Last time on Living With Disabilities...I sang Disney songs dressed as a Dwarf for a Christmas concert, forgot everything about preschool, listened to the Spice Girls way too much courtesy of a group of girls that I knew, and learned to talk to keep up with a girl who talked all the time. And now...Part 2!
Okay, so this time I'll be talking about the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), my time there, the nurses whose names I can remember, some of my doctors, the special locations I went to inside the hospital and some of the movies and TV shows I got to watch, the books, comics and magazines I got to read, and the toys I got to play with while there.
My first memory of CHEO, and basically my first memory overall was sitting in a little red wagon outside my hospital room when I was 3 years old. That's not my whole memory though. I also remember my dad arriving to see me before I had to go for some sort of operation. I don't remember whether it was just a procedure to open my esophagus, or if it was a more involved operation. I was still on 5 North at the time though. Each floor for the fourth, fifth and sixth floors were split up into units with a designation fitting one of three of the four directions on a compass, with south not existing, because the south end of the floor was where the playrooms were situated. Trust me, I'll get to the playrooms shortly. They were really cool. Because I was in the hospital for surgery more than for any other reason, I spent a lot of time on 5 East. That was my second home and all the nurses knew me in that unit. The other unit I spent a lot of time in, particularly when I got older, was 4 East. I only remember the name of one nurse there though. I remember more from 5 East.
As I said above, 5 East was my second home. During my early years I spent more time there than at my actual home. I had birthdays and Christmases on 5 East, I had a lot of nurses there who looked after me. Even the nurses who weren't assigned to me that day looked after me while I was there. Even when I wasn't admitted to the hospital, if I was there for all day appointments, my mom and I would go up to 5 East and say hi to the nurses there if we had time between appointments.
There was Jacques, Gladys, Margo (at the nurse's station), Louise (also at the nurse's station), Jo (I called her JoJo though), Lin (I think she was on 4 East though) and so many more whose names I don't remember, because there were so many. And that's just on 5 East. I had nurses on 4 East, the ICU, the Day Surgery Unit, the MDU (Medical Day Unit, which I talked about in a previous post), the clinic nurses, and the ER. There were so many people who looked after me at the hospital, especially when my mom or dad had to go home and look after my younger siblings who were babies at the time.
While the doctors and nurses took care of my physical health, there was another group of people who also looked after me at CHEO. They were the Childlife Workers. They're volunteers who run the playrooms, the book cart, and the entertainment units (VCRs, TVs, video game consoles etc). Without them being in the hospital for months at a time would've been a lot more boring and I would've been homesick a lot more often. The first one I remember was named Andrea. In fact, Andrea was such an important part of my life at CHEO that when my parents were expecting their second child, and they discovered it would be a girl, I named her Andrea, after the Childlife Worker. There was also Michelle, Norah and dozens of other volunteers who played with the kids in the playrooms, brought us the TV carts into our rooms so we could watch movies on the VCR, and brought us toys from the playroom if we were too sick to go to there. Which, I was quite frequently.
One of my favourite toys to play with when I was stuck in my room was the Fisher Price Castle. This was the original version from the '70s and I used to play with any figures they were able to give me from the bins in the playroom. When I was a little bit older, I would also pretend that it was Rita's Palace from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers since it had the balcony on it and everything. I mean they never made a toy of Rita's Palace so I had to make due with what I had on hand. Especially in the hospital.
My favourite place to go when I was at the hospital was the CHEO gift shop. They had books, toys, and comics as well as smaller things that could be used as either stocking stuffers at Christmas or as loot bag gifts for kids at a birthday party. My favourite thing to get here was The Berenstain Bears books. This was such an awesome series and I got a lot of these books from the hospital gift shop. So, the deal was, if I was good during a test, invasive procedure or bloodwork, my mom would take me down to the gift shop afterward and buy me a book or comic. I think she also got one of my Dinosaur toys from there too. Mainly books and comics. If I wasn't good though, she wouldn't take me and I would forfeit the reward until the next visit. More often than not I'd get the reward though because generally I was pretty good at the hospital. Bloodwork was the most difficult though because most times it would take forever for them to find a decent vein and often times it was quite painful as they poked me trying to find the right spot.
The gift shop was also where I got all of the issues of The Batman Adventures that I read as a kid. Before this I'd only read comics based on Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'd seen Batman on TV, but this was my first time reading Batman in the comics and I loved it, even though it wasn't the main Batman series that I started with. Issue #7 of The Batman Adventures was the first Batman comic I ever got. I had no idea who the guy was that Batman was fighting on the cover (it's Killer Croc), but I loved that Batman was in a comic book. The book's logo was pretty cool too.
