Fred and Sheba came into the bedroom to tell me to get up. Everything proceeded as it does every morning: the feed, the eat, the chop and burn, the type and post, and the search for the images below. I love the mornings. Each day commences between 5:00 and 5:30, but today, My Day, began at 6:00. How appropriate is that!
It was the first day of the weekend, indulgence was my two-day objective, takin’ it easy. And then, when I rose from the keyboard, my source of so much pleasure, to take my nap, I heard FaceTime ringing on my computer. By the time I got to my desk to answer the call, it had stopped.
But then the landline rang. I was trying to make a sound to the caller and failing, when the man on the other end said, “Chris. It’s Shel. Call me back on FaceTime.” Shel is a former neighbour, a very nice guy, and a retired emergency physician. I’d sent him an email on Friday asking for a chat.
I explained that I was working on a grant from Disability BC to research the access experience of dysfluent people with social service providers. Aidan and I developed a survey last week, that we’ve been sending to stutterers, and he emailed me last week to tell me that our survey results to date are telling him that accessing medical services is clearly a very big problem for my community.
That’s why I wanted to chat with Shel. We had a great time together, both of us, because it had been a long, long time since we last talked together. Shel and Cathy were our neighbours when I lived with Steve. This is the early and mid-eighties. And there was another reason we were having such a good time: were talking about Shel. C’om on, he’s male, he’s tall, and very, very smart; he’s a very dynamic and driven guy. He’s a driven man. Since he retired due to illness, he and Cathy are constantly traveling and having a great, great life together, full of adventure. He’s redirected his drive.
Talking with Shel is like playing a game. I chose tennis because it’s quick, there are plosives, and because we laugh and jest. He serves, and from then on, I must keep up. He’s very respectful. He always compliments my mind. How can I not love the guy?
When we said goodbye, I had the plan I wanted. Plan A is probably not going to happen. That plan is to earn a spot on the agenda of Grand Rounds of greater Vancouver area hospitals. A Grand Round is an educational forum for the doctors, nurses, equipment technicians, etc. of a hospital. There’s a medical nickname for a Grand Round. It’s M&M, because the agenda is driven by morbidity or mortality. In this use of the word, ‘morbidity’ involves complications due to medical treatment. And that means SPACE would have to find someone who suffered a medical loss due to their dysfluency to be featured in a Grand Round.
That’s not as hard as it sounds, hospital patients are deluged, and I mean drowned with questions when they enter into hospital treatment. Paramedics, admission clerks, emergency physicians, nurses, equipment technicians, everyone is asking questions; diagnosis requires communication.
Shel: “The greatest resource for diagnostics in the emergency department is the patient. Tests are valuable, but without vital information about medical history, onset, duration, intensity, activity, location, etc., etc., diagnosis is slower and prone to error. Information from the patient is vital. Our worst-case scenario is when we are presented with a comatose person.”
I may be on the hunt for a stutterer suffering from loss due to treatment in a hospital, depending on what Aidan has to say about all this.
Plan B is to get on the agenda of an Emergency Round (ER). (When that came up we both loved talking about The Pitt.) For that, we are good to go; we meet eligibility requirements already. However, Shel gifted me with a significant insight when he said, “Focus on the solution.”
NB: I am very proud to say that this plan is truly a product of both Shel and me. We had a baby. I wanted to be a doctor when I was at UBC, but when I took the requited course, comparative anatomy, I knew that I was too squeamish to continue. I always have enjoyed the pleasure of having medical friends with whom I have learned a great deal because I talk with them about medical things I read about in the scholastic medical papers that I read, and they always open-up because I am so enthusiastically interested in all they have to say. All my learning helped drive my pitch to Shel, the conversational gamer.
I proposed the grand round or emergency round as our campaign targets. From there, we talked for a solid half-hour about pitching to conveners of the Rounds. And as part of our discussion, Shel’s exceptional gift emerged when he advised SPACE to focus on solutions.
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The Solution
Shel had given me great advice. Forest walking was in order. Sheba would get exercise and I could think about solutions and questions I could ask of my next information source: Dr. Stacy. I’ve written often of her in these posts. Bryce has Stacy’s heart and soul; I have her mind and her sense of humour. She has a house here, but her primary residence is in Vancouver.
I’ve thrived, all my life, on the friendships of amazing, wonderful women. Stace is my latest find. It was mutual love at first sight; we both had a “one of my people” epiphany when we met.
