Visa card. But instead, I spent the evening getting an eyewitness look at the way the real health care system treats its best customers – the old, the self-destructive, the criminal, and the weird.
As a pundit who’s supposed to have some idea about what ails the country, and the people who live in it, that’s not such a bad thing.
jkay@nationalpost.com
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