The following is a lengthy post about a rather hard-luck period in my life starting a decade ago. There are 10 parts: Prologue; Phnom Penh; The Cambodia Daily; Spinal Meltdown; Travelling home; Rehab, recovery and relapse (x2); Getting back to work; Here's where it gets unbelievable; Real disaster strikes; Final thoughts, observations. Comments and questions are welcome.
Prologue
About this date, 10 years ago, I tried getting out of bed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to get ready for my job as foreign editor of the Cambodia Daily. I passed out from the pain of doing so; it felt like I'd been hammered on the head with a baseball bat. I didn't know it at the time, but I wouldn't work again for another year.
How did I end up in Phnom Penh? Read this post for the full background, but here's how I put it to my buddies from the Regina Leader-Post over a beer at Alfredo's, one of our most crucial watering holes:
Imagine for a moment that I'm sitting here by myself back in early December. And some wizened, creepy little man comes up and sits down. And that he tells me this: "On Boxing Day, you will find out that Conrad Black has bought your paper. You will spend the next two months imagining the worst. Your worst fears will be realized. You will be fired, along with 88 others. For the longest time, your job hunt will be totally fruitless. You will start to fret about never working as a journalist ever again. But just when all seems darkest, you will get a job as foreign editor of the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, Cambodia!"
Although life does throw funny curves, you have to admit that when I put it that way, it would have seemed far-fetched, to say the least.
First, to get the job, I had to fly to Boston to do an interview with James Kanter, the young, preppie-ish editor in chief (he'd just taken over the job from a guy named Barton Biggs). Kanter had gotten his journalism degree from City University in London, England, but was originally from Boston (he may well be working for the New York Times or the International Herald Tribune now).
One amusing question (in retrospect; I'll tell you why later) was this: "There's a lot of ... temptations in Phnom Penh, Bill. How would you handle them?" he asked tentatively.
My response was this: "I'm 37 years old. I'm not going to Phnom Penh to live out a Hunter S. Thompson-esque fantasy." When the work week is over, I'm happy go to for a beer or 12, but there would be little risk of me going off the deep end, I said.
When the interview ended, I was fairly confident I would get the gig. I was really hoping I would land it: I'd always been interested in southeast Asia. I'm just old enough to have some indirect contact with its effects on the times. My parents took me to anti-Vietnam War rallies in the late 1960s. In high school, I watched the fall of Saigon live on TV (more here on the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War) in the library. Later, in my forestry days, I would fly with helicopter pilots who were Vietnam veterans. I was riveted by the film The Killing Fields. My first professional reporting gig would entail working for a committed anti-Vietnam War activist. So I was anxious to get to the part of the world where it all happened.
Anyway, after the interview, I went to a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park -- the single greatest place to watch baseball on the face of the earth!
Early the next day, I took a side trip down to New York, travelling by train. The train eventually arrives at Penn Station, but it swings out through Brooklyn before crossing the East River and burrowing under Manhattan.
At one point, you get a fantastic view of the Manhattan skyline, which put a big sloppy grin on my face. I passed the time picking out the buildings that stood out to me in so many movies.
After arriving at Penn, I emerged from underground onto Broadway Ave. The only way to scan the horizon was to arch your neck upward -- not a natural motion for someone who had spent the past eight years living on the Prairies. :)
While in New York, I stayed with a cousin who lives and works on the Upper East Side. I took in a Yankees game, had lunch with a Steve Ross, a Columbia University journalism professor, at a diner whose facade was made famous by Seinfeld, drank in some very cool bars, saw avant garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor at the Knitting Factory, toured art galleries in Soho and Tribeca, went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and drank two-dollar "champagne" at the top of the Empire State Building at dusk, marvelling at the constant rumbling hum and movement and light and energy down below that marks New York.
Looking southward from the Empire State Building, I saw the World Trade Center towers. They could wait for another visit when I had more time, I decided. After all, those towers will always be there.
So I had a pretty good time on this road trip. The one thing a little off-putting when I got back was some unnatural tightness in my left hamstring.
When it didn't go away, I saw my doctor about it, but he said it was nothing to worry about and would soon take care of itself.
On May 28 -- three days after I was no longer a Hollinger employee -- I got offered the Cambodia Daily job. I found out later later that one line they liked on my resume was "... has experience working in physically dangerous places." :)
I dissembled my life in Regina and put it in storage in Edmonton, figuring I wouldn't be back in Regina ever again except to visit.
My new employer wanted me over there relatively quickly, but one thing giving me grief was lining up health insurance, primarily because Cambodia was considered a war zone. Kanter told me no big deal, I could buy some there for about $500 US.
So on June 27, I said a final goodbye to my parents and two aunts, telling them I loved them and would miss them very much. And then I was off for a one-year tour of duty. Or so I thought.
Phnom Penh
I flew Edmonton-Vancouver-Hong Kong to get there, over-nighting in Hong Kong. What dazzled me was the wealth evident in the place (and the energy level on the street, which is comparable to New York). I got picked up by a Mercedes limo for my ride to my hotel. Didn't do much in HK other than walk around the Kowloon district, as my Phnom Penh flight would be early the next morning. One of the great regrets of the trip was that I was in the world's dim sum capital, and I never had a chance to chow down on it there! Agghh!!
Phnom Penh is about a 2.5-hour flight from Hong Kong. The route took me over the coastline of Vietnam, which looked spectacular even from 35,000 feet.
Things really started to hit home on the approach into Phnom Penh that Friday, June 29, 1996 morning: The cafe-au-lait waters of the mighty Mekong River, the palm trees, the decaying but still-beautiful French colonial-era buildings.
After we landed, the "welcome to Cambodia" minutes started coming thick and fast.
My glasses fogged immediately as I went from the air-conditioned plane into the humid, tropical air outside.
