A professional liar in the bloc opératoire

A week ago, I was sitting in the day surgery pre-op waiting room at the Hospital of the Sacred Sacrement. I was hunkered down on a puffy blue chair, reading a sizzling summer romance novel set in Elgin County (Ontario).

The chair was comfortable. As if to say: you might be scared that this is your last chair, your last sit, but don’t worry. It’s just day surgery, You will probably enjoy other chairs again. But just in case, here is a nice chair on which to place your ass while you wait to be wheeled into a room where strangers are going to cut you open, mess around a bit and then sew you back up.

As I sat reading this flimsy summer romance novel, my mind drifted to the fact that my summer was stopped dead when I got this diagnosis. Not mentally — mentally, I was somewhere between OK and great. It didn’t scare me and I was ready for whatever came next. But practically, my summer stopped. I had planned it out so that we didn’t need to be home too much with the kids having absolutely nothing to do. July would be relaxing and then melt into August trips and Scout camp and I’d be rested and restored, ready for a hectic Fall.

That, of course, didn’t happen. While today was supposed to be my first day at a lake just outside of Timmins, where my aunt and uncle have bottomless wine and coffee for the adults and bottomless Fruit Loops for the kids, today, I’m home. Trying to work. Not really able to. The kids have been kicked out of the house and they’re wandering the neighbourhood and they’re going to barge in at any point declaring that they’re still bored.

I got no summer, sizzlingly romantic or otherwise. Just a forced break that feels more like April 2020 than it does July 2025. I got no surprises. Nothing that’s fun that I didn’t organize myself. Nothing out of the ordinary. I got hot weather, an endless August spread out across my horizon, boredom, regret that I can’t work as much as I want or need to, and then worse, a black hole for a Fall. Will I be able to travel? Can I even book anything without knowing what my treatment will look like? Who would hire me any way? I have nothing lined up …

So my novel is my only escape. Until Marc sits down beside me. Wearing a gown that goes to his knees. About my age. Wearing sun glasses. Smiling like I am. Excited for his surgery too.

No one else is around us. There’s no other option than to talk.

I ask him if they let him keep his shades and he said that he insisted on it. Mobility aids, really. Alright, who am I to ask any questions. We connect instantly. He is handsome, in a very specifically Quebecois way. This province has five facial archetypes and he has one of the better ones. He doesn’t hesitate like the other patients I’ve met and he asks — so what are you in for?

Breast. Lump. Cancer. Should be easy, I insist. You? He leans over to me each time he speaks. My left nut. They’re taking it off before it kills me, he laughs. Ah great. Here we are, a nut and a boob both trying to kill us. We’re the perfect pair. I make some comment about how I didn’t know that cancer is stored in the balls, which hits the perfect mark. He thinks I’m funny. My sizzling summer romance novel? Maybe I can live it out, right here, waiting for my surgery.

Ah, to be in our early 40s and to get cancer. Almost lucky. Marc is old for someone who has testicular cancer. I’m relatively young. His diagnosis? He forgets. Some time in June, a Tuesday. Mine was also some time in June. He isn't being followed at this hospital though, we probably have never crossed paths.

Marc tells me about what he does in life: he fixes broken chairs to make them into quasi works of art. He describes the chairs because we have no phones any more. Antiques with the bottom dropped out of them. Scratched and assaulted. Chairs that you pass on the street and wish you could take home with you but that you don’t think you need a chair with a giant hole in its seat. Chairs unlike the two that we are currently occupying. His hospital socks are tugged up to his knees, just like mine. He asks what I do and I tell him that I’m a writer. Ah, he responds, so you’re a professional liar?

I wish I could say yes because there is an allure to writing fiction that doesn’t exist amid the lines of an article about border agents or deficits or free trade or inequality. I wish I could say yes because I would like to tell a story that isn’t about how we’re all going to die, how the rich keep getting richer. Yes, I lie professionally, I imagine myself saying. I write perfect little stories where the ending is satisfying and the middle is messy and the reader marvels at how clever I am to be able to keep everything straight, until they are knocked over by how great the ending is. I lie professionally. I am paid to lie.

