So Who’s This TorontoEmerg Anyway?

A little about myself (if you know me from my blog, you can safely skip this paragraph): I’m a slightly cynical Emergency Department charge nurse who has  seen everything from the sublime to the tragic to the tragically ridiculous working in a hospital somewhere in the GTA, i.e. anywhere in the space from Barrie, to Guelph, Hamilton and Oshawa. If you live in the Toronto area I may have treated you. I’m the one with the harried look in the green scrubs and you’ll notice the sharp tongue. Stop and say hello: my bark is worse than my bite.

My principal cyberhome is a moderately prosperous blog called Those Emergency Blues, where I write about practically everything. I’m married, garden avidly, and have a cat. My first political memory, curiously, is the October Crisis in 1970. Being mouthy goes back a long way. I was strapped in school. (A hair across the palm broke the skin and caused bleeding, after which the strapping was supposed to stop.) I wrote to Joe Clark a letter of complaint in 1979 and received a personal, sorrowful, handwritten reply. I was mature enough to be deeply distraught by the election of Reagan in 1980, and even more appalled when Mulroney was elected in 1984. And don’t even talk to me about Harris. Everything, I think, has gone pear-shaped since.

I asked CK for the opportunity to write here for a two related reasons, one idealistic and one, sadly, purely selfish. The pollyanna reason was that as I’ve been writing on my own blog, it was getting harder to not to write about the politics, to divorce my role as a nurse advocating in public spaces from the political sphere. The gun registry debate really brought this problem into focus, and there are upcoming elections (for example), both federal and here in Ontario, provincial, which I will have an opinion about.

Which leads me to the selfish reason: my blog has focussed principally on nursing practice, health care, ethics, personal experiences and so on. Some of the topics I write about, such as state-sanctioned torture and the death penalty will have obvious resonance in both here and on my blog, and I anticipate a small amount of cross-posting. But about 80% of my blog’s traffic is from the U.S., and I know my American readers, while being friendly, progressive types, quickly tire of my excursions into darker realms of Canadian politics and Canada-centric issues, and God knows I weary of explaining the Westminster system and the vaguaries and nuances of minority governments. CK has graciously invited me to vent my spleen and unlease the hounds of snark here, and I thank her. I hope I give her no cause to regret it — but who knows?