In the terminal, immigration was pure Third World. There were 13 bored-looking civil servants in ill-fitting uniforms sitting in a row, each having one minor function to do with processing my visa (I actually signed up as an aid worker for the Japan Relief for Cambodia foundation; more on this later).
Leaving the terminal was freaky. As the doors slid open, I saw there was a vehicle waiting for me. A smiling Cambodian guy had a sign with my (incorrectly-spelled) name.
But to get to him, I had to move through a huge, frantic, screaming mob of people who were willing to do something, anything, for the equivalent of a few pennies. I was almost overwhelmed by it, but it provided a quick introduction to the impoverished nature of Cambodia.
 Keeping intruders out -- or us in? :). (Full image) |
Nobody English-speaking was around for the first while. Then I met a small, smiley woman named Debra Boyce, who as it turned out, was a fellow newbie and Canuckistani (rounding out the team of newbie Canuckistanis was Guy Nicholson, another newbie who would go on to work on the foreign desk at The Globe and Mail* ).
* Since Mr. Guynick protested in a comment attached to this post that the above makes it seem like he's now living over a heating grate, he and his wife Christina quit their Globe jobs in 2005 and went travelling for a year. They are now back and living and working again in T.O. Here's a sample Globe story about the trip (from there you can launch an interactive), and here's their travel website. They even returned to Cambodia. Guy should write about his time there; he got to work through a coup, among other things.
After a few introductory pleasantries, Deb would tell me something that would make it even clearer that I was in a far, far different place than Regina.
"I don't know if anyone's told you this," she started out (well, actually, nobody's told me anything; the one other person I've met doesn't speak English!), "but if it starts raining and you hear automatic weapons fire, don't worry."
Please, do elaborate.
Apparently, some Cambodians like to shoot long, loud and continuously at the clouds during cloudbursts.
Deb's room was right above where the guards hang out during the day. For them to do some upward shooting, all they had to do was step out a few feet, point the automatic rifle* skyward, and let the ratta-tat-tatting begin.
* The guards and rifles came in handy. I went out for beers with Mr. Nicholson on my first Saturday night to some Irish bar that had a Khmer band as its first anniversary entertainment. "You know what?" I told the owner. "There's a Khmer bar a few blocks away, and they're celebrating their first anniversary tonight too." He did not know that. "And guess what entertainment they're having?" He asked, and I said: "An Irish band!" Well, I thought it was funny. In any event, I was a bit tipsy, and a funny thing happened on the way back to the villa. My moto driver stopped a few hundred feet from my residence, turned off his engine and just sat there in the deserted street. Liet, one of our security guards, opened our gate, looked at the moto driver, waved the M-16 with his right hand and arched his eyebrows with a universal "don't fuck with me" look. The moto driver took off. Liet may have saved me from getting robbed. It wasn't unknown to have robbers follow on another moto.
Home sweet home at the villa. (Full image)
No one gave her advance warning, and so the first time she experienced it, "I thought we were under assault," Deb declared.
Welcome to Cambodia! :)
That night, we all went to a Middle Eastern restaurant overlooking the Mekong and had a very enjoyable dinner. On the horizon, the sky occasionally crackled with heat lightning, backlighting the palm trees and reflecting off the river.
We travelled there on motos, small motorcycles that were a transportation staple. On the way up, we passed a place that advertised itself as a "Thai massage" place.
I stupidly made mention of that fact in a way that screamed "hick!"
"Yeah, Thai 'massage.' Sure, right," snickered my more worldly coworker.*
* I went for a beer with one of our regular freelancers, a fellow named Brian. We went to a famous expat bar called The Heart of Darkness. To do so, we had to make two left turns off this main street. On the first left, there was a stretch that would be somewhat longer than the stretch between Manning and Clinton Streets on College Street in Toronto. But the streets were swarming with young prostitutes (as opposed to young Woodbridge girls). When we got to the bar, I said, "So, I guess I've seen Phnom Penh's red light district now." He replied: "No, you've seen one of them. The smallest one." It was a far more tragic than erotic scene. Most of those kids were farm girls sold by their parents to men who promised them "work" in the city. Those poor kids didn't even know what AIDS was, let alone have any power to protect themselves against it. The whole situation was seen at the time as a public health time bomb. Yahoo! News' special correspondent Kevin Sites has done a bit of a "plus ca change ..." kind of story in 2006 on the plight of underaged prostitutes in Cambodia: The Dark Trade. As a final FYI, check out this on the Heart of Darkness.
Again, welcome to Cambodia!
The Cambodia Daily
First, a quick history of Cambodia.
The salad days for the Khmer people were between the 11th and 14th centuries. In some ways, the only reason there is a Cambodia today is that it was a French colony in the 19th century. Otherwise, there was a real risk it could have been absorbed by either Vietnam or Thailand. Japan occupied it during the Second World War.
In the early 1960s, Cambodia wasn't doing too bad. It was even a net exporter of rice.
Then along came a little thing called the Vietnam War.
King Norodom Sihanouk, a likeable dilettante, tried to keep his country non-aligned, although he was under pressure from both the Soviet and Western blocs.
But the North Vietnamese were using his eastern lands as a route to move fighters into far South Vietnam. Actually, the North Vietnamese Army even established some bases. Cambodia was too weak to do anything about it. There was a nascent Maoist-inspired insurgency led by Pol Pot.
Under the Nixon administration, the U.S. commenced secret bombing of eastern Cambodia. Nixon also ordered an invasion of the ostensibly neutral country in 1970, leading to protests across U.S. campuses, including the tragic one at Kent State University in Ohio where four students were shot to death by Ohio National Guardsmen.
The CIA helped engineer a coup that overthrew Norodom Sihanouk and installed Gen. Lon Nol.
At that same time, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge began an attempted insurrection, one that would end five years later with his guerrillas taking over the capital, Phnom Penh -- and marking the start of Year Zero, a new beginning to history (I can't even write Year Zero without feeling a chill down my spine).
