Of Sinus and Cire

I have had a painful two weeks, quite literally. In fact, I hardly remember anything of last week. This post will be less an essay with my observations on Canada and more a rumination on living abroad and the difficulties which come with that.

Our scene opens on night, just before Canadian Thanksgiving, a Thursday. The setting is a quiet apartment in the working class neighborhood of Verdun, far outside the shadows of Mount Royal. The light rain patters against the front bedroom’s window, and the radiator is not on to fight the creeping chill.

It was on this night, I believe (because things start to get blurry around this time), that my story starts. As some of you may know, I work at a company which manufactures earplugs for hearing protection, hearing aids, and high end earbuds (for the iPods of the world). Being in this environment, it was sooner rather than later that someone stuck a probe in my ear and discovered, surprisingly, that I have a lot of earwax. So, I purchased an over-the-counter treatment to fix this problem and administered it after returning home from work. It all went smoothly for an hour.

And then the pain started.

The pain started in my left ear, as a slight ear ache. It radiated out into my jaw and, as the hours rolled slowly by, the pain increased until I could not keep my left eye open. Eventually, after about four hours of failed sleep, the pain began to ease. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought to myself, “That sucked, but at least it’s over.” My last thought that night was that having a little earwax never hurt anyone.

The ear is not externally connected to the sinuses. Nor is the left ear connected to the right sinus. So, I am sure that what happened on that Thursday before Thanksgiving (what a weird country in which I live) had nothing to do with what happened the next week. A strange coincidence, at the most. Rather, and I am supported in this opinion by a number of medical professionals, my cold which I mentioned two weeks ago in my non-post and had not been able to shake, turned into a sinus infection. Still, the proximity of the earwax treatment’s mystery pain and the incredible mind-numbing pain (and I am not one to use that term lightly) of the next week’s sinus infection feel somehow connected.

So, whether you want to say that the story continues on Saturday night, or that it all started then, is up to you.

Either way, I met up with some friends to celebrate Thanksgiving. We were a Scot, two Americans, and a Canadian who does not celebrate the holiday at home. We ate chicken - delicious chicken the size of a small turkey, but a chicken nonetheless). It was a great night which devolved at one point into a somewhat drunken intellectual orgy on cosmology and quantum physics. Surprisingly, I had nothing to do with that. I only participated after it became clear the war was lost and the conversation would continue whether I sat there silently or not. Eventually, we realized the last metro was running in 10 minutes, so the Canadian and I set out to beat it to the station in full merriment. Ho!

And then the pain started.

So, you tell me, does the story continue, or has it all started again? I believe Kundera would call this the mad myth of eternal return. Certainly, its inanity is annoying, if not irreparable.

As I said, the pain started. It radiated out from my right ear, but was much more forward, running along my cheek bone, before descending through my rear molars. They tingled in their numbness, and yet still hurt with the lightest of touches. It was an odd sensation, none too pleasant, but I figured it would go away. Mostly, I figured it was just my other ear having a delayed reaction to having its earwax so unjustly emulsified and drained out.

Sunday, I felt horrible, just tired, lethargic even. I did get around to seeing Coco avant Chanel, but Monday dawned much too soon and I spent my precious day off being truly lethargic. The pain had continued, and was now starting to get worse. This, by the way, is not a story about pain, but pain is central to the story. If you have not figured it out by now, I was in a lot of pain by Tuesday, and I was even more tired, since I could not fall asleep the night before from that pain which I just recently assured you this story is not about.

I ended up going in a good hour and a half late. It is an interesting feature of being in the early throes of a painful illness - and this same thing happened in the months after my back injury - but the realization that one is in pain does not necessarily translate to an awareness that one’s normal functions are impaired by that pain. Which is all to say that I felt horrendously bad about coming in late, as though I had somehow done something wrong, even though I had been lying in my bed at 3 am, five hours after turning out the light, grinding my teeth together in a vain attempt to calm down the throbbing pain in my right cheek.

Luckily, as I sheepishly walked into my boss’ office, my first question was, “How do you go to a doctor in Canada?” And this, if not at least twice before, is where this story starts.

