Ditch Doc

I figure speaking at an event with the words “World” and “Congress” in the title means I get to buy a new garment. So on Tuesday, I went to my local clothier for a really top-notch shirt. He looked at my coat and ties, picked one out, and told me the stripes are pronounced enough to tell everyone I’m the latest young hotshot, but restrained enough to put it respectfully. Here’s our post-purchase banter:

Ditch: “…and I think I’ll be back soon for pants. You warned me not to buy clothes in malls, and I did anyway, and the seam opened at the pocket after a week.”

Stitch: “Yeah, you know, I just can’t remember the last time I went to a discount superstore for thyroid surgery, either.”

I will most certainly be back for pants.

Then there was the aboriginal woman I picked up during paramedic preceptorship a few blocks from the notorious intersection of Hastings and Main in Vancouver. We found her lying in pain half on, half off her bed, surrounded by well used crack pipes, roaches, empty prescription bottles and a brand new box of needles she could only have stolen from a hospital. A stream of limp complaint poured slowly from her mouth. Her back hurt. Her head hurt. Her stomach hurt. She felt weak. She couldn’t walk upright. In the ambulance, I started a brief medical history, but ran out of paper before it was half done. She had diabetes, hypertension, depression and asthma. She was in an abusive relationship. “My kitney’s are no koot. My heart’s no koot either. My liver’s no koot.” (”Big surprise,” I thought.) “But my onions are OK.” My pen hovered over the paper as I pondered what organs she could possibly be calling onions, and I looked up just in time to catch her sharing a knowing grin with my preceptor. She nodded in my direction. “Blondy’s a little slow on the uptake.” The car errupted in laughter at my expense, and we traded jokes for the rest of the trip to St. Paul’s, most of them too off-colour to post on a Catholic blog. We left her to entertain the ER nurses, and for the rest of the shift, no one called me by my Christian name: ‘Blondy’ was more than sufficient.

The other day, I found myself speaking, as one will from time to time, with a man who thinks all the mainstream media are controlled by nefarious Jews. He even pronounced it ‘Jooooos…’. By way of evidence, he showed me the first few pages of a Google search, ‘media controlled by Jews’, which had produced about 270,000 hits. So it must be true. Of course this probably spells the demise of Western civilization, but I think we’re missing the real threat by a mile. Just Google ‘media controlled by cats’ and see.

I don’t like much of Anthony Hopkins’ work, but having watched “A Bridge Too Far”, I now see why he’s famous. Lieutenant-Colonel Frost is one of the best written, best acted heroes in Hollywood. He speaks softly. Maybe too softly, and a bit high. He brings his dinner jacket and golf clubs to Holland. The blasts on his tiny bugle seem affected, even dweeby. But he doesn’t let the cheering crowds in Arnhem get to his head. He just wants to see the bridge in one piece. He apologizes to the owner for having to occupy the house overlooking the bridge, but wastes no time in smashing out the windows and placing machine guns. He politely directs the front line of defence, and politely tells the German translator requesting his surrender to go to Hell. He takes the news that no reinforcements are coming dispassionately, and gets back to the hopeless business of keeping a Panzer division at bay with a few hundred exhausted men. And at the end, the position lost, the bulk of his men dead or wounded and himself crippled, he dismisses his batman with a small smile and the words: “We just didn’t make it this time, did we?”
On seeing Frost’s courage unfold, we might be tempted to refer to ‘character development’. But that smile belongs to the same soft-spoken gentleman we met at the beginning, who was already then the battle-ready leader of men that we see now. Only our knowledge of the man has developed.

There’s this idea that orthopaedic surgeons are basically neanderthals with an interest in shop activities. “Bone break, me fix” was how a medical oncologist prof of ours summed them up. Today we had a talk from a real live orthopod, and I can now reassure you that this stereotype is entirely false. Here are a few of the pearls of wisdom he imparted:

“People usually do pretty good after you fix them… they like it when you fix them.”

“Anesthetists don’t get to connect much with their patients, cause they’re not usually very awake.”

“…it’s fun to do stuff.”

“When you haven’t done it before, you don’t know how hard to hit things.”

I trust the myth has been dispelled.

