Today is Shauna's 59th birthday...
This has been a strange and trying week. I have lived
with Shauna now for over 24 years, and together we have lived with a constellation
of medical issues. These recent ailments are the most baffling and troubling to date. For those of you who might have seen my Facebook posts, some of
the following may be redundant, but I will recount what has happened
regardless. I am not so self-absorbed to think that our travails are any worse
than those of many of my readers; nevertheless, I have had a simple and often
ignored lesson drummed into my head this week: there but for the grace of ---
go I. I recount our recent experiences to remind myself and my readers of our
commonality.
To pick up where I left off last week, after a one and
one-half hour drive to Barrie, we were given about 7 minutes of time with the
rushed, albeit well-qualified, on-call ophthalmologist in Emergency at Royal
Victoria Hospital. He told Shauna that she had an inflamed optic nerve, which
is serious, and that the root cause must be further investigated by another
ophthalmologist. He made an appointment for us with a doctor in Gravenhurst,
but we elected to use Shauna’s trusted ophthalmologist at Sunnybrook in
Toronto. We’d already scheduled an appointment with him for the following Wednesday,
but got nervous when her condition so rapidly deteriorated. We were of course
apprehensive that with each day that passed, the eye might get worse. When
there are medical issues, the hardest part is the waiting. We’ve done a lot of
waiting this past week.
Jump ahead to Wednesday, and we finally saw her ophthalmologist
at Sunnybrook. He immediately ordered a battery of tests and, remarkably, managed to book Shauna an MRI, for 4AM last Friday morning. He also referred
her to another ophthalmologist who specializes in neurological ophthalmology,
and we were to see her around noon on that same day (on the other side of town).
You can see that this was a tight schedule, not particularly conducive to sleep
or eating. The MRI was traumatic for Shauna. She was prescribed a sedative, as
she has been for all other MRI’s, but they only gave her half as much as she
needed for the sedative to be effective. To compound the problems, they couldn’t find a vein and
really hurt her hand. By now her chronic pain condition was flaring, her
anxiety level was through the roof, and she was unable to remain still. As I
paced around nervously in the empty halls of the Sunnybrook basement, she was
enduring pain and the claustrophobia of an MRI for more than 2 hours. Apparently, they finally
got the pictures they needed of her eyeball and brain.
Over a period of five days, we had spent 16 hours
altogether, waiting in two emergency rooms, and seen three different doctors
from Huntsville to Toronto. We had driven to Barrie and back to Katrine, and then
down in Toronto (where we are now). Shauna had been suffering with the
ever-deteriorating eye condition since July 5th, and now she was
getting terribly worried that she would never regain the sight in her left eye.
As we sat for three hours in the Kensington Eye Clinic on College St. in
Toronto, waiting (again) for the myriad of assistants to poke and test her
eyeballs, she was understandably exhausted. We both were. Finally, the two
specialists who examined her at the clinic - the specialists referred by her
trusted eye doctor - recommended that she be admitted to Toronto Western
Hospital for a full neurological workup. No answers yet. Now we were freaking
out. It was late Friday afternoon, and we were to go to yet another emergency
room to wait, hungry, overtired, and afraid, just before the weekend.
Meanwhile, our dog Jasper was with ET, Shauna’s 92 year-old mom, on the other
side of town. E.T. was recently injured, is recovering from a fall, has a caregiver only
during the day, and was not physically able to handle Jasper alone. Not the
ideal situation for anyone involved, but these are the rules of triage. Treat
the most pressing issue at hand.
I believe there is a synchronicity to the chaos we
sometimes experience in our lives. At present, Shauna is finally in a room at
Toronto Western, but Friday night was a horror show. Emergency was packed with the
victims of drug overdoses, gunshot wounds, car accidents, mental illness, and
those generally in pain and discomfort. Surrounding us was a cacophony of
distress as we waited the 7-8 hours for a bed. I remember the similar
experience, when we were in the stroke ward at Sunnybrook for months attending
to Shauna’s dying father.
I don’t recount this experience simply to complain. I
do it to remind myself (and my readers) of the one thing I take for granted: my good health. You can’t take it with you, and all the riches of Croesus don’t
amount to a pile of dung if you’re staring at the ceiling tiles in a hospital
bed waiting for the next bad news. We all
take our health for granted at some point in our lives, and then when it is
wrested from us, sometimes as the result of our own negligence, we wonder how we
could have ever ignored it. I’ve had a little dose of perspective in the past
two weeks. I know I will once again take my good health and good fortune for
granted, but this past few days, I’ve had about one hundred little reminders of
the old adage “There but for the grace of … go I” . I’ve talked with a Stage
Four brain cancer victim, at 5am Friday morning, in the catacombs of Sunnybrook,
who was having an MRI to see how many more months or weeks he had left. As we
waited for a bed at Toronto Western emergency, Shauna and I managed to distract
a double lung transplant patient, suffering from rejection complications, long
enough to be seen by a doctor. He was frustrated, ranting, scared, and ready to
bail. There was no question that this man needed to see a doctor. I came upon
an ovarian cancer survivor, working at McDonalds, who was thankful to be alive.
I’ve listened to and observed a dozen stories about tragedy and ill health. I’ve
heard a dozen anecdotes about redemption. There is nothing like a health crisis
to open one’s eyes, and I believe I was being given a cosmic kick in the ass.
Wake up Jamie; there is a universe of suffering out there that eclipses yours,
and the more you realize this, and perhaps successfully connect with others in
similar circumstances, the more likely we are to diffuse the hatred spreading
throughout our society like wildfire. I try not to dwell on misfortune. Far
from it, I am ten times more positive now than I ever used to be. Whether we
heed the call or not, there are epiphanies that strike us like lightening, and
we can learn from them or we can bury our heads in the sand. If you think it
can’t get worse, let me assure you it can. Ignore the idiocy that passes for
leadership in the world. Ignore the media and the constant message that we all
hate each other. That is simply not true.
Hatred begets hatred, and it can be propagated by rumor, and hearsay, and
misinformation in general. But there is also love, in the emergency rooms, shown
by the doctors, and paramedics, and firemen (and yes, even policemen) who choose
as their livelihood to protect and save lives. There are families that are
bound together by tragedy, there are tens of millions of random acts of
kindness.
Shauna and I are on a roller coaster right now. We are
afraid, exhausted, confused, but also reminded of our place in humanity. Our
life will settle down. Regardless of the outcome of Shauna’s latest
tribulations, this week has been a lesson I find harder and harder to ignore.
It’s one thing to know in your heart that there is someone worse off than you.
It’s quite another thing to have it front and center in your conscience. We’ve
met some beautiful nurses, doctors, and just plain perfect strangers in the past
week. I am thankful to have been reminded that we all breathe the same air, feel
the same fears and joys, and share more than we know. I apologize if this post
is a bit over the top; I am not that guy as a rule, but the older I get, and
the more the more thankful I become.
- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
