Wardlife: The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk - Softcover

Steinmetz, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550651218 ISBN 13: 9781550651218

Publisher: Véhicule Press, 1999

Synopsis

For nine years Andrew Steinmetz worked as a ward clerk in the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department of a major hospital. Wardlife is a series of riveting prose vignettes—intensely observed moments drawn from diaries kept during the nine years he spent as a ward clerk. With character sketches, dialogues, and brief meditations on subjects ranging from the language of poetry to the language of medicine, Wardlife records the hospital experience—the pathos and pain, the humor and horror—of life on the wards. A profound and deeply sympathetic understanding of this unique environment is conveyed. Described are the feel of instruments, the tone of a locating girl's voice calling code blue, the oddly triumphant grieving of a family watching and singing at a dying father's bedside, and the complications of various hospital subcultures.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Steinmetz is the author of a memoir, Wardlife: The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk and two collections of poetry, Histories and Hurt Thyself. Steinmetz's work has been shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award, the Quebec Writers Federation (QWF) First Book Award, the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction, and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Presently Steinmetz is the editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint at Véhicule Press. He lives in Ottawa.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Take five plus ten. I step outside for my break. A bag of salt and vinegar chips. I need to ger away. Outside the garage, the ground is littered with cigarettes. A tobacco stew, tar meets tar on a hot humid night in July. Ambulances come and go. Thirty-one degrees and the city has cement breath, heat rises, time-released from the core.

I walk out to the top of University and look down over the city. Buildings jut up from the central basin, aglow, towers clustered like disposable flashcubes. It's been an evening of strange behaviour, beatings, and verbal abuse. A summer fugue. A festival of primal urges. C'est fou. C'est le bordel. A psych patient propositioned me with a steel bar. Then came the arrival of a woman by ambulance, postpartum, post-coherent, her new-born was found by the police tucked away in a dresser drawer.

I have these fifteen minutes to get away, I check my watch, view the city from above. I'm seeking some perspective in a very literal way. A new-born in a dresser drawer. That's no NICU. A dresser drawer, Jesus, son of Mary, stranger things have happened. Resurrections, resuscitations. In the distance on bridges draped over the river, a chain of red lights signals the outbound traffic. Electricity's brocade. I follow their progress, commuters retreating to the suburbs, the South Shore and beyond, into a wilderness of population statistics - of morbidity rates and demographic profiles - my attention lapses, I chck my watch again and by some paralysis of will I cannot read the time.

The clock-face reports back esoteric detail.

I stare, my eyes migrate over the city, from light to light, shining, shining - never assembling sight.

I forget what I'm doing.

I've been gone over twenty minutes. I'm late going back in.

Ready or not, here I come.

About this edition

• Publisher: Véhicule Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1550651218
• ISBN 13: 9781550651218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188