The Khmer Rouge would last from 1975 until December 1979, directly or indirectly killing almost two million people* and almost completely destroying the country in the process of pursuing their mad Maoist dream when the Vietnamese drove them from power.
* One thing I noticed in Phnom Penh was there were practically no senior citizens. A big reason for that is a large number of seniors and middle-aged people died during the KRs' reign. Only the strong survived.
So, for the next 14 years, the royalists and Khmer Rouge (?!?!) let bygones be bygones and worked together to topple the Vietnamese-backed government (the Vietnamese and Cambodians don't like each other; it's a much more toxic version of the Canadian-American relationship, with the Vietnamese as the Americans). Vietnamese troops pulled out entirely by 1989, but fighting continued.
Finally, a peace deal was established in 1991, with UN-sponsored elections in 1993.
Enter Bernard Krisher.
He's a former Asia bureau chief of Newsweek magazine who still lives in Tokyo and a personal friend of Norodom Sihanouk. Besides that, he's a man of humanitarian instincts, indefatigable energy and, for those who work for him, an immensely annoying micro-manager. :)
"The thing you have to remember about Bernie is he's an operator," said one of Steve Ross's Columbia j-school colleagues that I met on my New York trip. That made my eyebrows go up, but the guy clarified by saying 'in a good way.'
And I must say that I never felt jerked around by the guy in the slightest.
To help Cambodia on the road to recovery, Bernie set up his Japan Relief for Cambodia foundation, which had three main projects at that time:
- Gathering up used bicycles and distributing them in Cambodia for basic transportation
- Building a hospital
- Starting up a newspaper to give Cambodia an independent source of news and to help train Cambodians in Western-style journalism.
The Cambodia Daily* was launched in 1993, staffed mainly by young Ivy Leaguers (Bernie, a Hahvad man himself, loved to brag about hiring Ivy Leaguers -- and yet they hired me, the non-preppie, the anti-Ivy Leaguer. :) ).
* For more on working at the Daily, see this FAQ by Rich Garella, who worked at the paper for almost two years, that time overlapping with my short stay. I would concur with he has to say. In addition, the Daily produced a 10th anniversary supplement.
By the time I got there in 1996, the Daily had offices relatively close to the Royal Palace yards in central Phnom Penh. The villa was about a 20-minute walk south.
Here's one quirk of the place: One floor above us was an abandoned brothel.
Back during the UN days, there were thousands of foreign soldiers in Cambodia with, uh, needs. This brothel consisted of a number of cubicles with a single mattress and just enough room beside it for someone to drop their pants. The mattresses were still there. I asked my tour guide if anyone ever came up and sacked out on the mattresses. He shook his head in disgust.
When I got back to Canada, I would tell my orthopedic surgeon that if office ergonomic environments were viruses, the Daily would be Ebola. There was no real office furniture (understandable, given the place and time), just formal dining tables and stiff-backed chairs.
The first week was tough: Jet lag, long hours (my first day lasted 15 hours; I was two days off the plane), and wicked diarrhea, plus learning a new job (I'd been a reporter at the Leader-Post; here I did copy-editing and page design).
On a Wednesday, I went to lunch with one of my colleagues, Chris Decherd. We hit a bump* while riding on his moto and I openly yelped.
* Not so hard to do in the Phnom Penh of that time. While the main roads were paved, anything lesser was essentially smoothed-over rubble.
"Is your back okay?" he asked. Not really, I said.
Over the next few days, the back -- and leg -- pain would get worse and worse (on the other hand, the traveller's diarrhea cleared up :) ). On Saturday, I went on the Gretchen Peters (a Daily original, she is currently a producer with ABC News in Pakistan) newbie tour of Phnom Penh* and was kvetching and moaning the whole time.
* Part of the tour included a visit to the O Russei, or Russian market. You could get a pound of marijuana there for one U.S. dollar. "What if it's not very good?" some intern on the tour asked. "Smoke more of it!" was my reply. "It's practically free!" Back home, I sat down with some friends. We figured that pound of dope, about the physical size of a carton of cigarettes, had a retail street value of $11,000. Although I have no conceivable use for a pound of marijuana, I'm almost sorry I didn't buy it just to say I did. :)
On Sunday, the start of the Daily's workweek, I could barely sit and have breakfast with two of my colleagues at a restaurant near the villa. However, it seemed to clear up by the end of the day. "There's no more pain," I told Kanter.
Famous last words.
Spinal meltdown
Some time during the night, I woke up. I have tight hamstrings to begin with, and to loosen them up, I sometimes plant my heel and stretch my leg this way or that. They pop and temporarily loosen up.
This time, something went horribly wrong.
When morning came, I tried to sit up, and that's when the blast of pain literally knocked me out.
For context, I've taken soccer balls to the face and heads to the ear, a hard-thrown softball to the head, blew my left ACL out several times playing basketball and whacked my lower left leg with a logger sports axe. I've even chewed up my left knee with a chainsaw while doing oilfield surveying -- yet I still walked a half-mile out to the truck with my shirt tied around my knee to staunch the bleeding. So I think I'm justified in saying I can deal with pain. This, however, was a whole new dimension in agony.
When I came to, I was pretty disoriented and didn't know what was happening to me. Physically, it felt like someone had jammed a wood chisel between the discs of my lower back and was sadistically twisting it. I was sobbing and the tears were streaming down my face. Normally I don't cry very much.
It would have been about 11 a.m., I guess. Most everyone else had left for work, although some would return for lunch.
 One of the geckos that regularly patrolled my room's walls and ceiling. (Full image) |
The intern walked in.
"What's the matter with you?" he asked, clearly finding the scene weird.
"I CAN"T FUCKING WALK!" I barked. "GET SOME FUCKING HELP!"
