Rose's Cantina

I'm getting hospital withdrawal today. Every day for a week now, I've been schlepping myself down the road to visit the multi-tubal Jennette who has gone to Hell and has come out the other side, the result of her oral cancer surgery. But today, I'm snowed in, so I can only reach her by text. "They plugged up my trach," she told me. "Now I sound like Darth Vader." Yesterday, was the first day she could talk at all and it was a bit difficult to understand her. She's having to get used to a mouth that must feel like a gigantic pot of Play Do. She also lost seven teeth and part of her gum, so that's got to be hard to negotiate. Her tongue doesn't know what to do with itself. But she's a determined little lady, and she's working hard on learning to talk again, while motoring around her room on her trusted cane. I'm really amazed how fast the healing process is. The human body is wondrous in its determination to righ

Embed from Getty Images I ambushed my son Nick and took him to the Ottawa Hospital to see Jennette who was recovering from oral cancer surgery, the result of 40 years on the weed. Nick has been smoking since he was in his early teens, and I have been trying to get him to quit since he began that journey. When I got an inkling he was smoking, I plastered all the screensavers in the house with horrible images of smokers' past. There were pictures of people languishing in hospital beds drooling, others with big gaping maws, others sporting gnarly teeth and nails the color of Cheezies. Nothing seemed to work. Then the other two kids started smoking. It drove me bananas. I have been a rabid anti-smoker since my childhood, since I was forced against my will to live with five smokers, the bad kind, the roll-your-own kind. I remember getting out of the shower and taking the first breath which smelled like I was mainlining an ashtray. Whenever there was a family get-to-ge

The observation room at the Ottawa Hospital is on the 6th floor. It's a big room with six or eight beds with a nursing station in the middle. Here, patients get one-on-one nursing care, with specialty staff helping with physio, speech, and whatever is needed. Over Christmas, it's quiet. There aren't many people getting operated on over the holidays. Only the urgent and very sick get to spend their Christmas and New Year's in this bright room with big windows and a cheerful Christmas tree. This is where my friend Jennette is spending her holiday, hooked up to a virtual Medusa of tubes that feed her, fill her little body with all kinds of good stuff, and help her breath. On December 23rd, she had life-saving oral cancer surgery to remove a tumor the size of a Hall's cough drop from under her tongue. It was eight hours of misery for her excellent surgical team. When I got the call from her primary surgeon, she sounded absolutely exhausted. I didn't know wh

It was mild this morning, not unlike an early spring morning, as I crammed myself into Jennette's car. I say crammed because she had the seat set for a person nearly eighty pounds smaller than me and a foot shorter. Note to self:  It's time to get back on the diet and exercise hamster wheel. Nothing I can do about the height difference. I arrived at Jennette's place at about five a.m. to fetch her for her cancer operation which was scheduled for eight. She was up, showered, ready. The suitcase was packed to the brim for her stay which will likely be a fortnight given the fact she's having quite a surgery. For eight hours, two surgeons will be carving a cancerous tumour out of her jaw, and resecting her mouth, taking her bottom teeth with it. A graft will be taken from her left arm to replace the part of her jaw that will be taken out. She'll also have a tracheotomy to help her breathe. "Take a picture of my bottom teeth," she told me. "I w

It's the end of the year, and it's time for apologies. Why? Because it's 2015! Sometimes I say things I shouldn't. I am too trigger happy with the send button. And I don't actually realize that the people I'm writing about are real, nor do I realize that they actually read my stuff. Which is stupid, I know. I have the handy Blogger stats button to show me otherwise. But before I apologize to the legions, well the few, I have offended in this space, I would like to take the time to explain why once in a great while I turn into the Mean Girl Who Should Have Her IP Address Suspended. It all started back in the 60s. My brothers nicknamed me Stinks. Embed from Getty Images Everybody else had a cool moniker like Egg  Head, Renald the Pig, Scab or Gert. Those were nicknames the boys wore with honor. Stinks was not a name I could get behind. People thought I got the name Stinks because I was Pepe Le Pew, an odorous little mongrel who cleared a

