The Last Doctor by Jean Marmoreo & Johanna Schneller

Author:Jean Marmoreo & Johanna Schneller [Marmoreo, Jean & Schneller, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tom

Thomas Allen Fraser, age sixty-two, had a few character traits in common with Thor. They were both sociable, strong-willed, and certain of what they wanted. But their final chapters could not have been more different.

Tom lived in a one-room apartment in subsidized housing under the hydro towers that run across what used to be northern Toronto, before Toronto spread north of the towers. That apartment had so many locks and instructions posted on his door that it looked like an armed camp. I buzzed. Waited. Buzzed again. A solid click, and the heavy metal door swung open.

I stepped into the room—well, I side-stepped. It was crammed, floor to ceiling, with…stuff. Stacked plastic bins full of plastic baggies full of plastic bread-bag tabs, elastics, and matchbooks. Music equipment, including three Sony Walkmans, one in its original package. A vintage Singer sewing machine that once belonged to his mother. Mounds of cassette tapes (he couldn’t afford to buy many CDs, so he’d tape-record the hard rock and heavy metal he loved). Boxes of wires, boxes of mechanical contraptions, boxes of clothes, and cartons of Ensure, the high-calorie, high-protein drink that comprised most of his diet. The walls were decked with motorcycle posters and photos of the Ontario farm where he grew up. It wasn’t junk, exactly; there was a sense of order and purpose. But it was a lot. An aquarium bubbled against one wall. A lone chesterfield sat against another.

“In here,” a voice commanded. “I’m in bed, and make sure the door is closed behind you.” The door had clanged shut, but I dutifully checked it anyway.

A narrow path through the boxes led off to my right. And there was Tom. He managed life from his hospital bed, remotely. He’d admitted me to his flat with one of the many devices he’d rigged. A Hoyer lift—that bar contraption you see in movies when patients are immobilized—helped him access the wheelchair beside him. Which was, by the way, the only seat in the room. This small alcove was as packed as the front room with albums, tapes, radio equipment. More Harley-Davidson posters and photos covered every inch of wall space. Tom was sitting upright. He gazed at me with penetrating blue eyes as I searched in vain for a chair. I settled in his wheelchair.

“You called the ministry requesting help to die?” I asked.

“Give me that file,” he barked, pointing to a binder at the foot of his bed. “I am in terrible pain.” He handed me a sheet with a highly coloured drawing of a body, front and back.

I was familiar with this drawing. Pain clinics use it as a tool to graphically outline where and how much a patient hurts. On Tom’s, the entire back side of the figure, from buttocks to toes, was marked in bright red. The same with both upper arms, shoulders, and the back of the neck. He had labelled the red as “continuous and extreme.” The front of the body below the waist was coloured pink and marked “different, lighter pain.

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