Grandpa, Two Scotches In.

A story from my French-Canadian grandfather (Papa)

I had been to Mont Sinai General many times before. It was the closest hospital to where we lived, and it was where my three sisters and I were born. I saw a lot of the place just after I started school because I was prone to starting fights with the older boys during the lunch break on the baseball field. I would always seek out Oscar Grimsby, the biggest of the bunch, because I knew that nobody would dare pick on me after I had his fat face planted into the pitcher’s mound. Most of the time it was me being targeted, though. I could barely speak English and any that I could speak was still heavily laced in francophone. These kids had all come from limey homes so naturally they hated me. I’d take some vicious poundings sometimes because Oscar had so many of his lackeys backing him up. It was in these cases that I’d have to walk to Mont Sinai General to get patched up after school.

     Mont Sinai was as unsettling as most any hospital in the country, and worse was the fact that there were no French speaking doctors. It was a Jewish hospital, and all of the nursing staff and most of the patients were Jewish. Luckily, I didn’t have to say much to anyone when I arrived. They'd just look at me and knew what needed to be done from the wounds I had. 

What I hated most about getting a cast put on or having a busted nose snapped back into place by the doctor was the smell. It always reeked of s**t and vomit. It wasn’t the way the doctor or nurses smelled, but the patients around me, separated by these wafer-thin curtains on metal rings. Somehow I’d always share a room with some old b*****d who couldn’t control his puking, pissing, or shitting.

When winter fell over the schoolyard that year, I visited Mont Sanai again, but this time it had nothing to do with Oscar Grimsby. I woke up one -20 degree morning and couldn’t speak a word. It felt as though I had swallowed a pine-cone and got it lodged in my throat. It was so painful that eating and drinking were basically impossible. My mother got me out of bed, wrapped me in blankets, and we made our way to the hospital.  

This time it wasn’t as simple as a busted nose or broken finger. My mother had to fill out forms to explain what was wrong with me because the nurse at the reception booth didn’t speak French. My mother knew less English than me or any of my sisters, so she wrote what she knew, which was French. The hospital was very busy at this time, and the nurse didn’t even look at the form, she just threw it into a pile and motioned for us to enter the waiting area.

After many hours, the doctor finally came in, but he too spoke only English. He tried to read my mother’s handwriting, squinting at it as though his eyes were bad. He tossed it aside and started talking. I was only able to understand tiny fragments of what he was saying, and all I knew was that they wanted to keep me over night. I translated this to my mother, and she told me they were probably going to remove my tonsils.

I remembered my friend Gillian, who had had her own tonsils taken out. She claimed they gave her ice cream, lots of it, and she could even pick toppings. Since I came from such a poor family, ice cream was a luxury I could only taste in dreams. I marveled at the idea of putting back bowl after bowl of vanilla, chocolate, and possibly even rocky-road. It was my turn to lick the golden spoon, and I wanted to eat ice cream until I was sick.

After my mother went home to tend to the family, two very pretty nurses made me inhale gas. It wasn’t long before everything went black.

I dreamt of swimming in a lake with the two young nurses. I was showing off to them, flexing my muscles before swinging from a rope tied to a tree branch, back-flipping into the lake water. They were sunbathing near the shoreline and wearing red one-piece bathing suits, and after oiling each other,  they decided it was much too hot for bathing suits.

Before I saw their tops come off, I woke up in severe pain. My throat was worse than ever, but this wasn’t the pain that was bothering me the most. There was something else, something horrible, a soreness that throbbed under the thin hospital sheets like a second pulse. I reached under the sheets and felt around down there. I didn’t need to see it to realize that it was gone.

I started screaming, cursing in French, trying to curse in English but all I really knew how to say was the word “bugger”. Bugger did the trick because in seconds, one of the nurses came to try and calm me down. This was not so easy to do. She couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand her. In desperation, I snatched away her clipboard just as an elderly patient in the room knocked over his bed pan. She tossed up her arms, attending to the mess, leaving me with the clipboard. I scanned the words on the page, first recognizing my name and then some other English words commonly spelled similarly in French. It was then I came across a word that I’d hoped wouldn’t be there. 

In Mont Sinai Hospital, under the knife of a Jewish doctor, I was circumcised. Not one of them could read my mother's French on the forms she filled out, and after I had fallen asleep, the nurses inspected me to find out what the problem was. They didn’t notice my swollen tonsils, but they did notice my foreskin. When they reported this to the doctor, he shrugged his shoulders, figuring that must be the reason I came to the hospital, and so I got snipped. 

When I returned home, my sisters crowded around to hear about all of the ice cream. I had to admit to them that I hadn't gotten any. My youngest sister Claire asked me if I was at least feeling alright, and I told her my throat still hurt a lot. I also explained that after returning from Mont Sanai, I felt at least three pounds lighter.