– by Michael Forbes –
I’ve only been in the hospital for myself three times in my life. First encounter was when I was five and got my tonsils out. The next two times the job stress of being in this pressure cooker called radio convinced me I was having a heart attack. They weren’t cardiac arrests, I just forgot to have fun. Lesson learned.
This story is about the fourth time , one recent Sunday morning when I woke up with a pain in my side akin to being gored by a bull at Pamplona.
If I could give you any advice: please hold off on all medical emergencies until 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The admitting nurse was unbusy enough to watch me move like Jagger with his knees duct taped together across the VGH parking lot. By the time I had a chance to sashay my way in, this nurse had more than enough time to make her diagnosis. She said “there are only two reasons a grown man would walk like that. Either he is flirting with a kidney stone or is experiencing a Viagra overdose. A quick CT scan confirmed that I was suffering from the less smirk-worthy of the two.
Enter my nurse, Martin. He worked his magic and charm like the concierge at the Empress, with his cool drinks, warm blankets and “on demand” morphine.
Wait, he offered me morphine? My mind flashed back to all those World War II movies I had seen where the GI is lying on the beach using his left leg as a pillow and calling for his mother. They still use morphine? I resisted, even though I was now making sounds like a water buffalo and big game hunters were beginning to gather near the pop machine. I tried switching from wailing to mask the pain to the less obvious, breathy “hee hee hah hah” that Lisa and I learned in childbirth class, but that just made it ridiculous. I figured enough of this. If he isn’t going to give me an epidural, than just gimme the Saving Private Ryan drug.
Days later I found that there’s a brotherhood of “stoners” I now belong to. There are at least three other men at work who’ve experienced the agony of stone birth. We’re like a bunch of women who wear our labour stories like a badge of honour and try and outdo each other as to how long it lasted.
My “labour” lasted over six hazy days. Unlike most women who’ve had a baby, my bundle of joy was about 4 mm and not even worthy of the name I gave him … Oliver Stone. Unlike most moms, I will never be thumbing through a medical journal and catch a glimpse of a kidney stone, get amnesia and suddenly want to do it all over again.
In the end, little Oliver decided to pass quietly and go out like a lamb without much fanfare. I’ve been asked by my stoner support brothers if I’d rather die of a kidney stone or a viagra overdose. I tell them I’d probably choose a kidney stone, because at least that way, you’d be able to close the lid on my casket.
Forbes & Marshall are the hosts of Ocean 98.5’s popular morning show. Join them weekday mornings from 5:30 to 10:30 a.m.
