If we are truly going to be heard, and if the role our dysfunctional mental health care system played in the death of our son is to be accepted as truth, then we need to paint as factual a picture of Jordan’s journey as we can. How many days did he spend in hospital. How many interactions did he have with the police. How many  minutes of talk therapy did he receive over four years.

In order to paint that picture, we needed to gather all the disparate pieces of his health care record together. Achieving this proved nearly as difficult as navigating through the system in the first place. Different agencies, governed by different legislation, ruled by different policies and requiring different forms. I spent hours searching websites for contact information and making calls – each time having to describe our loss and explain our purpose.

Jab jab jab goes that sharp knife.

As of today, we finally have his full record; approximately 6 inches of paper when stacked on top of each other. Surprisingly small in comparison to the four years of pain it represents.

The largest pile represents his hospital stays. While his brother was a frequent flyer of the EENT service at St Paul’s hospital, Jordan’s interactions were usually trauma related and his files were primarily from RUH. Although the Evan Hardy canoe trip in Grade 11 had us visiting City Hospital for investigation of the ankle injury he sustained while jumping off a cliff into the river.

And then of course, there was his birth.

In 1989 I  was working as a registered nurse at the old City Hospital and I naively thought “wouldn’t it be nice to have my baby at the hospital where I work”. In the middle of August. With no air conditioning. And no anesthetists on call and therefore no hope of an epidural. Jordan stubbornly resisted his arrival to the world – my first taste of his negative first reaction to anything I ever asked him to do. It took 36 hours, forceps, vacuum suction and me inhaling an entire canister of laughing gas before he finally unhooked his feet from my rib cage and decided to arrive.

While I really had no desire to see that experience documented in the notes of the brave nurses who cared for me (“patient has now been screaming for 60 minutes”, “patient has slapped husband in the face with wet wash cloth again”), I was absolutely unprepared to turn over the emergency record detailing his ankle injury and find this:

The  irony of his birth records being destroyed the day after his death took my breath away.  I am still searching for the meaning in that.

Obtaining  his records was the easy part  – reading them will take more courage than I have at the moment.