We spent the better part of this week in Toronto — an impromptu trip after receiving a call with some concerning medical news on Sunday night. So, for the first half of the week we’ve explored the inner workings of the Toronto hospital system. As someone who more or less grew up inside hospitals, I’ve made some observations:

• Whoever is running the parking system is making a killing. We spent as much on parking as we did on food for two.
• The profits from parking aren’t being spent on hospital IT, because I’m pretty you’d have to try pretty hard to make a system that failed in its communications that badly.
• The need for patient advocates is just as great, if not more so, here. I’m undecided if that’s because it’s a large city with a supposedly interconnected system or public health in general.

Out of respect for his privacy, I’m not going to go into too many details publicly. T- is ill (fuck cancer, so say we all). We took him for an outpatient biopsy Tuesday and suffered from a rare complication that landed him in the hospital overnight. That postponed a diagnostic test for an equally serious but unrelated condition scheduled for Thursday. Not the news that T- wanted to hear, but his doctors — and there are many — are working hard to get him healthy again.

I was thinking of heading to Toronto next weekend for Ad Astra. The last convention I went to was World Fantasy in 2010 and I’d like to start meeting some local-ish writer folk. The doctors rescheduled T-’s next test for the day after Ad Astra so that cleared me for con activity without guilt.