Some people helped me on to this grey, leatherette-ish couch that was rather slippery, then held a confab as to what to do with me. I was laying on my back, with my legs on one arm of the couch.
They decided to take me to a private medical clinic operated by a French doctor.
Now, one of the people standing around was this Cambodian maid named Melai (spl?), a nice young woman who proved Mark Twain's axiom that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
When it came time to get me off the couch, she suddenly seized my left leg, which I could move about an inch or two without triggering an extreme pain response. Even though I screamed "NO MELAI!!!," she lifted that leg like she was tossing a caber, rolling me off the couch and onto the floor.
Thanks for the help.
They get me to the clinic and onto an examining table. Before commencing the examination, the French doctor brusquely tells me he is going to finish his lunch first -- something allowed by the Hippocratic Oath, I believe.
He then deigns to examine me.
"You 'ave scia-tick-a," he declares.
He asked me a question about my weight. It had been up about six months before, but was down substantially.
"Ahh, now I know why you 'ave ze scia-tick-a," he said, looking at me with thinly veiled Gallic contempt.
Needless to say, it was my only visit to him. However, he did give me some injections which temporarily controlled the pain, so I should be grateful for that.
A Singaporean doctor was next, and while a much nicer guy, gave me medical advice that, when I returned to Canada, would prove to be about five years behind the times.
He said I had a prolapsed disc in my back. He put me on a combination of steroidal and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, plus a muscle relaxant. His advice was to stay flat on my back in bed 24 hours a day, and it would hopefully clear up in a week or two.
 The sign on the guard house outside the bank reads: "NO weapons or explosif material allowed inside. Please leave them with the security." (Full image) |
I went to the bank to get more money one day, and after a minute or two standing at the counter, I collapsed on the floor. My back just couldn't take it.
At the end of that period, Kanter told me he had to fill the job, and that I was essentially no longer a Cambodia Daily employee. However, Krisher said I would be paid for the month, provided me with a very nice letter of reference and allowed me to stay at the villa for free, meals included, until I was well enough to head home.
I wound up in the villa for just under a month after the initial attack. My two regular visitors from the paper were Guy Nicholson and Debra Boyce, my fellow Canadians. I didn't really see much of my American colleagues ever again*, although some of the other volunteers and English-speaking Cambodians did pop in now and then. Guy told me not to think too badly of the paper types, as my situation had left the paper horribly short-staffed, with everyone working even zanier hours than before.
* Kanter popped in once to urge me to return to Canada. "It's not healthy to live like this, Bill!" he exclaimed. I concurred, but then somewhat acidly pointed out that since I couldn't stand or sit, and could barely walk, what exactly did he expect me to do? In terms of being blown off while sick, at one staff meeting, Kanter mentioned some Daily associate who was very sick with dengue fever. I got the impression people didn't exactly clear their daytimers to visit him either. Actually, I never heard mention of that guy again.
I like to call this image my most enduring view of Cambodia. (Full image)
At one point, Guy snickered and asked me: "Do you know what's going on? Do you even know the Olympics have been bombed?" Uh, no. I'm in a bit of an isolation tank here, Guy. :)
By the time early August rolled around, I decided to chance a flight back to Canada*. The doctor told me that flying probably wouldn't make matters much worse. And it was clear I needed better medical treatment than what was available in Phnom Penh. For one thing, the only expertise the physiotherapists had there was in treating landmine amputees (at that time, the landmine-linked amputee rate was one Cambodian in every 233). Bernie cautioned me not to let the airline know I was in a lot of pain or they might not let me on the flight.
* I forgot to mention that for the last week or so, I practically had my own personal assistant, thanks to Bernie Krisher. This guy got me to the doctor, picked up plane tickets, arranged for some stuff to be shipped and handled other such tasks. I forget the guy's name, but damn, he knew how to get stuff done! Thanks again, dude!!
 View from the villa's balcony. You can see moto operators in the shade, waiting for fares. (Full image) |
* This is why I found his "temptations" question amusing in retrospect. Kanter liked to party! :)
While they were there, I had to stand at the counter for the usual check-in shit. They drifted away and I felt my back start to spazz out on me and my legs collapse.
"HELP!" I yelled. "I CAN'T HANDLE THIS."
Deb and Guy rushed over, helped me into a seat and found me a wheelchair. When departure time came, I got a bit emotional thanking them for their help. They really did a lot to help me get through that extremely awful period.
But aircraft wait for no one, so it was onto the DragonAir plane and back the way I came. The great adventure was in its last stages.
Travelling home
Actually, I heard from them later that Deb and Guy didn't think my flying was such a good idea. :)
Ultimately, however, it was manageable.
The most amusing thing was lying flat on my back in the Hong Kong airport while waiting for my flight to Vancouver.
Every few minutes, as I'm staring up at the ceiling, a total stranger's face would suddenly appear directly above me, looking straight down at me.
"What's the matter, buddy? Bad back?" they'd ask. I'd nod yes. And they'd offer me drugs!
Not cocaine or ecstasy or anything like that, but painkillers that had gotten them through similar circumstances.
Ahh, the anonymous brotherhood of travelling back pain sufferers!
I was grateful for the offers, but turned them down.
On the 747 over the Pacific, there was an open area where I could lay on my back for much of the flight, keeping the pressure off my discs and letting me sleep.
Between Vancouver and Edmonton, however, one of the flight attendants gave me grief for asking to lay on the floor in the back galley area. She couldn't understand why I was flying if I couldn't sit in my seat.
I couldn't understand how she got a flight attendant's job if she was too stupid to understand my explanation.
Ultimately, I got back to Edmonton. My parents and I greeted each other with rueful smiles. When I left, I had no intention of being home so soon. And I don't think they expected to see me for a while, either. :)
Upon leaving the airport, I remember almost freezing to death. It was 16 degrees Celsius and rainy that evening. But I was used to a constant 35 degrees and 90 per cent humidity back in tropical Phnom Penh, so that felt pretty damned cold to me. But it may have also been partly psychological, my body telling me that the Cambodia experience was definitely over.
