Ditch Doc

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.”

Among the huge variety of eccentric people in the hostel where I stayed in Edmonton last week were a hopeless romantic middle aged Newfie and the Platonic form of a hippie conspiracy theorist. The three of us carried on a fairly heated discussion about ‘they’ and their plans to control the whole world with an enormous biometrics database and microchip implants. The Newfie made a fair bit of sense, the hippie made none, and I spent most of the time smoking at the ears. Here’s the conclusion:

Newfie: “Well, I’ll be gone before that all happens.”

Hippie: “Oh it’s coming sooner than you think.”

Newfie: “No, I’m dying sooner than YOU think!”

The words of Steve Smith, the actor who portrays Red Green, on his residence in Hamilton:

“If you’re going to be pretentious in Hamilton…boy…you must be really good at it.”

My mother tells this story from BC’s north coast. She was teaching a class on archives, of which a hereditary chief of the Nisga’a nation was a member. Mom said he had the sort of regal bearing that makes you feel honoured to be in his presence. As the weekend progressed, it came to light that he had once been an alcoholic, but had dried up and become a protestant minister. In casual conversation, another member of the class asked him about Europeans uprooting native religions and replacing them with Christianity. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he bridled. “All I know is what Jesus did for me.”

Doctors up here are a different breed. It seems like half of them are South African. “Why do they all come here, though?” I once had the naivete to ask. “Because they get killed there.” Oh. Right. In Fort Nelson, there are usually two doctors in town at a time, one of whom is often a nomadic locum doctor on the latest stop on the small town medical milk run. Between the two of them, they run the walk in clinic and the hospital, from maternity ward to laughingly-so-called ICU. They even do some veterinary duties on occasion, as the nearest vet is 200 miles south. Our current locum, who’s usually a farmer, was telling me some tales of impromptu animal medicine when he came out with this one:
“The only anaesthetic I have on the farm is my gun.”
[Contemplative, farmerlike pause]
“It’s pretty effective though.”