The first Batman comic I ever got that was set in the main DC Universe, albeit the DC Universe of the early '90s, was Batman #493. This was at the beginning of the Knightfall saga and Batman was starting to get worn out fighting all the escapees from Arkham Asylum. So that's pretty cool that this was my introduction into the main DC Universe. And, yes, I also got this at the CHEO gift shop. There weren't any issues of The Batman Adventures, no Star Trek comics, and no other comics that my mom deemed suitable for me that day, so she bought me this issue instead. One of the criteria for my mom to buy a Batman comic for me, if it wasn't The Batman Adventures, was whether or not Robin was in the book. Now, at the time I didn't know the difference between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake. I saw the Robin costume, which wasn't the one from the 1966 TV show, but the one that Dick wore in Batman: The Animated Series, which, before 1995 when Batman Forever came out, was the only Robin costume that was on backpacks, lunchboxes, trading cards, toys and stickers, which were everywhere. So that was my Robin costume.
Next door to the gift shop was the Coffee Shop. My mom and I would sit here between appointments so she could get some coffee and maybe a sandwich or a cookie or something quick if she didn't have time to get a larger lunch before my next X-ray, CT scan, appointment with a doctor or some other test or procedure. I loved that coffee shop so much. And when I was admitted to the hospital, sometimes my mom or dad would take me down to the Coffee Shop so we could sit and talk without disturbing my roommate and to give me a change of scenery, if I was there for an extended period of time.
Also on the second floor, along with the clinics, the X-ray department, the Orthopaedic clinic, and the Emergency Department, was the library. This is where the books that would be brought up to the kids on the floors on the book carts came from. From time to time my mom would bring me down here to look at the books. I am not ashamed to admit that the only books I tended to look at are the Disney books.
When there was a lot of time between appointments and my mom was hungry, we'd go downstairs to the large cafeteria on the first floor, near the passageway to OCTC. This is where all the doctors and nurses went to eat their meals on their breaks, so more often than not I would run into one of my doctors here or any number of nurses from 5 East, 5 North, 4 East, the ICU or the Emergency room. This cafeteria is also where the CHEO Telethon would have their Sunday morning children's entertainment hosted by either J.J. Clarke or Eric Longley from CJOH News or Suzanne Pinel, who played a character on TV named Marie-Soleil, who I watched on TV a lot. I never got to participate in this activity, because I was either too sick or too sore from surgery to go down there or I wasn't in the hospital for it, which is a good thing.
Right now there are five people who worked at CHEO that were instrumental in my care there. Three are doctors, one worked in the blood lab, and the other worked in Admitting. So that's where I'd like to start. If I was being admitted to the hospital and wasn't going through the ER, which was a very rare event, the person who would take care of everything was Unita. She was such a sweetheart and acted as my reassurance that everything would be alright, which made being admitted to the hospital less scary for me as well. As far as I know, Unita still works at CHEO now, thirty years later, which is awesome.
The three doctors I want to talk about now are my surgeon, his protoge, and the cardiac surgeon I had when I was a kid. Doctor Cornell was the Cardiac Surgeon who did my second open heart surgery when I was only 5 years old. I'd had one at 13 months, when I was paralyzed on my left side from the waist down, but this was sort of the part 2 of it, which they couldn't do until I had grown a bit more, which really meant when I was 5 years old. Lol. If it weren't for Doctor Cornell fixing the problem, my heart condition would've worsened and I would not be here right now writing this for you. However there is one doctor that I have everything to thank for.
That doctor is Doctor Soucie, my surgeon at CHEO. He's the one who formed the nucleus of my medical team and kept things going in terms of communication between the various doctors I was seeing at the time. And he did such a wonderful job too. Also, if he hadn't performed the operation to remove my esophagus, I wouldn't be here right now. I'd had so many operations to keep my esophagus functioning by the time I was 7 years old that if he hadn't removed it I would've died from malnutrition since I wasn't on the feeding pump all the time at that point, as it was more of a supplement rather than my primary source of nutrition and sustenance. Or I would've choked on my food or something because of how narrow the esophagus had gotten. So while Dr. Cornell had fixed my heart, Dr. Soucie is the one who saved my life after that. He was great with us too and I think at one point he had even given my parents his home phone number so they could call him in an emergency as he most often was the one who looked after me when I was rushed to the hospital. I owe him everything.
I remember any time Dr. Soucie would perform surgery on me, he'd come to see me the night before the operation, as I would generally be in the hospital overnight before surgery. And then he'd come see me first thing in the morning as well and we'd talk. He'd reassure me that everything would be alright and I had no reason to be scared, because of course I was. But he always came to see me the morning of the operation before they would come to take me down to the O.R. personally. He never sent a resident up to see me beforehand. He always came himself. And I really appreciated that. He also tried to make sure that he was in the operating room by the time I got there, so that he'd be a familiar face, albeit a face behind a surgical mask, for me to see before they put me to sleep. And then no matter where I was after the operation, either the recovery room or the ICU, I would always wake up to find my mom sitting there at my bedside, waiting for me to come out of the anaesthesia.