Canada, we all know all too well, is a socialist country with socialist medicine. And I am not covered by that socialist medicine. I have an arcane foreign healthcare policy, which requires mailing in forms through the mail! And I was not sure if I could just go to a doctor’s office and make an appointment, or if I had to find some special place that accepted degenerate Americans. And, although I did not realize it at the time, my ability to function as a normal member of human society was quickly degrading. (One of the founders of the company, upon seeing me yesterday, said, “Welcome back. I don’t want to insult you, but you were a sack of **** last week.”)

As best I understand it, a sick person without a regular physician and Medicare coverage has two options: the first is to go to a walk-in clinic; the second is to find a private doctor willing to take on a new patient. In both cases, the charges are to be paid up front. So, figuring that any competent doctor would be able to help me, and not yet being in truly terrible shape, I opted to get up early and go to the cheaper walk-in clinic on Wednesday morning.

And that is what I would have done, if I had been able to sleep that night.

It was even worse than the night before. I spent a good two hours of that night seriously thinking about using my paycheck (I got paid on Thursday last week) to pack it in and go home. By the time Wednesday dawned, I had not slept soundly in two nights, the pain was as acute as, well, it definitely ranked with the worst pain I have ever experienced. The pain was to the level of disrupting my every conscious moment, and preventing sleep, and that is a very bad place to be in when trying to get up early to go to a clinic in a foreign country, knowing I will have to pay out of pocket after waiting for three hours just to see a doctor for five minutes who promptly said that the pain was not in my sinuses or my ears, but that I had a tooth abscess.

Despite not a single visible sign in my mouth of any problem, he declared it a tooth abscess.

Despite having had a cold for two weeks, he declared it a tooth abscess.

He prescribed me an antibiotic (clindamycin). I asked him if I should see a dentist, and the incompetent doc said the thing which probably saved me from a week of pain. He said, “No, no need to see a dentist. Just take this prescription, and if my diagnosis is correct, you should feel better before a week.”

Why hadn’t he told me he was incompetent when I walked in?

Needless to say, I went to the office, which was my only link to people who knew how to find English-language medical care, and told my boss that I needed to go to a dentist. By this time, it was too late to call for an appointment that day, but we agreed that as soon as I came in the Thursday morning, he would call his dentist, who was accepting patients, and send me over there. And that is what happened.

Really.

What a great dentist! He took x-rays, tapped on my teeth a bunch (to find which one it was that hurt), talked to me about how bad O’Hare is (yeah, I know, I’ve been hearing that since England in ’05), and then said that it was nothing dental. In no way was my pain being caused by a dental problem, but that a simple evaluation had shown him that my sinuses were hurting and that clindamycin was not the antibiotic to be used for the treatment of that. And then he only charged me for the x-rays. Seriously, he was a great guy, and I owe a debt of gratitude to him for seeing me on less than an hour’s notice and for giving better medical advice than the doctor the previous day. If you ever need a dentist in Montreal, I can highly recommend Dr. Peter Weinstein at Côte-des-Neiges and Queen-Mary.

So, it was back to the office, which at this point I was only returning to for help in getting treated, since Tuesday was the last day that I could really do any work. This is where my story enters this strange, bizarre world that can only come from working for rich Jews. I am not making this up. No one else in the world would give me the advice that came next.

Adam, the aforementioned founder of the company, came up to me and said he knew a private doctor who “took cash.” The man had saved the life of Adam’s brother, had once headed the ER of Montreal’s largest French hospital before getting tired of the life, which evidently included his wife, who Adam told gleefully told me the good doctor had left for a hot young thing who now carted him around. Because, behold the insanity, this doctor only makes house calls. And when I say he “takes cash,” I mean that only takes cash.

I will withhold his name, because people like him are not the sort of people that need publicity or their good works rewarded in overly long and effusive essays posted on public blogging sites.

I called his number and was informed that the doctor would be around my office between 11 am and 3 on Friday, and that the doctor accepted cash for the consultation fee, which was not an insignificant sum.

