I broke my ankle on the winter solstice, which I hope means it will grow stronger as the days grow lighter and longer. No dramatic hockey accident, although I usually play hockey twice a week. The sad fact is, I tripped while carrying too many Christmas presents down the stairs. As I fell, my ankle got wedged behind the metal support for my husband’s stairlift. The support didn’t break. Metal: 1. Ankle: 0.

Here are some moments from four days in hospital before and after surgery.

After the paramedics got me into the ambulance, we went to St. Michael’s Hospital in downtown Toronto, where there is an internationally-renowned foot surgeon. I have no idea if he was the one who eventually operated on my ankle. At first, the Emergency department was full, so the paramedics took me into a corridor by an elevator to wait for a room. As they waited, they kibitzed with colleagues accompanying other people brought in on gurneys. I can tell you that all the paramedics were avid union members, which is a good thing, especially give the war on health care by Conservative Premier Doug Ford’s government in Ontario.

One of the male paramedics was reading a thick book and another, a woman, asked him what it was about. I heard him explaining the theory of surplus production. When I rubbernecked, I saw he was reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 

“It’s hard to get what he’s saying if you’ve only got community college,” the paramedic told his colleague. “But I figure it shouldn’t only be the intellectuals who understand what’s going on in the world.”

The woman asked him another question, and he said, “I don’t know. But I think the Marxists would have an answer for that.”

Not long afterwards, nurses came for the Piketty reader’s patient, and he closed his book and left. The woman paramedic brought me a heated blanket, since it was cold by the elevators. When I had to go to the washroom, she joined the paramedics who had brought me to the hospital and helped me hop in.

One of the paramedics, Alex, said to me, “You’re one of the toughest people I’ve ever met, and you can say a paramedic told you that. Usually when we carry people out of their houses, they’re screaming and swearing. But you didn’t say a word.”

“I figured you knew what you were doing,” I said. 

Plus, the EMS supervisor who was first to arrive at the house had given me three extra-strength Tylenols and two Advils. He said studies have shown the combination was as strong as hydromorphone. I said I couldn’t take hydromorphone, an opioid. Dilaudid. When they gave it to me after surgery for my broken wrist eight or nine years ago, I vomited and fainted for eight hours, so they had to keep me in hospital an extra day. (That one was a hockey injury. Well, a skills class.)

I had to keep rejecting hydromorphone the whole time I was in hospital, since it was offered with every change of shift. They even gave me a prescription when I was discharged, the way they had after my broken wrist eight or nine years previously. 

The wrist hadn’t been too bad. I was back teaching at the Canadian Film Centre three days after surgery, although when the first of my students walked in, he was surprised to see me.

“What you on?” he asked.

“Extra strength Tylenol,” I said. “I can’t take opioids. They gave me a prescription for dilaudid but it makes me sick.”

“Dillies,” he said. “I can get you $700 for that little piece of paper on the street.”

When my ankle and I finally got into the Emergency ward, I was put in a small white room with opaque sliding glass doors that were kept half open. Occasionally people came in to check. The ward was full but fairly quiet, at least until I heard yelling from down the hallway.

“You’ve got to let me go! You’re going to ruin my relationship! She doesn’t know where I am! They stole my phone and ID! You’re going to ruin my relationship! You’ve got to let me out of here! She doesn’t know where I am!”

After several bursts of this, a tall young man in a green hospital gown ran down the hallway, then ran back, then ran toward me again and threw himself on his knees right outside my sliding glass door. He raised his arms in supplication to a male doctor who appeared amidst nurses and security guards. In a reasonable voice, the doctor asked the tall young man to come back to his room, but the man just kept saying they were ruining his relationship.

“You’ve got to let us take out the IV, at least,” the doctor said. At this, the young man got up and followed the doctor down the hallway. When he passed my room again, he was wearing a fashionable grey track suit and was on his way out. I watched him leave, escorted by security, while another young man of about the same age cleaned out the garbage can in my room.

“That’s what happens to you when you start down that road,” the cleaner told me. “You don’t want to start down that road, no sir.”

Eventually an orthopedic surgeon came in to order X-rays, then to set my broken bones (tibia and fibula) and put on a temporary cast. All this happened right in the room, with a portable X-ray machine wheeled in first and other devices later. The surgeon, a resident named Dr. Champagne, said they’d put me under with a combination of propofol and ketamine, and something was injected into my IV.

“Think of being on a beautiful beach,” she said.

I tried to picture a beach as I went under. Palm trees. Turquoise water. Instead, I emerged from a moment’s darkness with the bizarre but not unpleasant sensation of being a rectangular piece of sponge. I had big manga eyes and was wedged among other manga sponges coloured orange, yellow and lime green. We moved around as if we were inside a kaleidoscope, repeatedly changing places. The other sponges were friendly and it was all very bright, and no, I’ve never watched Sponge Bob Squarepants. When I woke up, I heard myself complain, “I didn’t go to a beach. I went to a sponge warehouse,” which the doctor and nurses found hysterically funny.

At midnight, I was taken out of Emergency for a CAT scan, then left in the corridor until a porter could take me to a bed that had been found in a neurological ward, the orthopedic ward being full. Apparently there’s a shortage of porters at St. Mike’s and it took two hours for one to arrive and wheel me into an elevator, and from there to a bed. I wasn’t in much pain but I was hungry. All I’d had to eat since breakfast the previous day was a “cheese sandwich.” However, when she came into my room a few hours later, the morning nurse told me I would probably have surgery that day and couldn’t eat breakfast. I was fifth on the list for the operating room, at least if there weren’t any emergencies, and I would probably get called in the late afternoon. If I didn’t, she’d find me some food.

Half an hour later she came back to prepare me for surgery. Someone came to put me on a gurney and things began to move quickly as we headed for a hallway outside the operating room. I don’t remember meeting the surgeon beforehand, just the anaesthesiologist, who took a very thorough medical history and put me under right there in the hallway. When I woke up, I met the surgeon, Dr. Hall, in post-op. I remembered the the big post-op room from my husband’s hip replacement surgery a couple of years before. Dr. Hall said they’d put a plate on one side of my ankle secured by screws. There were more screws on the other side. 

“How many screws?” I asked woozily.

“Lots,” he said. 

A couple of days later, I was home. The pain wasn’t too bad by then, despite the lack of hydromorphone. All of the nurses were lovely and professional (with the exception of one jerk in Emergency, but let’s leave that aside). They told me their names. Angel. Lovey, who called everyone “love.” Khan, who described himself as The Great Khan. When one introduced herself as Snowy on the day of a blizzard, I wondered if nicknames had become a thing to preserve anonymity, and asked a friend whose daughter is a nurse to check it out for me. She did, and told me that her daughter had said, “Maybe.”

The care I received was excellent. On top of which, the surgeon said I should be able to play hockey again. The food was awful, but my son brought in real food when I was allowed to eat, and I got home in time for Christmas dinner with my family.

American friends, a week after I ended my four-day stay in hospital, which included a two-and-a-half hour surgery, I received a bill in the mail. It was $45 for the ambulance. That’s all. This is what universal health care looks like, under stress, and it’s what the despicable Premier Ford and his right-wing cronies are putting under further stress in their attempts to privatize our health care system. 

Meanwhile, I’m okay. I’m tired. My family and friends are being wonderful, dropping off food and books, visiting, doing errands, cleaning the cat box. Tomorrow I get my big cast off and a smaller boot put on, although I can’t start physio or bear any weight on my left leg for another month. 

Happy New Year to all of you, a bit belatedly.

And don’t vote Conservative the next time, please.