Hey guys! How are you all doing today? I'm pretty good. The humidity is still insane, but that could go away tomorrow, or stay with us until mid-October, depending on what the weather feels like doing this year. Today I'm here to talk about two places that were huge parts of my life when I was growing up. The Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) and the Ottawa Children's Treatment Centre (OCTC). Not only were both places instrumental in keeping me healthy when I was a child, but CHEO saved my life and OCTC is where I spent the first five years that I was in school. I'll also be talking about some of the books, comics, TV shows and movies that I experienced in those places as well since this is a geeky blog after all. I wanna start with OCTC because that's where I made my first friends and had my very first best friend.
So OCTC is a place that is now part of CHEO, but when I was a kid, the building was on the same campus as CHEO and there was a passageway between the two facilities, and there were also medical clinics at OCTC as well. This is where the Physical and Occupational Therapists had their offices. So even when I wasn't at school, or had moved on to Greely Elementary School, I spent a lot of time at OCTC. And as I may have mentioned there was also a school there that went from preschool until the first grade. The school was actually two classrooms in a hallway, and then a playroom with a lunch room and three classrooms that were along the wall. There was also a Toy Library next to the lunch room, but I had lots of toys at home and so I never got to borrow toys from the Toy Library.
I started at OCTC in the fall of 1989 when I went into preschool. I don't remember anything from preschool, except what the classroom looked like and even that's pretty vague. What I do remember is the driver I had who took me to school every day and brought me home again. His name was Vince and he was my driver for that whole year. Vince drove a van. Anyway, later in my life, Vince became a security guard at CHEO and my mom and I would go down to the security office which was beside the entrance to the passageway between CHEO and OCTC on the first floor of the hospital (basically the basement). Also, whenever I was in the hospital and Vince knew I was there, he would come up to whichever floor I was on and see me on one of his breaks. Which occasionally meant a late night visit if he was on the night shift.
There are two custodians as OCTC that I'd like to talk about, their names were Ron and Gord and they always said hi to me when I was out in the play area at school. Ron was still there when I went back to OCTC for group meetings in the late '90s, which I'll be talking about a little later. Gord had moved on by then though. I remember one time Gord set up the play mats that were always in the corner near the bookshelves, as the bridge of the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, using a picture in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Journal, which I brought to school to show him. Which was really cool.
Junior Kindergarten, which I was in from 1990 until 1991, was when my whole life changed. It's the school year where I began talking. Prior to this I had used Sign Language and sounds to communicate to my parents and preschool teacher. But this year I started talking and it was all because of a girl. That's right, I started talking because of a girl. Her name was Sara, and she talked to me constantly. And of course, because I didn't start talking until after I met her, I couldn't talk back to her. Sadly, I don't remember Sara being at the OCTC school in the remaining three years, so it's possible she moved away after Junior Kindergarten. I really don't remember.
I met other kids there. Some of whom I got back in touch with for a brief time. Lee, Kyle, Krystianne, AnaLori, Caitlin, Moe, and Anna are the ones that I remember. Kyle and I reunited in the late '90s at OCTC for a summer day camp known as Teens First Summer Camp, and then somehow we ended up in the same program at Algonquin College for two years. Which is wild. Krystianne, AnaLori and I also reunited at Teens First Summer Camp. Oh and Krystianne and I also hung out for a while as adults too. Lee and I didn't meet again until college when we found each other on Facebook and I would also see him around campus. Sadly, Lee passed away a year ago, but among those of us who have had health complications since birth, we're lucky that we've lived as long as we have. I miss him, but he's in my memories for sure.
However, my best friend at the OCTC school was a boy named Joshua. Same as me. We both liked Star Trek and Power Rangers and played together all the time. We were in the same class one year and so the teacher started calling him Joshua, and I was Josh, and that stuck. Oh and Joshua also went to Los Angeles to visit the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation at Paramount Studios the week after I did. Literally, he left just after I got home. I was jealous, because even though I had gotten to go first, he got to meet Michael Dorn, who played Worf, and I didn't, because he just happened to not be filming scenes the day I was there, so he wasn't on set that day. Joshua was also the one who taught me the names of the Power Rangers too. Which was kinda cool. I remember he came to visit me in the hospital one time and he brought a toy phaser and communicator from the original Star Trek series to show me. I had the tricorder from TNG though, so I wasn't too jealous of him for having the TOS phaser and communicator (yes I was). Unfortunately I lost track of Joshua over the years because we didn't keep in touch when we left OCTC and went to different regular public schools and I've never found him on Facebook. We got along great though. Would've been cool to see what he's like as a teenager or an adult, if he's even still alive. Like I said, many of us were really sick and I know at least one of them who passed away after we'd left OCTC, but while we were still kids.
