My Apology to All the Irish in Nova Scotia

Spud Shame

Many years ago I had the task of cooking dinner for a visiting Irish Cèilidh band. Top of the menu, not surprisingly, were potatoes. After peeling a big bag of spuds I asked innocently if maybe this was more potatoes than we needed. The response from the Irish hosts was to look confused, and wonder who this Canadian goof was that thought there could ever be too many potatoes.

Last week though I met my match. After six days and nights of the worst food that I’ve eaten in decades, the Queens General Hospital delivered a chunk of spud beyond belief. It was, I swear, 3 inches by two inches by two and half inches. Lord knows how large the entire potato was.

As far as I can tell the cooking technique used was called “boil it.”

After my episode of angina pectoris (not a heart attack) I wound up stuck in the Queens Emergency department for six days while they waited for a chance to deliver me to Halifax to be seen by a real cardiologist. I’ll state here that the people at QGH were superb, and I’ve never felt more cared for. They even raided the staff coffee machine to keep me caffeinated during the day. The watery stuff from the hospital kitchen couldn’t do that.

I’m going to say it right now: QGH has, hands down, the worst food that I’ve eaten in decades. Somehow they have managed to maintain the kind of stereotypical hospital food that most places have left behind. I mean I eventually learned to enjoy soup beans in Kentucky, so I can adapt to local regional food, but this was just dull, unpleasant, and unappetizing.

I did lose weight though.

The highlight of my visit though was, I think, Saturday, when the lack of a doctor meant that the Emerg was closed for the day. It was me, four nurses, and a totally empty Emergency department.

Two days later I had my first ambulance ride. I’ll admit to being fairly excited by this: I grew up watching Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe in “Emergency” and had a pretty romantic vision of ambulances.

Instead I learned how it felt to ride in the back of a Ford cube van. All of the shiny white and green paint can’t change the fact that it’s noisy, has terrible suspension, and is really unpleasant

Plus we got stuck for fifteen minutes by a construction delay.

Anyhow, eventually I was admitted to the cardiac ward up at the QE2 hospital in Halifax. It was less friendly, though the beds were significantly more comfy. After two more days, more endless and repeated tests and measurements of my blood pressure and heart rates, and a very high-tech Cardiac catheterization - they basically stick a long tube into your arm vein, and feed it up into your heart to look around - the heart specialist was able to finally diagnose my situation.

And what he said, after eight days in hospital, was “Your heart and everything around it are in great shape.”

And that was it. Great news I guess, but wow I can’t imagine how much it cost NS Health to get to that point.

After which I got dressed and they tossed me out the door to find my own way home.

The ambulance was strictly one-way.