Jack and I were no strangers to hospitals. They were the places we knew best other than my condo and our shared house. We arrived at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre for the first time together on January 20, 2016. Jack grabbed a quick smoke walking from the car park to the door. As he dropped it in the sewer grate he grinned, threw his arm around my waist and said: 

“Hey, we’ve never been to this hospital before!” 

As he said it, I knew he’d be flashing back on our first hospital visit, as I did. 

—

“I have a pain in my chest and my heart feels weird. Do you think I should drive?” he asked, in a by-the-by way during one of the hours-long phone calls that characterized our early courtship. 

“Stay there.” I replied and hopped in the car.

I was at his appliance repair shop as fast as I could through Toronto evening traffic. As I pulled up, I saw him through the window, his computer monitor bright with evidence of cow-trading on Facebook FarmVille. His skin was the colour of the ash that dropped off the end of the DuMaurier hanging from his mouth. That ash collected with the remains of its burnt predecessors on the mounds of invoices, flyers, and scraps of important paper on his desk. Even if the heart attack that seemed brewing in his chest didn’t kill him, he was one careless flick away from going up in a fiery inferno. 

“Jack, let’s go to the hospital.” 

Surprisingly, he agreed. We wouldn’t have found parking closer than we were so we walked slowly across the field at the now-closed branch of the Humber River Regional Hospital. I shifted my weight nervously beside Jack while he reported his symptoms to the triage desk. As worried as I was about his heart, mine fluttered when I overheard him give my name and number as his emergency contact. 

Chest pain gets attention at the hospital. We were in an exam room quickly: Jack on a rolly-bed with a thin mattress and a sheet on it; me on a hard armless chair beside it, my legs exposed under the three-quarter length curtains. After a rundown of his symptoms and his history, the doctor decided Jack likely had a bout of heartburn or possibly angina, but decided to observe him for the night. 

“Go home. It’s late, you have to work in the morning, and I’ll be fine,” Jack told me, looking vulnerable and sleepy from his cot. 

Thinking about my new ‘emergency contact’ status, I knew my job was here. The responsibility I felt both thrilled and overwhelmed. I couldn’t possibly know what lay six years ahead of us. 

“Nope, I’m staying with you, just in case.” 

All night, I sat awake on the hard chair while my patient snored beside me, despite the harsh lighting, endless PA announcements, and chatter and clatter of people and equipment outside our curtains. 

Jack was deemed safe to leave about 5 a.m. and as we exited the hospital I remarked:

“Patients would be lost without caregivers here, eh? There aren’t enough staff to give adequate attention to everyone who needs it. They should at least give us better chairs!” 

We drove to our respective homes, reflecting on the good and bad of our public health care system.  

—

Our next brush with emergency was a few months later as we searched for our house together, focussing on Weston, an inner suburb of Toronto close to Jack’s shop and well-served by public transit. The neighbourhood is very mixed - Victorian mansions sit next to post-war houses, semis are in the shadows of sprawling turreted castles. It was - and still remains - a treasure unknown to downtowners.  

“Jack, this bathroom is amazing!” I exclaimed as I descended to the main floor of a small detached '50s house with peacock blue fixtures and tiles. 

“Oh, I will rip that out. It’s awful,” Jack responded from three steps behind me, foreshadowing the endless debates about decor that characterized our cohabitation. 

“No way!,” I replied, turning to emphasize my point. “Fuck!” I screamed a millisecond later as I missed the bottom step, landing awkwardly on my ankle and hitting my head against the wall. I could feel my sandal tighten against my swelling foot. I was sobbing now, knowing our house-hunting was done for the day but worried that I might be out of commission for a while.

“Can you walk?” Jack asked, always good in a crisis.  

“I don’t think so,” I sniffed back.

“There’s a hospital in Weston,” Jack told me, as we drove three blocks north to the now-closed Church Street Site of the Humber River Regional Hospital. 

“This is amazing. Another reason to pick this neighbourhood,” I remarked as we hobbled into this Emergency for the first time. Bad sprain was the conclusion reached some hours later. Jack drove me home in the middle of the night, another successful hospital trip. 

—

That was the first of several trips to the Church Street location just down the street from our new house including the time Jack intervened in a fight between our two dogs. Kora, his 10 year old boxer, put an incisor through the fleshy part of his thumb. As he reported it, it was his fault for getting in the way. He doused his hand in peroxide and we headed out to the party we’d been invited to. There were a bunch of tough guys at the party and to a one, they insisted Jack should be getting his hand checked out. Eventually I convinced him and we headed to our favourite local hospital. We had to carefully evade the truth for fear Kora would have to be muzzled or worse, euthanized for having bitten him. Through it all, Jack was unfazed. 

Over the years, minor gynaecological issues took me to Mount Sinai and St. Mikes, with Jack accompanying me through the process; Jack’s kidney stones had us in the new Humber River Regional Hospital; I gave blood numerous times at Mount Sinai; and we attended a dietician’s workshop on dealing with Jack’s pre-diabetes. Endless minor care. 

—-

But nothing really prepared us for the path that lay ahead when we took that first step into Princess Margaret that January day nearly eight years ago. I furiously took notes as we learned the results of the MRI, a PET scan, and a biopsy, were all in and they pointed to Stage IIIA Small Cell Carcinoma, a fast growing cancer.  The words were as impenetrable then as first year Torts law class and so I recorded verbatim to sort out later. Regrettably, within weeks, I was fluent in the language of cancer, and spoke it for three years.

Jack’s medical oncologist, Dr. Liu, explained the proposed aggressive treatment - 4-6 rounds of three day chemo, spaced three weeks apart, with three weeks of twice daily chest radiation thrown in. Without treatment they predicted Jack would get significant back-pain in the next few months and the cancer would kill him quickly. With treatment, we were told the tumours should shrink. If that happened, they would give him whole brain radiation in the summer as a precaution against the lung cancer cells migrating northwards. Then he could expect a period of 18-24 months of wellness and then a recurrence of the cancer which might be treatable.

“We’ll put Jack through hell,” Dr. Liu said. “The chemo may damage his lungs, heart, kidneys, and liver. It can lead to hearing loss and will most definitely result in nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite, and loss of hair. But there is a chance for a cure.”  

Jack and I listened, holding hands, together against a common foe. Our previous hospital experience was no help now. 

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