Rehab, recovery and relapse (x2)
The first order of business was getting an Alberta health card. I remembered this because walking into the office, I was hunched over and shuffling my feet about four inches at a time ("I'm moving like an old man," I thought at the time*).
* Later, when I got a bit healthier and could go to the store, I would have to carry a two-litre carton of milk dead centre and tight to my body. If I held it in one hand or the other, my discs would start to shriek.
When friends came to visit, it was much like the Hong Kong airport scenario: I had to lie on the floor while we yakked. :)
I hooked up with a GP, Dr. Henderson of the Allin Clinic (where I went as a boy), and went into physiotherapy immediately.
The physiotherapist performed a lot of manipulation on my back. And unlike the Singapore doctor, he wanted me to get up and move every 20 minutes that I was awake*. In addition, he wanted me doing a half push-up known as the "cobra" in yoga. I was to do three sets of 10 every hour; more if I could take it. I did hundreds per day.
* The laying around I did in Phnom Penh is completely at odds with what was known in 1996 as "aggressive conservative therapy" for disc troubles (they don't want you laying around because your whole body gets weak when it needs to be strong). It may have led to the build-up of scar tissue that hampered my ultimate recovery. And the high doses of steroidal and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories over a long period gave me stomach trouble that took more than a year to clear up.
My dad gave me rides several times per week to the local pool. I'd put a floatation device under my arms and tread water for 45 minutes or so in the deep area. The weight of my body would act like traction on the disc, taking the strain off it. This way, I could put my legs through a reasonably full range of motion -- although the right one more than the left.
Walking was encouraged. The first walks had me going down my parents' front walk to the main sidewalk, about 30 feet in total, going about 15 or 20 feet to the left and then returning to the house to collapse. That should take about five seconds normally; my first round trips took 10 minutes.
But within a few weeks, I could make to the closest corner store, then the next furthest, and by early October, I did a two-mile round trip! I was sore afterwards, but as an accomplishment, it still felt like finishing a marathon.
In fact, by mid-October, I felt so good, I took my parents up on an offer to go fishing for walleye on the Pembina River near a place called Flatbush. One dumb thing: I didn't check with my doctor or physiotherapist.
I felt fine all day until the drive home, when I felt a twinge in my back. After we got home, I was on the living room floor, screaming and crying and pounding my fists like I was being tortured.
Back to square one.
Seven more weeks of traction, manipulation, cobras, aqua-jogging and other sundry stuff and I felt like I was getting better.
Some buddies from the Leader-Post -- George Bentley and Gord Brock -- came up to Edmonton on a road trip in late November. We hooked up with another ex-LPer, Bernie Pilon, went to an Oilers game (where I got yapped at for standing up to stretch my back -- in between breaks in play, I might add), drank some beer, shot some pool and otherwise hung out. Shooting pool without being able to bend low over the table was an, ahem, challenge. :)
A week or two later, I was crossing a street in downtown Edmonton in early December. A car made a hard left. Looking to my left, my torso twisted, I accelerated to get out of his way.
Upon arriving home, I felt a familiar twinge.
Oh. No. Not. Again.
Yep. A second trip to square one.
This time, I started thinking, "fuck this 'aggressive-conservative therapy' shit."
The next time I saw my doctor, I asked him point-blank: "Is this going to be the rest of my life?" He didn't have an answer; both he and the physiotherapist were surprised I wasn't fully healed by then.
I demanded an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon and got one. Henderson also booked me in for a CT scan.
The CT scan, conducted in mid-January, 1997, showed that I had a herniated disc.
For background, you have an 80 per cent chance of a lower back pain episode at some point in your life. There are many different causes. Sometimes the disc simply bulges but touches a nerve. In relatively rare instances, about 10 per cent of all back pain cases, the disc -- which is like a donut of cartilage filled with jelly -- ruptures, with the jelly pushing against the nerve, causing the tightness and pain in the leg. In even rarer cases, sequestration occurs, when a piece of cartilage breaks off from the disc and becomes trapped against the nerve.
In retrospect, the tightness in my left leg after I returned from New York was probably evidence that the disc was starting to go.
In reading the medical literature I could find at the time, the doctors talked a lot about "spontaneous healing," which essentially means your back will get better when it gets better.
What normally happens is that once the disc ruptures, the jelly inside dries out and retracts, taking the pressure off the nerve.
When I finally saw the orthopedic surgeon (Dr. John Kortbeek) in early February, he had me do a few basic tests: Bounce on my toes, rotate my torso, etc., etc. He said to wait a month and then see where my back was at. The prevailing wisdom was that surgery should be an absolute last step.
I kept up with all my regular rehab stuff. Then two key things happened.
In early March, some Chinook winds had created a bit of a melt, so there was some ice on the sidewalk. I slipped on it and literally started whimpering with fear, thinking that old familiar twinge would return. But it didn't.
Buoyed by that, I decided to torture-test my back. I chopped ice with a steel bar. Nothing!
The worst seemed to be over!
That realization was an incredibly happy moment for me.*
* One reason I had gotten antsy was that the longer your recovery takes, your chances of ever being healthy enough to work again drop substantially. If your back hasn't healed within six months of the initial injury, your probability of ever working again drops to 50 per cent. It took roughly eight months for my back to finally stabilize.
Getting back to work
While my doc said I could be considered medically fit to work, that didn't mean "without pain." :)
The back was still pretty sore (and would basically remain so for more than a year), and I kept up with physiotherapy. But I also started on an exercise program to strengthen myself and compensate for the bad disc.
