My Birthday

I was born Sept 13, 1950. I always suffix that with ‘the year of the Great Flood’ in Winnipeg. People usually go… ‘what?’, as if they can comprehend neither Winnipeg nor flood, or at best are unable to put the 2 together. It was a nasty business back then as the Red River washed much of the city into Lake Winnipeg. At least it gave birth to the Winnipeg floodway, a big ditch around the east end of the city that on occasion has averted such disasters.

So yesterday was the day, and one bigger than most if you do the math. At one point during my research of this cancer stuff, it seemed the threshold for many things. For example, in the history of cancer treatment a policy for a while was that those under 60 could withstand the rigours of a stem cell/bone marrow transplant (the only real cure – but real risky one – for MDS/leukemia) and patients over 60 were assumed not strong or flexible enough and therefore ineligible. So everyone around here, myself included has made a point in the fact that I was 59. So now I guess I’ll just shut up about it.

So last post I was going on about the nurses… Well yesterday afternoon about 10 of them come parading into my room singing at the top of their lungs with a huge piece of birthday cake. They crowded around me as I peeled back the cellophane. They exhorted me to make a wish and not tell them. I thought for a second… they’re kind of an earthy, visceral bunch so I wished they would each have great sex, real soon and blew out the candle.

My daughter Cassandra had showed up with Pete about 11, fighting bad traffic from Barrie for a couple of hours. Willow arrived shortly and finally Heather (also driving from up north) walked in with a birthday card, a goofy framed picture of my dog Fred who misses me horribly and some clean clothes. Yahoo, what could be better. On the roof of PMH there is this fantastic outdoor rooftop lounge and garden, so we all went up there for a short hang while the sun dropped in the late afternoon sky.

One of the highlights of the birthday party was watching Pete eat his cake. Cassandra just took a gooey piece and put it right in the tray of his stroller. Pete had that taken care of in seconds. See the picture below that more accurately describes what happened to that cake.

Speaking of food… there is this curious tendency amongst males in my family… well there were 7 of us growing up, but now with subsequent input from my Dad (& the accidental loss of my bro Pete in ’87), that total would now be 8 surviving males and 1 female (my 21 yr old 1/2 sister Daniela)… Anyway most us guys often will make hard assumptions about things that have little or no rooting in fact. Being no stranger to this syndrome, I come into the hospital, sniff my nose disdainfully over the 1st tray of food served to me and declare ‘How can I survive chemo and this food?’ At this point my dietary needs are specific (maybe in my exalted opinion exclusive). No meat, no sugar, no cafeine, no additives… but it’s gotta taste great. Heather rolls here eyes and imagines how she’s going to work all day, clean and feed her horses, prepare me 3 meals a day and deliver it 2 hr (1 way) each day. She dutifully shows up with home cooking for the 1st few days. Willow comes by with bags of wonderful organic food prepared by a downtown middle-eastern caterer she knows. Meanwhile the chemo pump has turned on. I can’t even smell food let alone keep it down. Pretty much all this wonderful rich earthy stuff has a shelf life of about 20 min inside my body. Then the chipper gal from food services shows up to make sure I’m getting the right stuff from the PMH kitchen with all my “can’t eat this, can’t eat that nonsense”. As it turns out it’s only the bland simple food that I can actually stomach at this point. So now I eat my oatmeal or cream of wheat, fruit juice, muffin and herb tea in the morning; vegetable broth, egg salad sandwich or past primavera with my herb tea and apple slices at lunch; and baked salmon, whitefish or chick pea stew with pureé sweet potato and green peas with more herb tea for dinner. It’s hilarious, but I don’t think I have ever eaten so consistently and regularly such healthy (pretty low-fat this) food in my life. Now my visitors bring their own, get a great deli sandwich from Druxy’s downstairs or go over to the wonderfully cheap, diverse and fabulous anything-you-want eateries that run all along Baldwin St from McCaul to Kensington Market.

One of my friends said it was a bass-ackwards way for me to go live cheap downtown for a while. No question, even if the only amenity is that I’ve got this view from the 15 floor looking west from University that you’d really have to pay a lot of money for…