The next doctor I want to talk about is the surgeon who replaced Dr. Soucie after he retired. That doctor was Dr. Bass. He was a resident under the tutelage of Dr. Soucie when I was a baby and by the time I was a teenager and had graduated to the adult medical system, he was the head of General Surgery at CHEO. Either Dr. Bass or Dr. Soucie would be the one to change my feeding tube every so often and when they did they would always have me say "1, 2, 3...OUCH!" when they were putting the fresh tube in. Dr. Bass did far more than that though. When I was 16 years old I was starting to feel trapped because of my feeding tube. I missed a lot of time in class because I would either have to deal with my feeding tube or my esophagostomy pouch where my esophagus had been. So I went to see Dr. Bass to look at options for how to proceed. With the way I was, there was no way I could go to college, move away from home (I didn't know at the time that I wouldn't be able to do that anyway) or even start dating as long as I had the feeding tube and couldn't eat properly. He knew he couldn't do the operation himself, so he referred me to a surgeon at the Ottawa Hospital, General Campus who could and everything fell into place from there. So in that way he freed me from the prison of my own body and enabled me to do things like stay at Kelly's for a weekend, take a day trip to Kingston to visit Jonathan with Brad, go to Michelle's wedding with Katie, and of course go to Ottawa Comiccon and other fun geeky events around Ottawa.
The final person I'd like to talk about is a man named Julian. He was the head technician at the blood test lab, which was almost as scary a place as the operating room was for me, because it involved needles, which my veins didn't like. Julian did all the bloodwork himself. He was also a wizard with needles too. Now my veins are really bad from overuse and scar tissue from said overuse and when I was a kid trying to do bloodwork or start an IV on me was a long and arduous task. Julian was the only one who could do it in one try. If he was there and wasn't busy, and another technician was trying to draw blood, and my veins were not cooperating, they'd call Julian over and he did it no problem. And if I was admitted to the hospital, and they were trying to start an IV on me outside of the operating room, but they were unsuccessful, they'd call Julian up and that IV would be started in five minutes or less, no problem. In fact I think I remember a time where they were trying to start an IV on me in the middle of the night and nothing they tried was working. Five different nurses and at least one doctor tried, and they all failed. So what did they do? They called Julian as he was on call that night or was working the night shift, and he came up and got the IV started. And that was after everyone had been trying for four hours.
Now, I'm going to talk about a few of the movies that I saw while I was in the hospital growing up that I didn't get to see at home.
The first one that I saw, that I actually remember watching was Batman Returns. This was a huge mistake because it scared me to death. The Penguin was super creepy in this movie and being a young child I had nightmares for weeks after seeing this movie. I mean how could you not? He bites the nose of a guy named Josh. I actually think that's what freaked me out the most, that the dude's name was Josh, just like me. I didn't see that movie again until I was in high school and got it on DVD in the The Batman Legacy box set of all four Burton/Schumacher films, even though my parents had it on VHS along with Batman (1989). That's how bad it freaked me out.
The next movie I remember watching at CHEO was Super Mario Bros. (1993). It was in one of the waiting lounges in the MDU while I was waiting for a bone marrow procedure, not sure if it was a transplant or just a removal, but this was one of those all day trips to the hospital and they put this movie on for me while I waited to be called into the procedure room. I didn't get to see very much of it. Maybe the first fifteen or twenty minutes before they called me in. I just remember watching it on VHS in the waiting lounge behind the MDU nurse's station.
Shifting to the more child friendly entertainment options one roommate I had was into Barney like I was, so we watched the seventh tape in the Barney & The Backyard Gang series, Barney in Concert together one afternoon. Right after we watched Batman Returns if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah, weird how it was the same kid I watched both things with eh? Lol. Now I'd seen this video before, as my parents had taped off the TV the one time they aired it on PBS right after an episode of Barney & Friends. I just didn't have either of the official VHS releases of the video, and this one was the first one and only one I saw. It was the 1992 release so it was the one that would be in stores at this point in time.
Going back towards more family-friendly but less child specific entertainment, CHEO was also the place where I saw The Fox and the Hound for the first time. It was the last release to come out under the Walt Disney Classics banner, as such I think it came out on VHS the same month as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is why I hadn't seen it before. I watched it either when I was in for a sinus infection, pneumonia, which I was highly susceptible to, an asthma attack or the Chicken Pox. The earliest I would've seen it was in May or June 1994 which is when I had the Chicken Pox and I think that was the last time I was admitted to the hospital for something other than Day Surgery until the sinus infection when I was in grade 4 or 5. I watched so many other movies and TV shows at CHEO but these are the ones that stood out to me and were memorable, aside from Robin Hood, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, and Barney's Campfire Sing-Along which were mentioned in my segment on the doctor's appointments and spending days at CHEO for those.
That comes to the end of my CHEO and OCTC memories. At least the ones I wanted to share with you. I have many many others, both good and bad, but I think I'll share those at a later date. Right now I'd like to thank all of you for reading these extremely long posts. I was expecting to talk about a few things and that would be it. You know, just enough to fit into one post. But fortunately, or unfortunately, that was not to be. I'll be back tomorrow for some Free Comic Book Day comic book fun. So until then have a great night. Later.
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