He arrived in stately glory, a worn medical bag at his side, and the reassuring look of a French country intellectual (think Michael Lonsdale). I told him my problem, through gritted teeth and wiping my eye of tears, and he listened. Which is what the dentist had done. Which is not what the free clinician had done. But, unlike the dentist’s, there was no sense of urgency, no sense that there were other patients to be seen. So, we sat in the boardroom and he listened, and then we chatted a bit, and he asked a few more questions, and we joked around. And, it was, dare I say, luxurious?

I told him that the doctor at the free clinic had misdiagnosed me, and he said that usually happens.

I told him the dentist had given me a better medical consultation than the doctor, and he laughed. I do not know why he laughed, since it was not funny but simply a sad statement of fact, but he laughed. And I relaxed.

I told him I was on clindamycin from the clinic, and he looked befuddled. But, quickly, understanding came to him, and then he looked both amused and professionally insulted. “Oh,” he said despairingly under his breath, “for an abscess.”

He checked me for mono and a quick check for meningitis. He looked in my mouth and my ears, and he listened to my lungs. All of which, I would like to add, Dr. G. A. Thon of the Vendôme walk-in clinic had not done. Finally, he diagnosed me with a sinus infection and joked about him giving me a shot of vancomycin (which was hilarious at the time).

And he wrote me a prescription for Biaxin, and at this point I did not care that I was taking my second antibiotic in two days, because, you see, luxury relaxes tensions and, as I hinted above, this visit was luxurious and I was now relaxed. I looked back and realized how tense I had been since Saturday and that was all gone now. I knew I would take the pills and then I would be well. And that is exactly what happened.

After I paid him 150$ in cash.

The Yeoman's Lurgi

I was "under the weather" both literally and figuratively this past rainy week. I had a fever last weekend, and a wicked cough this weekend, with lots of sleep in between. So, I did not get an essay written for this week. I do have a couple ideas floating around, so I might get something up next weekend, but don not count on it.

I will, however, post a picture of the most evil, hideous machine designed by man or beast. As if dealing with one of these was not bad enough, I had to struggle mind and soul while so weak I could hardly stand. The machine on the right, I have no idea what it is for, but the orange and blue behemoth on the left can only be for making us humans look as ridiculous as possible.

Say Quoi?

Note: I wrote most of this just after starting a new job, when I was well and truly (bel et bien?) exhausted by the move to Canada and starting my second job in less than a month. I think that comes through below, but I wanted to point it out, since that was an integral part of my experience while writing it. Thank you.

Before I left for England, the study-abroad literature had a stark warning about homesickness. It will come, they said, and will surprise you. The first weeks spent in country will be exhilarating, and many students find it easy to convince themselves that they have settled in comfortably. However, after the novelty of the country wears off and the recent memories of home fade, the little differences start becoming larger and larger, until, one day, you find yourself consumed by homesickness.

It is true, too, and I was overwhelmed by the feeling, although I did little to ameliorate the condition, actively eschewing the very things that would have made me feel more comfortable.

In Québec, I am still in the novelty stage, although at six weeks, I am approaching the end of the honeymoon. There are good parts to that: I travel around the city with ease, I have made some friends. But the things which seemed so alluring to me when I first arrived are starting to grate on my patience.

The biggest of these, by far, is the issue of language, and that is something which will not go away. I have alluded to it in my previous posts, but the fierceness with which the Québecois defend their language is startling. Although I have not run across any unpleasantness, I have heard anecdotal tales of crazed bus drivers calling the police because a passenger asked for the time in English and of protesters descending upon a restaurant to protest a bartender who spoke no French.

These stories seem so absurd that part of me thinks they must be fabrications, although the one about the bus driver was well documented in the local newspapers. To date, I have had no problems at all, perhaps because I am tall and charming and I smile a lot and always ask if someone speaks English before addressing them in the language. Still, the stories are enough to make me feel slightly uncomfortable; every day, there looms the threat of a separatist rearing his ugly head, staring down his crooked nose, and extending a bony finger at my face. “Tu,” he will say, “n’est pas francophone, tu n’est pas Québecois de souche, et j ne t’aime pas beaucoup.”