She is a physician who worked with Vancouver’s prominent rehabilitation hospital, G. F. Strong. She, like Aidan, knows about my bad medical access experience, so she enthusiastically embraced the challenge of finding a solution with me, and we stopped when we had a plan. Stacy and I had a baby.
I am grateful for my medical access misadventures. The give me street cred as I do research for our project called our Listening Equity Project. I’m a credible partner for my brilliant and generous doctor friends; they inform and drive my mission. When I had my breakdown in April 2016 and lost my fluency, I used an iPad and bought software called Proloquo2go. Proloquo2go is an award-winning augmentative and alternative communication app for people who are non-speaking or have difficulty being understood, including those with Autism, Down Syndrome, and Cerebral Palsy.
Stacy defined the targets: ambulances and emergency rooms. She also told me about the translation process serving doctors, and I think that is valuable information for our pitch to Rounds and that includes signers but precious few dysfluent people can sign. Dear Sirs, what about us? ‘Us’ is a figure somewhere between 1% of the population who stutter, and 18% of people who have trouble “being understood.” This larger figure includes a large percentage of people for whom English is a second language. I have done my research. This is technical writing, folks. I am back!
Our baby named Solution looks like this: An iPad in every ambulance and emergency room, programed with Proloquo2go and customized for medicinal diagnostic purposes.
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Marilyn Baker would be very proud of me.
The career highlight of my life, my most thrilling project, was designing a two-hundred seat community theatre, professionally outfitted. Plus, finding the money to build it and passing municipal health, structural, electrical inspections before for public occupancy. I proposed a figure for my salary, and I raised all the funds to pay it.
The municipalities involved had me report to Mayor Marilyn Baker of the District of North Vancouver. She was to oversee me. At our first meeting, there was no friendly warm up, she got straight to the point. She told me she expected monthly financial reports in a form satisfactory to her finance department, no bullshit in progress reports, a timeline of measurable objectives for the project, and architectural plans for her engineering department before I started work on the renovation. I was adding the theatre to the communities art centre.
I was 24. I had an English degree and two years of experience being a drama teacher. However, just as I did to find The Solution for dysfluent people, I used my network of acquaintances to find solutions, money, services and labour. As for the architectural drawings, one of my warmest and wonderful memories is of meeting Gerry Brewer, the head of engineering for the District of North Van.
I explained that I had no experience and no money. I also explained why I had the nerve to propose myself for the job, and that was about my social network of people of a wide variety of talents and professional certification. I also explained that I was raising every cent required for all fees, my salary, and all materials, and to hire an architect was going to be extremely expensive.
When I finished talking, Gerry called out to everyone in his open plan staff to listen up. He introduced me most graciously, and he told everyone about my plan and of my certified advisers, and he ended his speech saying, “If this guy can do all that for our municipalities, what can we do? A bottle of aged scotch to the guy who steps up to draw up the plans this young man needs.”
I was standing beside him, and I really struggled to not let people see that I was crying. We opened fourteen months later. I still actively love Gerry Brewer. Without him, I would not have had such a magnificent life experience.
Marilyn quickly became an unforgettable friend. I’m a technical writer. My reporting was spot on. I earned first her confidence and respect, and then a great friendship. When her daughter came out, Marilyn and her daughter invited me to dinner because her daughter felt my friendship told her that her mother was gay friendly.
At the dinner the daughter did a rant about BC Ferries to her mother. When she finished, Marilyn asked her, “What are you going to do about it.” The daughter responded with a teenager’s favourite word: “Nothing.” And Marilyn delivered, a gentle, kind, and encouraging short monologue on civic responsibility. I was greatly moved and learned a valuable lesson: Complaining does nothing, take positive action. As Shel said, talk solutions.
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I wrote up the notes on all the points raised, by Shel and Stacy, I explained Proloquo2go, and I sent them to Aidan. In my notes, I included a proposal/request of Aidan. I asked him if SPACE could take on the development of a prototype medically customized Proloquo2go program as a project so that it could be used in our pitch to get on Round agendas. He wants to talk to me about my research and results on Monday.
I got paid for my work yesterday, and I had leftovers from the dinner with Ali and Pete for my dinner last night. What a grand fucking day, and all in glorious
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Sharon Dawn: Thanks for that title. I suppose I could have Google searched it, but I asked you. So, thank you. And yes, I know of Mr. Don, and I watch his shows and love seeing all the various gardens. Did you see his recent series that ended with a brief glimpse into his own garden?
