Super Sunday's Olympic Finale.

Over the course of the past few weeks since the Opening Ceremony at BC Place Stadium, I had witnessed a sense of great Canadian pride and patriotism in the city I have not seen in, well, EVER. People of all ages, stripes, and colours came out to enjoy the numerous festivities offered all over the city. Along with the locals were visitors from other countries enjoying themselves during the Olympic games. The population of downtown Vancouver swelled three-fold, turning this small village of Vancouver into a true metropolitan city. From Livecity Downtown and Livecity Yaletown to the numerous provincial pavilions around False Creek and the international houses scattered around town, people were queuing in line at every venue. It was like having Expo 86 with the Olympic games. Queuing for an hour was not unheard of. In fact, that was considered to be a short wait! The queue for a chance to zip across Robson Square on what was called “The Zip Line” had an estimated wait time of seven hours at one point. Seven hours of wait for thirty-seconds of glory. Unbelievable.

Our entertainment strip along Granville Street was THE place to be to feel loved and be embraced by random people sporting Canada flag capes on their backs and maple leafs painted on faces. Everywhere you looked, there were droves of people waving the flag while singing “Ole ole ole ole!” and “O’ Canada” while giving everyone high fives as they paraded up and down the street.

On the bus and on the SkyTrain during all hours of the day, someone would start singing “O’ Canada” and everyone else on transit would sing along boastfully with glowing hearts, hand over heart.

But this Sunday, more than all the days combined, had the citizens of this glorious nation on edge. Not only was it the day of the closing ceremony of the XXI Winter Olympic Games, but it was also the day of the men’s hockey final with Team Canada against none other than Team USA. Canada’s reputation as a hockey nation was on the line. Could we pull off a repeat performance at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City when both the men’s and women’s hockey team won gold? We were already half-way there.

From Canada’s Northern Pavilion, I walked along the peaceful streets on a warm and sunny afternoon to HBC where I found a small crowd of people huddled around a window display from street level. Upon moving in closer, I found that they were not admiring the mannequins wearing HBC Olympic gear, but rather, the flat-screen televisions airing the men’s hockey game live. The fact that no sound could be heard from the other side of the glass didn’t bother them at all! Anxiety and tension rose up and down as the nail-biting game played on. Thirty seconds left on the leader board and and Canada was in the lead at 2 - 1. Victory was within reach in mere seconds when suddenly the Americans scored a goal on us to tie 2 - 2. The painful cries could be heard nation-wide.

As I kept walking along towards Robson Square, I couldn’t help but to notice the eerie stillness and quiet in the host city. Robson Square with the British Columbia Canada Pavilion housed inside the Vancouver Art Gallery is usually full of life with Olympic mascots ice skating on the new GE sponsored ice rink but the usual crowd of people were no where to be seen. That is, until I continued walking towards CTV at Robson and Burrard to where they had moved the news desk on an elevated platform on street level. A sizeable crowd surrounded the news desk platform glued to the television monitors white knuckled and mouths agape. There were people on the roof of a bus shelter and people in trees. There were people climbing on lamp posts as well for a birds eye view.

As the rules to hockey in the Olympics differ slightly from the rules to the NHL, the game went into a shoot out instead of in overtime. While in the middle of it all, armed with my photo and video recording devices in hand, the moment we were all waiting for happened before our very eyes: Sidney Crosby took a shot and SCORED securing Canada’s reputation as the FIRST and still the BEST nation in hockey. The crowd went wild. What was a quiet sea of nerve-racking spectators quickly turned into a roaring tsunami of cheers in a split second. Hands shot up in the air in concert with the flags and everyone was embracing everyone else in this proud and shining moment of being Canadian. Young guys to the left of me revealed a two-litre bottle of champagne disguised in a pop bottle and started shaking and spraying it all over his friend.

The streets of Vancouver roared with joy and celebration as cars continued to honk and crowds cheered and sang songs long after the game was over. While watching the recap of the days event on the news, I learned that this sensation echoed at the Molson House, in pubs, and on the streets in Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto. A nation unified by a common thread. The thread that forms the fabric of this nation.

With a world-record breaking fourteen gold medals, the most golds won by a single country in the Winter Olympics, along with seven silver medals and five bronze medals totalling twenty-six medals in all and earning Canada in third-pace after USA and Germany in medal count, we have a lot to celebrate to and a lot to be proud of. Forget about our traditionally docile and reserved Canadian mannerisms, this is our time to make some noise and LIVE OUT LOUD!

GO CANADA GO

The Operation.

After spending nearly 7 months from wearing a hanging cast to fitting a humorus brace and checking into VGH for my monthly x-rays to see my bone-regeneration progress (of lack thereof), the time had come for me to go under the knife and fix it for good.

Bones tend to fuse themselves naturally after a fracture over ninety-five percent of the time according to Dr. Guy, however, after months of observation I fell into the latter five percent where it didn’t fuse at all. Instead, calcium started to build up around the two fractured ends forming “an elephant’s leg” overtime. Yes, that was the technical term.