I took some courses from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology on HTML and whatnot to develop some technical Internet skills.*
* I began that process while flat on my back. A friend of mine got me a book on HTML and I started teaching myself that, holding the book up and tapping into my laptop as I lay on the living room floor.
After an hour of sitting in class, my back would be screaming, but whaddaya do? I sucked it up.
The 1997 Canadian Association of Journalists convention took place in Edmonton that spring. I organized the computer-assisted reporting program for it. We brought out Steve Ross, an excellent teacher, for it.
Doing stuff over the course of the convention was a bitch, as I could only spend so much time on my feet (actually, standing for long periods is problematic for me to this day. If I go to an art gallery, I have to sit down after a maximum of one hour, and after that hour, the rest stops have to come more frequently or my back starts to spazz out). Every so often at the convention, I had to find a quiet place with some carpet to lay down and take the pressure off my back.
Running into acquaintances at the convention was rather interesting. After getting downsized by Hollinger and then losing another job for health reasons, maybe they thought I was a job-loss carrier! :)
They'd see me, and their faces would immediately change to a "what do I say?" expression. More than one person would ask, "what are you going to do?" I'd shrug, grin and say: "I don't know!"
But I did try to schmooze as best I could. One guy I talked with a fair bit was Paul DeGroot, a longtime Edmonton Journal staffer on secondment to the Southam New Media Centre (I'd previously met him before going to Cambodia). I didn't mention the 'j' word, but a week or so after the convention, I sent him a note saying nice chatting with you, and by the way ... .
The worst experience in job-hunting was applying for a job as a writer-media relations officer at the University of Alberta, my alma mater. Normally, that's not what I'd be interested in doing, but these weren't normal times.
They gave me 45 minutes to do a writing test. It took me 10 minutes, giving me 35 minutes to stare at the walls and ceiling. I had an interview with a panel of people. It was one of those rare occasions where I dazzled. All of them pumped my hand afterward with big smiles. I thought I stood an excellent chance of getting hired.
And then the phone call came. I finished second. I asked why. The guy gave me a bunch of bromides, but then added very soothingly: "Besides, your back is still healing." I didn't react well to that.
More comically, I had an interview at the Edmonton Sun. David Quigley, the city editor of the time, looked at my clips, pulled out a big feature I had written on the "tragic choices" forced by the high cost of medical technology, waved it at me sternly and said: "I can tell you we don't do a lot of this around here!"
At the L-P, I was known for having a tabloid-y writing style, especially on courts and crime stuff. One of my co-workers there, one-time Sun reporter Therese Macdonald, told me I'd make a great Sun writer.
I mentioned this to Quigley. "Oh Therese!" he said. "I remember her. She was Therese Kehler when she worked here!"
And then his mood visibly darkened. He went on to say: "And now she works at the Edmonton Journal. And she's making the big bucks! And she's completely bought into the Southamista line*!!" Quigley's voice rose with each new sentence.
* The Progressive Conservative government of Ralph Klein made deficit-fighting the prime job when they won the 1993 election. However, some Edmonton Journal writers and editorialists questioned the aggressiveness of the cuts, saying the deficit was being used as a cover for attack on government itself. On the deficit issue, Sun columnists were more Catholic than Pope Ralph. They started calling their Journal counterparts Southamistas (the Journal had been owned by Southam), in reference to the left-wing Sandinistas of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution.
I tried to remain as impassive as possible, but in my heart, I sighed and said: "I'm screwed." Needless to say, I didn't end up working there either. :)
However, in early June, DeGroot contacted me and asked me to come in for a tryout/interview. So I did, apparently impressed, and so Southam New Media hired me for a one-year contract, with the possibility of it turning into a real gig!
On June 16, I commenced work -- about 50 weeks after the original injury. Woo-hoo!!
Actually, the first day was tough. My back was really going berserk, and I was extremely close to saying, "I can't handle this." But ultimately, I could. And since that day, I've never missed a day's work due to back-related problems (or almost anything else).
Here's where it gets unbelievable
Remember my wizened, creepy old man soliloquy? Well, what if he finished, I started to pull away, and he grabbed my arm and said 'Wait: There's more!' ...
You will spend thousands of dollars to get to Phnom Penh, yet you will only be ambulatory for about 10 days. Then your back will blow up on you, and you will be essentially left immobile and jobless. Your recovery will be long and painful. Getting back into the workforce will be a struggle. And when you finally do, it will be with a branch of ... Hollinger, the same company that downsized you the last time! And they'll do it again!
Yep. The first warning sign was when Paul flew to Toronto for meetings, and Mike Pilmer, the vice-president of new media for Southam, asked him if he'd filled the vacant job. When DeGroot said yes, Pilmer reportedly grimaced.
Then, one Friday, we got all these calls from content partners wondering why they'd just been slapped with 90 days' notice that we would be cutting them off. More ominously, Paul didn't know anything about it. And even more ominously, Pilmer said he'd be out on Monday to speak with us.
When I saw Pilmer show up with the Journal's human resources manager, who was grinning like a necrophiliac in a morgue, I figured, "Oh, oh, screwed again!"
Yep. Pilmer came out to shut the place down by Oct. 31. Their plan was to reconstitute a more limited version of Southam New Media in Hamilton, but to do so, the plan was to fire us all, and then have us apply for the new jobs if we wished. Interestingly, none of the staffers wanted to continue with Southam New Media. Some had been laid off eight times.
If I'm not mistaken, this happened on July 7, 1997, which happened to be the one-year anniversary of my back blowing up. Happy anniversary!! :)
However, even though I'd only been with the organization for three weeks at that point, Pilmer said I would get three months severance, which was actually generous of them.
So, back to job hunting.
For the hell of it, I applied for one of the new Southam New Media jobs -- a sports position -- and had one of the second-weirdest interview experiences in my career.
The interview was with a guy named Alex Beers.
