The Sunshine Coast is a peninsula, lying twelve miles from Greater Vancouver across Howe Sound. A ridge of the Coast Mountains surrounds the sound, creating eye-popping seascapes but making road travel to Vancouver impossible. To get from the rural coast to Vancouver’s frantic metropolis, we had to take a ferry. Al and I both worked there. We commuted two hours each way—on the boat, bus, and SkyTrain—for our jobs.
Leaving at 5:45 a.m. to catch the ferry was tough because I rarely got enough sleep. Besides being tired in the day, I suffered joint pain in my arm and shoulder at night. I was also unusually jittery. No matter when I got to bed, a stabbing pain would jar me awake close to midnight. The only relief was to sit upright for at least an hour. I kept both a Kindle and an Android reader on my bedside table, each loaded with several books. I would fire one up, place three pillows behind my back, and read. Eventually I would flop into sleep, but I would suffer a couple more bouts of anguish before dawn. The routine often woke my husband. Al, ever tolerant and an easy sleeper, would half open his eyes and ask what was wrong. I remember a night when I answered by snapping, “Don’t you know?” I tossed the Kindle aside and knocked my lamp onto the floor, shattering its bulb. I had thought living on the quiet Sunshine Coast would keep me relaxed, but it didn’t.
Soon after the move, I learned that my doctor in Vancouver was thinking of retiring. After thirty years of a doctor–patient relationship, Dr. Louise Halliman and I had become friends. I told her I planned to retire soon too. So as Louise tested my damaged arm for mobility, we talked about opening up time in our lives during retirement. It seemed the right time to try a doctor on my side of the ferry route.
Back at home I called Dr. Iris Radev, who had just begun to practice in Gibsons. Her assistant slotted me into a “meet and greet” appointment for March 10, 2014. As the day approached, I decided I’d interview Dr. Radev, find out if I liked her manner, and withhold my decision whether to change doctors until I had given it some thought. Dr. Radev turned out to be a perky young woman in a trendy gray business suit. Perched at a computer, she tapped away as she asked about my medical history. She started with the usual set of questions: Any history of cancer in my family? Heart problems? Major surgery? No, no, no. The questions kept coming—there were more than I was used to—and she mentioned that she liked to be thorough. She examined my heartbeat with a stethoscope, and she looked down my throat with a tongue depressor. She asked about my medications, and she filled out a prescription for one that was running low. She typed the information into the computer with fingers almost blurry with speed. A printer churned out the prescription. I gazed on in appreciation, my plans to treat the “meet and greet” like a job interview as far out the window as China is from my living room.
The printer kept spitting out pages. “These are for tests,” she said, handing me some of the sheets. “When I get a new patient, I do a lot of tests.”
I thanked my new doctor and headed out of the clinic into the sunlit parking lot. Unlike medical labs in Vancouver and its suburbs, the LifeLabs unit in Gibsons is seldom busy. In fact, a ten-minute wait for anything on the Sunshine Coast except the ferry is considered exceedingly long. So as I walked out of the Gibsons Medical Clinic I had no excuse not to pop into LifeLabs. The sun shone. Spring was coming, and potted pansies bloomed on racks outside the grocery store. Ambling through the parking lot, I glanced through the lab’s sidewalk-to-ceiling windows. The waiting room was empty. I gazed at the top sheet in my hand and read that one of the tests would be a blood test. I turned and walked straight to my car. After all, my dog, Zeena, was alone at home, wanting a walk. I told myself the tests were routine. There was no urgency.
Actually, I knew Zeena could wait. I was skittish around anything that could draw blood. I had fainted twice during blood tests, and once in the 1980s I wobbled with my stomach churning as a doctor sliced a quarter-inch sample of a rash from my young daughter’s shoulder. Both Jessica and the doctor reached out to steady me, and I squirmed in embarrassment. The incident reinforced my squeamishness, which prompted me to sidestep Dr. Radev’s order for a blood test.
Besides asking me to get the blood test, Dr. Radev had recommended that I see a physiotherapist for my joint pain. The physiotherapist wanted a copy of MRI results from tests that had been done on my shoulder the year before. Close to two weeks after my first visit with Dr. Radev, I stopped at the clinic to ask for those. Since I’d be in the same mall, I decided to go to LifeLabs. As I left the medical clinic, I conveniently skipped the second task and drove instead to Tim Hortons.
Driving home with a coffee in the cup holder and a honey cruller in hand, I scolded myself for being a wimp. My husband and I would be leaving the next month for Mexico. Before splashing into the ocean off Tulum, I should make sure I was healthy. So I got off the main drag, made a U-ey, and drove through Upper Gibsons to the mall. My fingers were sticky from the donut, so I took a side trip to a washroom at the nearby supermarket. I continued on to the medical lab, stopping at a clothing store to try on some jeans and at a kitchen store to hunt for a cheese grater. I wandered through the Sears outlet store, comparing major appliances I didn’t need. Then I steeled myself and entered LifeLabs.
The waiting room was empty. I started to leave, but a short, curly-haired lab assistant named Bernice arrived at the counter and reached for my requisition. Once I handed it to her I was committed.
“You can go right ahead,” Bernice said. She led me to a room with a beige padded chair fitted with wide, beige padded arms that went well with the beige-everything look of the clinic.
“I can’t sit. I’ll faint,” I said, thinking my blood would create a startling contrast with the decor.
Bernice led me to another room with a narrow vinyl bed that had a sterile paper cloth spanning its length. I lay down, stretched out my arm, and squinted my eyes shut. I explained I had fainted in the past.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It won’t take long. You can stay here and lie down afterward, until you feel okay.” She babbled about the weather and stretched a tourniquet around my arm. A needle pierced my skin. Seconds slushed by. My stomach fell, as if I were descending in a roller coaster. “All done,” she said.
My mind spun for a few minutes, and then I slowly rose from the cot. As I passed Bernice at the counter, I grabbed a brochure that told me I could get my results online. I was happy I hadn’t fainted. (It’s hard to swoon while lying down.) I could get the results quickly. And I wouldn’t need another blood test anytime soon, I told myself, unless the test revealed I had hemochromatosis.
HEMOCHROMATOSIS IS A rare genetic disease that causes a dangerous iron overload in the blood. It affects more than 1 million Americans and 100,000 Canadians. It’s most common among people of northern European descent. Its symptoms include abdominal pain and memory fog, which I had been experiencing. I knew the source of my stomach pain. It was a hiatal hernia, in which stomach acid flushes upward through the diaphragm and flows where it shouldn’t. I attributed the memory fog—which I later learned is also a symptom of hep—to a loss of sleep because of shoulder pain. However, my dad had suffered from hemochromatosis, so he carried the gene. He had advised me to get tested. For many years I had put his warning aside.
It had come a few weeks before he died, and less than a month after 9/11. The highway borders between British Columbia and Seattle had thickened with security. Lineups for cars were inordinately long, and most people avoided cross-border trips. I couldn’t do that. My dad was suffering from heart disease, bone cancer, and kidney failure. My mother was having a hard time managing the half-hour drive from their condo in Kent to downtown Seattle to take my dad to his dialysis appointments. I crossed the border once or twice a week to help out.
After driving forty minutes from Vancouver, I’d line up with hundreds of other frustrated drivers and wait. Eventually I’d inch up to the Customs and Immigration window, hold out my passport, and explain I would be