Embed from Getty Images There was a disturbing, screaming, headline on Facebook today that brought shudders to the shoulders of dieters everywhere. "Cauliflower is $8.99 today due to weather conditions in California." A ripple of discontent went through Farm Boy as tiny Asian men gingerly piled the caulie on high with managers hoping that their stock of the ear-shaped vegetable would not sit there like so much tinsel on a Christmas tree. To their surprise, the cauliflower flew off the shelves. Of course, it did. You see cauliflower is a dieter's staple along with kale which ridiculous people turn into "chips" which apparently are delicious. These righteous people also say the same thing about putting marinara sauce on a spaghetti squash. "Delicious! Tastes just like real spaghetti!" Yeah, only if real spaghetti tasted like ass. A lot of moms out there have abandoned the lowly potato in favor of mashed caulie. They lace it

Embed from Getty Images You ask the average person when death comes knocking at their door whether they want a prick on their side or some kindergarten teacher who is going to kiss their ass. When that day comes, I want the prick! Philip Seymour Hoffman in Patch Adams "How exactly are you going to take the cancer out?" my friend asked the two surgeons who had just violated her, through her nose, with a scope. They both looked at each other, blanched, and looked back at her. "We have our methods," the female doctor said softly. It was a good question, which deserved an honest answer, but it left the doctors squirming and clearly running for cover. It was a question that my friend could have had answered if she had been a little more Internet savvy. I knew the answer; I had Googled it hours before. My friend has oral cancer, a tumor just below her tongue. Two days before Christmas, doctors will drive a backhoe through her mouth. Th

Embed from Getty Images When I first set foot in a journalism class 40 years ago, I was not prepared for what I was about to hear. My first year professor, Tom McPhail, began the class this way. "If you've come here to be a creative writer, ask for your money back," he said. "There's no room for creativity in news. And if you've come to get a job in print, forget it, print is dead." I felt like walking out of the class, and transferring to Western University where I had planned to study English, but was talked out of it by an earnest guidance counsellor who predicted my future would be brightest if I went to Carleton University to study journalism. After hearing that first lecture, I believed I had made a mistake, but I'd already moved from St. Catharines, and there was no turning back. I should have listened to that little voice, I thought, two years later when I lost my first fulltime job at the Ottawa Journal which folded jus

I was listening to one of those political shows, Pee and Pee, or Pee Pee, and the talk turned to this month's story about Justin and Sophie, in Vogue magazine. In case you haven't heard, our Prime Minister and his wife appear in smoldering poses in the latest issue, which has caused a shitstorm amongst members of the Pee Pee Gee -- better known as the Parliamentary Press Gallery. "What are you thoughts?" Canada's Jon Lovitz enquired to a veteran wag. "Well, " she sniffed. "It would have been more appropriate if he'd given his first interview to a news organization in Canada." Her colleague, a Francophone reporter, simply shrugged and sported a Cheshire grin. You knew secretly he was getting a boner under the desk at the sight of Sophie stroking Justin with her eyes. It was like a  Fifty Shades of Grey moment, but better. The French reporters get it: Justin doesn't kiss babies, he makes them. Unfortunately, a goodly num

View image | gettyimages.com One of the things I love about Canada is the spirit that embodies the people of this nation. Maybe it has something to do with the cold; we are always ready to welcome neighbors and people we barely know into our homes, and into our hearts. We are good decent people, well raised, with stellar values. Sure we have opinions on everything, and on the surface, Canadians can appear a bit cranky. I grew up in an extended family with grandparents who “chewed” about the weather, the God damned government, and how strawberries never tasted as good in winter. But they were the first ones to make a casserole, lend a mower, or offer a ride to the grocery store. Our society has changed a lot since I was a scruffy little school girl, and I’ve noticed a mean kind of spirit that has invaded a lot of people, who have become jaded, jealous, and intolerant of others. Sometimes I think it’s because we’ve been given so much in our society, and we’ve stopped