I made note of the fact there were a lot of big, successful sports sites already on the Internet. "What will be our niche? What will we be number one in?" I asked.
"Oh, we won't be!" was his candid response.
My head spun. How do you run a successful business with the philosophy that you'll be worse that your competitors? What was the company cheer going to be: "We're mediocre! We're number five!!"?!?! Good Lord, no wonder some of the Southam New Media vets had been whacked so many times.
In early September, I took a trip out to Vancouver and had informational interviews with the Vancouver Province and Vancouver Sun, hooking up with two of my fellow Leader-Post dismissados -- Brian Foden and Sean Collins.
While I always like visiting Van, the one sobering thing about this trip was the Sun's managing editor of the time, Paul Sullivan, telling me -- and not unkindly: "You know, you're getting old to be a reporter." I was 38 at the time.
Wow. My first direct, tangible brush with ageism in journalism! :)
Sullivan tried to sell me on copy-editing. Actually, the Southam New Media thing was as much an editing gig as anything, and most editors seemed to want to speak with me about copy editing gigs, not reporting. Sullivan may have been the first one to be honest as to motivations. But I still loved writing and reporting.
Real disaster strikes
Moving into late September, I still had no replacement gig. Meanwhile, my dad had to go to hospital for routine knee replacement surgery.
We thought that it went okay. In fact, in 149,999 of 150,000 cases, it reportedly does. But even when he got home on a Friday, Dad started acting like all was not well. By Sunday, he was definitely sick, and an ambulance took him to the hospital. We left the hospital late, with Dad in care of the doctors.
The next morning, we found out they had to shock his heart twice overnight to keep him alive. What had happened was he'd developed a tiny pinhole leak of blood in his intestine (Gordon Lightfoot had the same thing happen to him). Meantime, he was on beta blockers for high blood pressure. As Dad's blood volume slowly dropped, the concentration of beta blocker in his remaining blood rose, leading to the drug hitting toxic levels.
Along with his heart, he was having simultaneous liver and kidney problems.
In the intensive care ward, the doctor told my mother point-blank: "Your husband is a very, very, sick man, and you should prepare yourself for the possibility he's not going to make it."
Not much ambiguity there. :(
In terms of a prognosis, they said if he was still alive by Thursday, we could start talking about what the future might hold.
For most of October, I got to deal with the very real prospect of losing my Dad and my livelihood simultaneously. Livelihoods, however, can be replaced.
After about 10 days, however, the tough old bastard was still hanging in!
I told one doctor, who was also of Ukrainian descent, "I guess it helps to be descended from hearty Ukrainian peasant stock, eh?"
"Oh yeah!" he replied. "Can't kill those people with a stick!"
Or maybe it was because my mom was there every day, sitting by his side and telling him how much she loved him (she spent every day with him through the entire nightmare).
Dad would spend until about Christmas in intensive care*. In fact, I considered him getting out of intensive care and into a regular hospital bed to be one of my best Christmas presents ever.
* He was there on Halloween, which provided an excellent opportunity for a black-humoured witticism. I think I repulsed a couple of the intensive care nurses when I said: "It's Halloween today and you see people dressed up as witches, goblins and vampires. But tell me this: How come I haven't seen even one person in this hospital dressed up as the Grim Reaper?"
Before that happened, his life would be in serious danger several more times. He got ravaged by several infections and other setbacks and required a few more bouts of surgery. The only way to deal with one was to amputate the leg in which he had the artificial knee installed.
At one point after that happened, he became conscious enough to realize his leg was gone. Bawling, he'd ask me: "Bill: What happened to my leg?" And, tearing up myself, I'd tell him. And then he'd cry even harder and then pass out. And then when he regained consciousness an hour or two later, we'd go through the whole thing all over again.
Fortunately, Dad didn't remember any of his time in intensive care. Thank goodness for that.
Ultimately, Dad would spend six months in institutional care; three in an acute-care hospital, with a good part of that time spent in the shadow of the valley of death, then another three in a physical rehabilitation hospital.
While in the rehab joint, Dad hooked up with a guy named Billy Warwick, a man-about-town who loved to B.S. and play cards as much as Dad did -- which is saying something. :) I'm still somewhat amazed we got the old man home! :)
One thing I admired about Dad was how well he dealt with the near-fatally bad hand that fate had dealt him. He didn't spend much time bitching and moaning; he got right back on with life.
As for me, I did catch a lucky break for a change. In very late October, just days before my Southam New Media gig ended, the Edmonton Journal hired me to work on its website for six months (they moved a designer onto the copy desk to fill in for someone on leave). So I had work in my field over the winter, and it was a night gig, so I could take my mom to the hospital and visit with Dad. While it didn't pay much, I worked with some very talented people, learned a lot and ramped up my skills.
When my stints at the Journal ended (I did some other work for them after the fill-in gig ended), I wound up getting a staff job in Saskatoon as Web editor of the Western Producer, a weekly farm newspaper. This would be in June 1998, approximately two years after I left on my Cambodian adventure.
By then, my parents' lives had basically stabilized. Dad was able to get around and drive again and they didn't need me anymore (or vice versa :) ), so I felt I could leave them with a clear conscience.
Two years after that, I would get a job in Toronto as senior web producer with globeandmail.com, which was just ramping up to start delivering breaking news via the Web -- the first daily newspaper in Canada to make that investment.
After moving to Toronto, I visited with Mr. Nicholson, who graciously provided the beer and hamburgers.
I looked through his photo albums and heard some of his stories from Phnom Penh, and I got a bit wistful.
"Dude," I told him, "You did everything I wanted to do there."
Final thoughts, observations
All told, the Cambodia experience cost me thousands of dollars at a time when I was without a gig. I had to pay my plane fare there and absorb a bunch other expenses -- all for 10 ambulatory days ten time zones away. All the medical expenses I incurred in Cambodia (and a large chunk at home) came out of my pocket.
