Home »
From hostel to hospital
By Peter Christensen
Op-Ed Commentary
My friend made an anxious journey to Kelowna for a heart valve replacement. He’d been getting weaker and finally, after a lengthy wait, a date was set. Some people talk as if heart valve replacement is a common procedure, as if having your ribcage sawed open from the top of your rib cage to your sternum, held open by clamps and a new valve sewed into your heart is as easy as fixing a broken toe. I bear witness that open heart surgery is no small matter!
Once the repair is in place, the ribcage is lined up and sewed back together with stainless steel wire, the surgeons go for coffee and the patient waits out the next day or two in Intensive Care cruising on morphine dreams. The ‘family’ earnestly waits and worries that the patient will not develop post-op pneumonia, which can become an uncontrollable infection that ravages the patient.
The actual procedure is harder on the spouse or partner than on the patient. Spouses are wide awake during the operation. They wait, exhausted and passive in opaque and barren hospital waiting rooms. They come and go from these rooms thinking what lovers do when they confront the possibility of mortal separation and loneliness as in the Eurythmic song:
“Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
Want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you
So baby talk to me
Like lovers do
Walk with me
Like lovers do
Talk to me
Like lovers do
Here comes the rain again”
What the Doctors don’t tell you is that for a long time after surgery your emotions will be so fragile you will not know yourself and that you will understand what it is to weep.
The valve replacement was successful and my friend is resting at home. He rocketed out of ICU in a couple of days. The nurses have patients up the day after surgery, get them walking and breathing to work the lungs and as soon as able to climb the stairway to heaven, that being one flight of hollow concrete stairs. Then they send the patient home.
While our friend was in Kelowna General Hospital his spouse stayed at a ‘hostel’ called Joe Anna’s House. Joe Anna’s is two blocks from KGH and provides reasonable accommodation for out of town ‘family.’ For the protection of persons making the fate-filled two block journey from Joe Anna’s to KGH, two fully decked out Security Guards are provided. It is not considered safe to make the journey alone because of the danger of being attacked.
The streets near KGH are inhabited by desperate addicts, homeless and transients. For reasons unknown the City of Kelowna lacks the cultural capital to insist their streets be safe for pedestrians walking to and from the hospital. Humans are adaptable though and armed guards are provided to escort a person safely.
One has to ask: has our society gone so far down the egregious path of self-blame and guilt that violent, desperate and jealous persons living on the street are no longer accountable for their behaviour? Has all the sympathy, outreach and care intended to guide desperate persons to a better life been a waste, been so unsuccessful that ordinary persons cannot walk unguarded for two city blocks?
Have we overproduced “intellectuals,” that is people who rely on their peers for validation rather than empirical facts? Are our bureaucracies and universities stuffed full of disconnected cosmic influencers and over-esteemed persons who believe our justice system is corrupt, that it inherently creates social, economic, and political inequalities, that the diligent application of long thought-out laws is responsible for criminal behaviour? Has this ideology lifted responsibility for their actions from criminals who are then put on the street to fend off shock and harass people in public spaces?
Does this cosmic sense of justice promote the idea that because we are a successful society we are collectively guilty for individual criminal misbehavior, that we should be empathetic toward violent people?
The methods and ideas of well-healed and self-anointed “influencers” inhabit our day-to-day thinking so much that ‘family’ must employ armed escort to walk two blocks between hospital and accommodation.
Have we had enough?
– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley based writer and poet