I had my first chance to see a movie a couple weeks ago, and the whole time before the show started, I was fretting about the language it would be shown in. The system used in movie listings is simple enough, but there were no experienced anglos to whom I could turn and ask for help. I had to work out that vf means the movie is dubbed in French and voa means it is merely subtitled. Of course, those are rarely used, because oftentimes the movie listings just print the title of the film in one language or another, translated if the movie has been dubbed. (Inglourious Basterds became Le commando des bâtards, which misses the point of the original title).

But what about District 9? Would they merely add an E to the end of “district?” Or would they write out the number neuf? As it turns out, they left the title unadulterated, and used the easier method of assuming the moviegoer knew which theaters played movies in which language. Thanks, Montreal. So, I took a chance and guessed on the theater nearest the English universities; my hard work was rewarded with an English-language (albeit with a lot of Afrikaans) experience.

Something was surprisingly relaxing about sitting in a theater where I knew that every interaction I had would be with an English-speaker, either those around me or those on the screen. In fact, it was so relaxing, I ended up seeing movies on the next two nights, as well, and each time the experience was the same: two hours without worrying what language I would be forced to use was a blessed respite.

Nowhere was the language barrier more stressful than in the restaurant. The language of the kitchen was French, of course, and the pace of 200 covers a night made every day a horrifying experience. Someone would yell out a ticket and I would stand there, slowly working out the words. “Poutine, was it regulière or foie gras? I think it was foie gras, so poutine foie gras. But did he say un or deux?” I always ended up asking for clarification, which broke the rhythm of the line, frayed nerves, and marked me as an obvious outcast. It was not until my last two shifts that I was comfortable enough with French that I did not slow down service.

Language is indeed a barrier, but it is surprisingly easy to live a life nearly devoid of French, even though this is the second largest French-speaking city in the world. At my new job, there is only one engineer who is not a native English speaker. There are two large English-speaking universities right downtown. So, although it can be stressful, and French is always hanging just around a friendly corner, living in the city has been anything but difficult.

A Column Made of Stone and Humilitation

The heat of my first week here has abated, and Montréal is better for it.

For some cities, Chicago being a prime example, hot weather makes them sing. There are few places I would rather be than Chicago in the summertime. During the steamy days of my first week in Montréal, the city seemed disjointed, as though nothing was quite working right. Fewer places have air conditioning here than in the US, including my apartment and the subway, so perhaps my impressions of those days are a bit jaded.

Still, my impression of the life on the streets, and in the restaurant, and among my coworkers, was that the Québecois did not know what to do with themselves when the mercury hit 90. I find that funny, similar to the residents of Nottingham who balked at less than an inch of snow. In both cases, people found the weather entertaining, but in a novel way, and they did not move through their activities with the ease of familiarity.

Now that the city has cooled off to a very comfortable 20 Celsius, the beauty of this place is almost unbelievable. It is so French, yet so American, and that paradox is a lovely thing to behold.

For instance, I was walking through Vieux Montréal, the old neighborhood dating from the time of colonization, which is composed of beautiful stone buildings and slightly less than straight streets. I walked by a square and, looking up, saw a column. I thought, “Naaaah! There’s no freaking way!” So, of course, I walked up to it, and sure enough, in the second largest francophone city in the world, stands a column dedicated to Admiral Lord Nelson, great defender of the British crown at the Battle of Trafalgar, against the naval forces of France.

Think about that for a moment. How are the Québecois all right with that column standing there? Of course, by the time Napoleon came to power, the Québecois had been a part of the British Empire for 40 years, but even so there has to be some sense of alienation or betrayal or something.

The only answer I can come up with is that the Québecois culture is defined enough, and is old enough, that they truly feel they are their own nationality. I suppose the same thing has happened in the US, and has happened to a lesser extent in the rest of the English-speaking world. But it is still shocking for me, a rather ignorant outsider, to come to Montréal and see a column erected to Lord Nelson.