Would I do it all over again if I knew the outcome would be exactly the same? Absolutely not!
But am I sorry I took the risk in the first place? Hell no!
For one thing, I needed a change, and Phnom Penh is about as different from Regina as you can possibly get. The timing was perfect. I'd just been downsized and I had my severance money in the bank, so I would have had money to live on when I returned home.
Some solid overseas experience almost automatically boosts your employability. By working as an editor, I would have also expanded my skill set.
From Phnom Penh, places like Bangkok, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Vientane and Singapore were all relatively short flights away, so visiting the region would have been fairly easy.
While returning to Cambodia in the aftermath of my back blowing up wasn't an option, I would certainly consider working some place more developed, say Bangkok or Hong Kong.
If I did, the first thing I would nail down is health insurance. As I said, I had trouble getting it in Canada because Cambodia was still considered a war zone at the time. As I found out later, once place you can look is Telfer International Insurance (they reprinted an article I wrote for the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists, now Canadian Journalists for Free Expression).
The policy Kanter spoke about worked this way: If you needed an evacuation, you paid up front and then they would reimburse you. What Kanter didn't tell me during the interview process was that he needed an emergency wisdom tooth extraction and had to fly to Bangkok to get it done. The whole thing cost $6,000 US. Then the insurer claimed a wisdom tooth was a "pre-existing condition" and balked at paying. I'm not sure how that ever worked out.
In any event, I never got a policy because I hit the ground running in Phnom Penh. I may have also taken it for granted, because I usually don't get sick enough to take days off (In the eight years I worked at the Leader-Post, I only missed a day-and-a-half of work due to illness. I'm on three years with no sick days taken at CTV.ca News).
However, had I needed a full medical evacuation to Canada, it would have cost a minimum of $25,000 US, which would have been absolutely ruinous.
So if you're going to work in a high-risk environment, have a strategy for getting yourself out if you get sick, and go in with a plan on how to stay healthy. This goes double if you're a freelancer without organizational support.
As I mentioned in a comment below, in some ways, I was very lucky. One French woman's stay in Cambodia lasted two days: On her first night in-country, some Cambodian broke into her villa and violently sexually assaulted her at gunpoint. She flew back to France the next day.
A French man was driving his moto down a fairly major thoroughfare when two Cambodians tried to rob him. He disdainfully waved them off. They came around and made another pass, but this time they shot him in the stomach. And as he writhed in the dirt, they robbed him.*
* Although Cambodia was still somewhat riven by armed conflict in mid-1996, the bigger security problem on a day-to-day basis was just good, old-fashioned crime. Phnom Penh was a Wild East city at that time -- the 1990s Asian equivalent of Dodge City, Deadwood or Tombstone -- and swarming with guns. Most nightclubs actually had gun checks, the way you might check your coat. There was a bit of a security scare when I got there, so people were edgy about personal safety. The last night I worked, I got a ride home with Kanter and one of Bernie's drivers, Mr. Lang. On the way home, there were four young Cambodian men having a heated argument in the middle of the street at 1 a.m. or whatever, and Mr. Lang crept by them at about one kilometre per hour, which had Kanter freaking. I think James was expecting the guns to come out at any second. According to Kanter, Mr. Lang can barely see: "I think he navigates with some kind of sonar," he said. :)
The worst case of all was this young guy who just radiated niceness and happiness, all the more startling because he had no face. Robbers had thrown acid on him to disable him, and it literally melted his face. According to Gretchen Peters (we met him on our tour), the guy had been a promising medical student until that senseless attack robbed him of his sight. But he still wanted to do something where he could help people, so he was training to become a masseur. It's funny how you can find such inspirational people in such bleak places.
Again, compared to those folks (or my poor dad), I got off easy.
Now, if worst comes to worst and you get a similar injury to what I had, listen to your physiotherapist and play an active role in your recovery.
In the spring of 1998, I was getting treated at the Kinsmen Physiotherapy Clinic in Edmonton. My physio was a guy named Paul. His boss was a woman named Mary, who had served with the Canadian Olympic team in Nagano that winter.
Mary was doing work on some patient. She asked if he'd been doing his exercises. "No-o-o-o!" he bleated. She asked why. "Because it hu-u-u-u-rts!" he said. She nodded, and asked how his back felt when he didn't do anything. "It hu-u-u-u-rts!" he said.
Very coldly, she told him: "Look: The only way your back is going to get better is if you do your exercises. If all you want to do is have me rub your back and make you feel good, you're wasting my time!"
This Vince Lombardi-style pep talk certainly got my attention. I asked Paul about it, and he said that frankly, people sometimes need a kick in the ass.
In the books I've read on the topic, a key thing when you're dealing with something like chronic back trouble is deciding if you're a back patient or a pain patient.
The guy Mary chewed out was a pain patient. He became so pain-averse that he wasn't doing anything.
Part of getting back to normal is realizing you can still do stuff even though you're in pain. The key consideration is whether your actions are making things worse.
In terms of the big picture, fate can -- if I may put it so indelicately -- kick you in the nuts (or in my case, the spine). Not only that, it can do so repeatedly.
There's nothing you can do about that. Executives and managers make crazy decisions that affect your livelihood and bodies break down at inopportune times. Nice people get acid thrown in their faces over a few dollars.
While you can't control the vagaries of fate, you are very much in control of your response to those vagaries. Your choices are simple: Doing something or nothing. The people I admire are the ones who do something.
In my Vancouver Sun informational interview, Sullivan asked me what would happen if I got downsized again. I told him I'd deal with it.
"I'm tough, resilient and have fundamental confidence in my abilities. I'd bounce back," I said.
What getting downsized twice in 15 months -- plus the Cambodian debacle, plus my dad's illness -- taught me is just how true that above sentence is. And how necessary it is to believe in its tenets.