Jay accompanied me at the hospital before going into the OR and took some lovely pictures of me on the stretcher wearing nothing but a flimsy hospital gown that didn’t quite cover all. True to ourselves, we were joking with the RN on duty as she prepped me for surgery. I was injected with a nerve numbing solution known as “the block” and within minutes, my left arm was a deadweight. I couldn’t believe how heavy it really is when I tried lifting it with my right arm!

The operation took four hours if my memory serves me right and it was virtually painless. I was in a semi-conscious state throughout (as I was meant to me) so I heard the conversations that transpired around me as well as the sound of drills cutting, or perhaps more accurately, shaving off “the elephant legs” so that a stainless steel plate can me mounted on a flat surface. I kept drifting in and out of reality and found it hard to distinguish what I had imagined being done to me to what was actually being done. After getting sutured up, I was wheeled out of the OR to the outpatient room waiting to be processed and properly tagged.

I’d opted to spend the night in the ward and was fortunate to have a nurse with a sense of humour who made crude jokes about my Pakistani friend who accompanied me. After asking of his whereabouts and giving a description of him, she told me that she’ll be on a lookout for a terrorist in the waiting room!

Dinner was not so bad as far as hospital food goes. It was more than I can do for myself in the kitchen, that much is true. I was served the following:

1 each        Salt
1 each        Pepper
1 each        Sugar

1 each        Salmon Fillet

60 ml        Dill Sauce
120 ml        Spinach
120 ml        Mashed Potatoes
1 slice        Wheat Bread

120 ml        Vanilla Pudding

1 x                Tea

1 each        Apple Juice
1 each        2% Milk
1 each        Milker
1 each        Margarine

In the evening, two young adults who couldn’t have been any older than twenty made their rounds around the ward pushing a cart of magazines offering outpatients with periodicals. The young girl and boy who were probably volunteers were friendly and courteous and quickly had my respect for what they were doing.

The post-op pain was felt gradually as the block wore off. Morphine was given to me throughout the night in both pill form and injection to ease my discomfort by round-the-clock nurses. With every passing hour, I was able to extend my arm to a greater degree which made me happy.

When I was briefed about spending the night in a ward with five others, I had imagined something like a dorm at a cheap youth hostel or a homeless shelter with beds pushed together to maximise space. In reality, my experience was nothing like I had imagined. In my room with a south facing window, I shared with just one other who turned out to be an older Chinese gentleman, separated by a curtain. He kept to himself and was quiet through the night.

At sun-break, I was served the following for breakfast:

1 each        Grape Jelly
1 each        Brown Sugar
1 each        Salt
1 each        Pepper
1 each        Sugar

180 ml        Cream of Wheat

60 ml        Scrambled Eggs
2 slice        Bacon

1 slice        Wheat Toast + Marg

120 ml        Cantaloupe Cubes

1 x                Coffee

1 each        Apple Juice
1 each        2% Milk
1 x                Cold Water
1 each        Milker

I couldn’t have made breakfast any better myself.

Soon after eating, a nurse by the name of Brian came to check on my vitals and asked me how I was feeling. He too was funny and chipper. All things were looking good and I was ready to go. Jay came by again in the morning and fetched me in a Zip-car. Before I got discharged, I was given one last morphine injection. And that was that.

A stainless-steel place with six screws in me later, no nightmarish hospital stories to tell. On the contrary, I felt well looked after by the competent doctors who operated on me to the humourous nurses on duty, and to the courteous volunteers with the cart of magazines. And as a Canadian, I was covered by national healthcare with no hospital fees to pay.

Last but not least, thanks, Jay, for being a good friend. You went above and beyond.

CODE: Vectorial Elevation.

As a continuation from the night before, I found myself with Timm and Kemila strolling along English Bay in the wee hours of the morning. We went down to the beach to see the Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition (CODE) installation called Vectorial Elevation, a series of twenty robotic searchlights in which people from all over the globe with an internet connection can control to make intricate patterns in the sky. This was amazingly beautiful to see up close, right in our own backyard and it complimented quite nicely with Vancouver’s skyline.

More information about this project can be found here: http://www.vectorialvancouver.net/

Later at night, I went down to check out Vancouver’s newly restored and recently opened public ice skating rink at Robson Square. Anyone with a pair of ice skates can come down and skate away and those without skates of their own could rent a pair for only a few bucks. Above the ice rink was the newly installed Zip-Line where one can zip across from one side of Robson Square to the other along a cable line. It wasn’t yet open to the general public, however, but the construction crew seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Granville Street was all abuzz with people enjoying new installations of its own. This pedestrian friendly street was lined with public art and sculpture including a forest of metallic trees with lanterns which created a festive environment in which to walk through, day and night.

This city’s turned even more beautiful with the run up to the Olympics! If only these were here to stay...