I had some pretty neat teachers too. Like I said, I don't remember the one I had for preschool, but for Kindergarten, both Junior and Senior, I had Corinne and then I had Joan in the first grade. There were also other Teacher's Aids and attendants at the school as well that helped to deal with our medical stuff like my feeding pump, going to the bathroom and other things like that. One of them, his name was Steven, used to tell really bad Star Trek knock knock jokes to make me laugh during lunch. Yes, there were Star Trek knock knock jokes. I don't remember any of them now, but at the time I thought they were hilarious.
There was this one time, that I alluded to in my review of the first tape in the Disney Sing-Along Songs series, where my school did a Christmas concert, where we sang Disney songs and dressed up as various Disney characters. I Cosplayed before Cosplay was a thing. Anyway I got to be one of the Dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There's even a picture of me, in full Dwarf gear, hidden here, where no one will ever see it. And I'm dressed as Grumpy. So imagine me, as a five or six year old, trying to look angry, while smiling at the audience. Both of my grandmothers were in the audience, as were my sister (my brother as well too if I remember correctly) and my mom. We sang all of the classic Disney songs, including "Mickey Mouse March", "Never Smile at a Crocodile", "It's A Small World", "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo", "Following the Leader", "When You Wish Upon a Star", and "Heigh-Ho". Beauty and the Beast wasn't out yet, and we also didn't sing anything from The Little Mermaid either.
Before I get to talking about CHEO, there's something else that I'd like to mention about OCTC. And that is Disability Awareness and Teens First, two social discussion groups that I was part of that were actually pretty fun. Disability Awareness was a group that met in the lunch room in the school area of OCTC and it was a weekly thing. A lot of the kids that I'd gone to school with in preschool, Kindergarten and first grade were in this group, as well as a few that I'd never met before. Which was cool because while we got to see people we'd known our whole lives up to that point, we also met new people, which wasn't something that happened very often out where I lived at the time. I went to Disability Awareness in 1997.
Teens First was different, because it was more of a social group than Disability Awareness was. While Disability Awareness was meant to not only help us understand our own disabilities, but to also help us learn about the disabilities that the other kids in the group had, as well as helping us learn to cope with people who don't have disabilities and their questions etc. Teens First was about us growing up as people with disabilities and becoming teenagers. We had a movie night, where we went to see Titanic. Yes, as my eleven year old self, I went to see Titanic in theatres with a group of my peers. A group where there were a lot of girls in it I might add. I don't think any of us guys would've willingly chosen to go see it if the girls hadn't wanted to see it, or hadn't been there. Oh well.
One of the weirdest things that happened to me that winter (Teens First and Disability Awareness happened in the wintertime) is there was this one day, where I was heading into a Teens First meeting and in the lobby of OCTC I passed a girl and her mother, coming from another group similar to both Teens First and Disability Awareness. The girl was only 8 years old, and I didn't pay much attention to them because I was trying to get to my meeting and I just put it out of my mind. Well, I found out a month ago that that 8 year old girl ended up becoming one my best friends and one of my absolute favourite people in the world, because that girl turned out to be Katie. We were sitting in the backyard back in July and I happened to mention OCTC to her and the groups I was part of in my early teens between 1997 and 2000, and then she told me about the group she was part of, run by the same person who organized my groups, and that's when we realized that we were there at the same time.
Teens First had a summer day camp that I went to for a week in both 1998 and 2000. I have pictures from the week I went in 1998 and we did a lot of stuff. Karaoke, Laser Quest, a Martial Arts/Defense lesson, and a walk around the CHEO/OCTC/Ottawa Hospital, General Campus campus. There were older teenagers who joined us as volunteers and I made friends with a few of them. Ryan C. and Matt were two of them, as well as Ahmed, who became my mentor briefly in 1999. Oh and did I mention that I listened to a lot of Spice Girls that week? No? Well let me tell you that story.
There were a group of girls at the camp who loved the Spice Girls and being teenage girls they put on those albums every day. I even have a picture of them posing as the girl band. Well, trying to anyway. Stephanie, from the winter program, was in that group, as were AnaLori and Krystianne. So that was cool. I think I had a crush on Robin, who was Stephanie's best friend at the camp and they were always together.
I think I'm going to leave it off here for now as I talked way too long about my time at OCTC, and didn't even cover everything that I remember from those days. There were swimming lessons, movie days, field trips, visiting each other when one of us was in the hospital (CHEO was right there) and so much more. For now I'll end things here. Come back shortly though and I'll have the CHEO part up before I go to bed tonight. Later.
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