So, maybe these paradoxes are not paradoxical at all; they only appear so because I am looking at this culture through filters that were developed elsewhere and which do not apply here. I have my European filter, developed in France, Belgium, and England. I bring my North American filter, developed on the highways of the US and anywhere I have ever lived or visited. I bring my Canadian filter, developed in conversations with friends in England and through jokes back home (eh), but none of these are right for Québec. Because I am decidedly not in Europe, and I am decidedly not in the US, and I am in a part of Canada that only passively wants to remain a part of Canada.

And that is going to be a hard thing to adjust my mind to.

It Was Sticky

I shook Martin Picard's hand today. It wasn't really sticky, but he seems about 8 feet tall and must weigh over 500 pounds. The man's a living legend, a monster of decadent cuisine, like some kind of backwoods Québecois ogre. I was humbled. Of course I spoke only French to him.

There Is No Good Poutine West of Ottawa

Before I left, I had some crazy notions in my head. The biggest and craziest of them all was that I would not only land a job in my first week, but that it would be a dream job. For anyone who knows me, it will come as no surprise that I have a long and deep interest in food, and an obsession with the professional kitchen. So, of course, I had settled in my mind that I would go to the most famous and one of the best restaurants in all of Canada, Au Pied de Cochon, and sweet talk my anglo ass into a gig as a dishwasher, where little French would be required and I could work around the kitchen staff.

Needless to say, that did not happen.

Still, just look at how important a part in my life food has played. The biggest dream I had before coming to Québec was to slave in a hot, cramped restaurant kitchen exactly when everyone else was going out on the town and having fun. A part of me (an unhealthily addicted part) craves the toil of making really great food for other people. Some of my happiest days were spent running sandwiches at the Prairie Croissant, and not just because I had a wonderful group of people to work with.

And, beyond that, I appreciate good food, and I like to savor it slowly. I like complicated, antiquated preparations. I really, really like maple syrup. I could not have come to a better province. The Québecois have much in common with their French ancestors in this arena, as well as basically owning the world’s maple sap harvest.

There is a fast food dish popular throughout Canada called poutine. I knew that it had originated in Montréal, but all the Canadians I knew until very recently were anglophones from Ontario and farther west. Here in Québec, though, poutine is a symbol of semi-national pride. I had been in country a week before I had a proper plate of poutine, and people were shocked it took me so long whenever poutine came up in conversation. And it came up a lot.

As with so much of Québecois culture, poutine has spread and been adopted by the rest of the country. I think this appropriation has led to the fierce desire for independence - at least cultural, if not political and economic - from the greater Canadian nation-state. There are many other examples of this: the ever-present maple syrup, the Canadiens hockey team, the proud flying of the fleur-de-lis. I have gotten to know a girl here who has a tattoo between her shoulder blades. At first, I thought it was like any other tattoo a young woman would have, some sort of a colorful, stylized pattern. But, the other night, I was surprised to see that it was actually a word: Liberté.

There is also the same duality here between the cutting edge of the moment (à la mode) and the protections afforded tradition in every day life as I have observed many times in France and Belgium. It seems to be a peculiarly francophone paradox: How does the same culture have both the Paris Fashion Week and 56 types of regionally-protected cheeses? How does the same nation produce most of its electricity from nuclear power and yet very few homes air conditioning? How can the same country hold the high speed train record and yet be France?

Montréal is the cultural capital of Canada, as well, yet Québecois I have met seem perfectly at ease. That is really the heart of the matter, it seems to me. There is no striving after more wealth, because the francophones here realize that the cultural wealth they have is more than enough to stand up against all the rest of Canada. Au Pied de Cochon is a perfect example of this paradox: It is among the hottest dining spots in all of Canada, but the food is rustic fare, the sort of food les habitants might have eaten 400 years ago.

By the way, I may not be a dishwasher at Au Pied de Cochon, because I’m cooking there. And it sucks. A lot.

Crème Glacée in the Rain

I really like this city. It's beautiful, maybe more beautiful than Chicago, and more walkable. This has to be one of the nicest cities I've had the pleasure to visit. If only there weren't so many people from Ontario.