Which is, of course, the ultimate lie. Because writers are paid so little, even if I did lie for a living, it would be a piss poor living. So I explain: no, I wish. I take old chairs and I analyse them. I explain what parts make up the chair, explain why the chair exists, highlight the good, condemn the bad, suggest how the chair could be better, and then, unlike him, I just leave it where I found it. Every day, I record a podcast where I talk about the latest chair. The oldest chair. The most politically interesting chair. Not very useful I ask him. No, he says. Not very useful at all.

But Marc likes politics a lot. He thinks he might be a Marxist but he has never really understood the word. Now he’s touching my arm. Breathing on my cheek as he leans over to talk to me. We’re supposed to be quiet in this ward. He says something about blueberries and the Saguenay and have I ever been there and did I know about forest fires, and then a nurse calls his name — Marc Larochelle — come over here. You’re able to get up onto this bed, right? Actually, you’re best to walk, she says. He flashes me a smile, hesitates for a split second, and he leaves.

I sit there, alone once again. My book tempts me not one bit. I imagine running into him at Place Laurier, asking if he remembers me. What he might look like if he were wearing shoes or a t-shirt or no sunglasses. Or maybe this cancer diagnosis is the time to blow my life up and he wouldn’t just remember me at Place Laurier, but he’d be beside me. We’d be going there together to buy curtains. Make the worst decision possible and chase a sizzling summer romance. I’m called pretty soon after Marc walks out of the ward and I go through the same process. Yes, I can walk. Yes, I’m excited for this. It will be nice to see the surgeon again.

I’m led into an elevator and up to the Operating Bloc waiting area. I walk in behind the préposé who is guiding my bed and see Marc, sitting up on his bed, sunglasses still on but now he has a blue surgery hair covering. He says he drinks three times per week. Does a few drugs. He’s exicted to have his nut removed. Yes, he says, he would like a photo of it when it’s over. He’s talking to the anesthesiologist and he gives me a nod as I’m placed beside him. As the bed is wheeled to its spot, a curtain separates the two of us. We can’t see each other. I need to ask him where he lives. Maybe he isn’t local. If he is local, maybe that’s a sign. Or maybe the sign is in how he is talking to the doctors. It wasn’t like he was talking to me. Affable but not playful. What a stupid place to be thinking these thoughts.

I sit up on my bed and I listen to Marc’s responses. He has someone to go home with (oh no), his sister (oh yes) and he will stop rock climbing for as long as he needs to, he won’t risk tearing the sack back open. My own surgeon appears and I have to focus on what she is there to tell me. This is important. Yes, I’m feeling good. Excited, actually. Yes, I’ll fill out the survey on pain that she has sent to me. We meet in a month. Can I get a photo of the tumour? No, it will be enrobed in my own flesh and wont look like anything interesting. I have to believe that she’s lying, and I say so, as no one would dedicate their life to removing lumps from strangers if what you removed was uninteresting. We laugh and my eyes hang onto Marc being wheeled out, down the hall for his surgery. He gives me a wave.

The anesthesiologist comes to my bedside. Do not drink any alcohol for the next 24 hours, she says. And critically, make no important decisions.

My surgeon tells me she’ll see me in a few minutes. I should rest up. Lie down. No time for my book now, which isn’t actually a sizzling summer romance at all. It’s called The Scotch, a book that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote to please himself while he was being bored to death by speeches he was forced to attend while he was ambassador to India. The Scotch, the Scots who settled in Elgin County. No romance. Actually, I made it all up. There wasn’t even a Marc.

No, my conchirugiennes were nameless and not surprising. One wore a stylish wig until she was forced to remove it for surgery. One had something removed from a vocal chord, a procedure that meant that the last jokes he could tell for a week were happening two slots down from me between him and his surgeon. Two people fell asleep while they waited, and they snored in arhythmic harmony. I was the youngest by 30 years at least. The only thing that was true was that I was excited. I was eager. I was about to have 97%-100% of my cancer removed (Inshallah) and I couldn’t be happier. I walked that morning to the surgery with my partner. He was booted out of the room just before I sat on that blue chair, not reading my copy of The Scotch because by then, we weren’t allowed any personal items.

Except glasses. We were allowed to keep our glasses if they allowed us to see. Professional liars or not.