couple of years until pregnancy interrupted our winning streak — women.
There’s only one downside, which is this: when guys go into cardiac arrest.
The first time it happened, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. On the opposite side of the ice from us, Hamish Powell from the Stoney Creek Choppers bounced off the bench where he’d been sitting, mouth agape, exactly like someone from my former church might have done in a moment of holy ecstasy. The spirit could hit you like that if you happened to have the right preacher — say, a preacher like Beth — in front of you, egging it on. One minute you’re letting the words wash over you, weaving back and forth in relative peace, hands in the air, and the next it’s like a holy bolt has entered through your anus.
But that wasn’t what had happened to Hamish, even if that’s what it looked like to me. Wow, I thought. Here of all places. Hamish has seen the light. Hamish has been saved.
I remarked to a guy on the bench beside me: “Hamish —” but didn’t have time to say anything else, because my teammate, an internist at Saint Joseph’s named Wally who had helpfully identified my broken tibia the year before as I lay writhing and gasping on the ice, was now flying across the rink.
As I watched Wally arrive at the other side I still didn’t grasp what was going on. Meanwhile another guy had positioned himself on top of Hamish. They’re fighting, I thought. Hamish has gone nuts! But that was when I realized the other guy was a colleague of Wally’s — an EMT, to be precise. And that’s when I heard Wally yell for a defibrillator.
Did you know sports arenas are legally obliged to keep heart defibrillators on the premises, precisely for occasions such as this? It happens, I was soon to discover, all the time. Old guys like us who spend our weekdays in desk chairs and our weekends on couches and our mealtimes dumping gravy all over everything decide we can just lace up a pair of skates one fine winter’s day and hit the ice like we were seventeen again. It’s a bit sobering, Adam. It’s sobering to be sitting in what you realize is a kind of temple devoted to the worship of youthful, masculine vigour and watch a guy get taken down so decisively, as if in reproach. Like a too-big kid getting his hand slapped reaching for cookies. You’ve had enough, decrees the fucker-in-the-sky.
Hamish was okay, but I would never meet him on the ice again. I found this out from Wally a few weeks later after a game. Usually I liked talking to Wally, because he often shared gross details from his medical career. He once told me he’d learned to do stitches in med school by practising on the flesh of dead pigs. I couldn’t get the image out of my head — a bunch of guys sitting in a room sewing pigs.
Still. I wasn’t all that keen to learn the details of what happened to Hamish. Wally was keen to give them, however. Wally loved talking about his work, and he was, he said now, perpetually fascinated by the workings of the human heart. We men, he told me, we walk around with no idea how fragile our hearts might be.
We were standing in my kitchen, Wally watching me slather sauce onto spare ribs in preparation for a post-game barbecue, one of my all-time favourite rituals of defiance against the winter months. I have been known to barbecue while wearing ski-goggles, to protect my eyes against ice pellets ripping at my face in gale-force winds.
I replied something like Yeah yeah yeah as I slathered, just letting Wally ramble about ventricles for a while. I was happy Hamish was still with us, but the image of him popping up from the bench like a jack-in-the-box with his mouth in an agonized gape hadn’t left me.
Then, from out of nowhere (or at least that’s how it seemed to me, considering I’d been working so hard at not paying attention), Wally started talking about the tasering deaths in the news. Do you remember that scandal, Adam? The cops got a bit zap-happy with their new, supposedly non-lethal toy and a handful of people getting zapped promptly disproved the whole non-lethal thing. Whoa, remarked the cops as multiple zap-ees dropped like stones. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Cue public outrage.