There’s a man in Fort Nelson General, (let’s call him Zechariah), who is slowly recovering from a stroke. Aside from the wheelchair, he is a comely gentleman, bald, with glittering eyes and a well-trimmed peppery moustache. He understands what is being spoken to him, but can generally only reply with “Yeah.” He speaks his one word with an amazing versatility of facial expression, intonation and head movement, so you can usually get a good idea what he means. The other day, the Fillyjonk and I went to say goodbye at the hospital, where Zach had wheeled himself to the door for his daily sit in the shade.

Fillyjonk: “Good morning!”
Zach: [Smiling and vigorously nodding] “Yeah!”
Ditch: “How are you?”
Zach: [More quietly, but contentedly] “Yeah, yeah.”
Fillyjonk: “We came to say goodbye.”
Zach: [Frowning] “Yeah?”
Ditch: “Yeah, I’m moving to Ontario, and FJ’s going to Vancouver.”
Zach: “Holy shit!”

And he turned completely red and looked ready to cry. The two of us nearly burst into tears on the spot. God bless him, and send us more friends like him.

OK, I can’t not post this stuff. The intersection of the Liard River and the Alaska Highway is four hours north of town, in the geographical centre of no-where. The water from the springs is hot enough to support an eerily jungle-like spread of greenery in an area that reaches -40 in the winter, and the characters who drift through or set up camp are even weirder. Here’s a brief dramatis personae: 

Trapper Ray: Pretty well the definitive hotsprings legend. Built cabins over a wide area of the Liard watershed, ran a trapline, and used to own the Hotsprings Lodge. Founder of the Fur Spider Hoax (See March ‘06). Once shot a moose from across a river, and carried it back in pieces across the shifting ice floes just after breakup. Was allowed by the government to shoot possibly the only Kermode bear ever observed in the Northern Rockies, because they didn’t believe that he’d seen one.

Stanley the Buffalo: Used to hang out at the Lower Lodge and watch the customers through the windows. Sometimes he would stand aimlessly in the gas station for several hours at a time.

Crazy Old Bill: Maybe not exactly crazy, but definitely a little odd since he cut down a tree onto his own head. Used to run a jade mine, which produced many green rocks, some of which, it stands to reason, may well have been jade.

Lucy: Grossly overweight stray horse that begged food off whoever would cough it up at the Hotsprings Lodge.

Kenworth the Buffalo: Still goes by the moniker he earned when he was hit by a Kenworth truck on the highway and survived. The truck was a write-off.

Ranger Al: The duty to remove fur-spider crossing signs from the highway and explain to tourists that the creatures were imaginary fell to Ranger Al. Consequently, he didn’t get along too well with Trapper Ray.

Jan: Fugitive from the FBI who just showed up at the Lodge one day and started working. Picked an assortment of wild mushrooms one day, and then disappeared for a week. Eventually hauled off by the mounties.

Cowboy Ron: Former inmate of the Kingston pen, and artisan of a still so sophisticated that it now belongs to the collections of the Penitentiary Museum.

And all this without even mentioning Toad River! Maybe one day.

On fighting fires in Australia:

“No, I didn’t go. The guys who went were telling stories about crazy-ass spiders and crocodiles in pump sites and shit. I’ll take mosquitoes and black-bears any day.”

And then there was the one about the guy who was planning to shoot his wife, but was so drunk that he forgot to brace the shotgun against his shoulder, missed at point blank range, blew up the TV and broke his collarbone. You sure look tough now, buddy.

The hostel’s heating system had broken during the day, so we sat in our coats in the second floor kitchen, watching a bitterly cold Edmonton wind tear down the dark street below. A greying Newfoundlander, eyes droopy with sixty years and one very hard night, weakly swayed in his chair and rambled aimlessly across the steel strings he’d forced upon a tiny classical guitar. An enormous smooth-headed Djiboutian, wrapped to the chin in a new pea coat and matching black scarf, sat back with his hands in his pockets, quietly observing from across the table. Between his smattering of English and mine of French, we exchanged names and a few broken sentences before lapsing into silence. The drunken rambling took on words and direction: it had become an improvisation on love, directed at the only dedicated audience member, whom I now knew as Pierre. Pierre flashed a black Cheshire grin and chuckled. “I love you too.” We exchanged an amused smile as the Newfie struck out on the theme of a heartbroken girl. Pierre felt around for the right English: “He makes up his own music…directly,” he said. The singing stopped. “No, no…” slurred the musician. “It’s ahff de coff.”