The joy of general assignment lost on next generation
Journal: The Sick Days, Part 19
The Death Knock is among one of the most unpleasant tasks in any newsroom, but the uncomfortable face-to-face with a grief-stricken relative has now been replaced by social media trolling and scalping Tweets
By Shelley Page
It’s called a “pick up” or a “death knock,” and it’s among the most unpleasant tasks a general assignment reporter on the city desk can draw.
The most experienced of our breed can get a grieving mother to unchain her door, make a pot of tea, and unspool woeful stories of her lost love, usually urged on by an invitation to “set the record straight” about son Jimmy the Bank Robber or make sure Little Emily the Heroin Addict isn’t misremembered. The most tenacious of us leave the widow’s home with an entire photo album under our arm so there are no pictures left for media outlets late to the tea party.
This is another one of those tasks that journalism school can’t prepare you for.
So many years ago, ...
Dating, illness and the survival instinct
The Sick Days: Part 17
I relished the feeling of safety... Perhaps that wasn’t enough to build a relationship on, but I was enveloped in the narcissism of illness and fearful another flare would strike at any time.
By Shelley Page
He’d cared for me before diagnosis, pulling me out of snow banks when I fell. Later, he rode the prednisone rollercoaster with me, as my spirits sunk then soared and I dealt with a swollen face and ripped skin, immunosuppression and insomnia.
During the three years we’d worked in different cities, we saw each other every few months and vacationed together. He’d take my woeful phone calls, reminding me, “You can do it.”
When he was posted to Toronto, we decided to move in together, without much thought.
In marriages involving chronic illness, divorce rates are said to be more than 75 per cent. A study I found in the Journal of Oncology reported that spouses are actually lonelier than their ill partners and have lower levels of ...
Reporting behind bars
The Sick Days: Part 16
Journalism 201: Remember to bring your prednisone to prison
By Shelley Page
“Don’t forget to take their picture.”
As I’d find out, not the best advice for a reporter sent to sneak into a third-world prison.
I was heading to Trinidad to interview two imprisoned teenage drug mules who had attempted to smuggle three suitcases of marijuana back to Canada. Both 17, they’d been sentenced to eight years in an adult prison, filled with murderers on death row.
The Star wanted the boys’ story.
It hadn’t started out as my story. A new hire, a summer student heading to Columbia University’s journalism school in the fall, had been following the case and already called the prison warden asking to interview the boys. Although she had a hunger for foreign assignments and a passport filled with stamps, she was too green to go.
Instead, I was assigned to show up at the prison, say I was a cousin, get their story and a photo: proof of life for ...
Playing with the boys
The Sick Days: Part 13
How one young reporter ended up shouting at the Queen Mother from the sidelines of a horse race while dodging the pig sty theatrics of One Yonge
By Shelley Page
When I joined the Star’s downtown general assignment pool, all the reporters’ desks had been shoved into rows as they renovated the newsroom.
It reminded me of a Grade 8 class at an all-boys school.
Loud-talking guys in wrinkled dress shirts, loosened ties, sitting jowl-to-cheek, ego-to-ego, as they pounded out their stories on 1970s computers, in late stages of decay.
I was seated, temporarily, beside a bulldog of two-way man (meaning he both wrote and took photographs), who immediately showed me the collection of girlie photos he’d amassed on the job. He’d somehow convinced numerous women to pose for photos with their shirts off, and kept a file in his desk, mixed in with pictures of his children (clothed).
He showed me this collection, I guess, to see how I’d react.
...
The Sick Days: Part 12
The mantra, the mental spellcheck and a call to the show
The suburban beat suddenly gets grisly when a serial rapist starts stalking Scarborough, leaving a young reporter haunted by a narrative loop of horror that demands spiritual healing, while her body slowly tapers off high doses of prednisone
By Shelley Page
A suburban monster, he overpowered her from behind, dragging her into the backyard of her parents’ Scarborough home. There, he strangled her with an electrical cord, while viciously raping her for almost an hour.
He left her tied to a fence with her own belt like a dog.
The details in the press release were spare, stark. The victim was 19. I wasn’t much older.
I quickly typed up the brief and filed it to the senior cop reporter based at One Yonge, Toronto Star headquarters.
Reporters are observers. That is our blessing and our curse. We know we can’t help, but we’re uncertain what or how to feel, as though it were a professional liability.
Repo...
The Sick Days Part 5
Prednisone 101: What the doctors didn't tell me
15 prednisone-fuelled moments from journalism school
By Shelley Page
1. I’d only been back in Ottawa a few days and my face was like a pregnant woman’s belly. People couldn’t keep their hands away.
Walking with a purposeful bounce across the Bank Street bridge, I waved at an approaching classmate. She looked at me oddly and didn’t wave back. By the time we were face-to-face, she leaned in, squinted, and then gently poked my face with her finger.
“Shelley? What’s the matter with your face?” she squealed. “Are you sick? Did you have your wisdom teeth out?”
I imagined my neo-cherubic cheeks popping, squirting prednisone juice all over her.
Others simply didn’t recognize me. While sitting in a campus pub, I noticed my former roommate Jen waiting tables. I prepared to launch into my brief explanation that I was on a medication called prednisone and it caused Fat Face. But she served me hot chocolate and ...
The Sick Days – Part 4
Getting the scoop of my life
The rheumatologist increases the dose of prednisone to 80 mg, enough to medicate an asthmatic elephant, but fails to mention the life-expectancy side of a lupus diagnosis
By Shelley Page
This is how the cover-up began.
I showed up for my summer newspaper internship, signed some papers, found a desk, took an assignment, only cried in the bathroom.
And after writing 1,000 words for a sidebar on a school board matter that should have been just 400—the Province is a tabloid–I slipped out to await my mother, driving up Granville Street in her Ford Pinto.
That first week, and many after, my mom spent three hours each day as a chauffeur driving to and from the Province. She deserved a medal for driving; me, for acting.
I didn’t tell anybody, editor or the veteran journalists sitting on either side of me, that I’d just been tentatively diagnosed with a serious autoimmune disease.
Operating instructions, please
The truth is, I had ...
The Sick Days: Part 3
Who's afraid of the wolf?
An aspiring reporter gets her first shot at daily journalism, along with a diagnosis that demands a daily dose of prednisone
By Shelley Page
If home is where the heart is, what about the hurt?
Would it follow me there, too?
Upon my return from university, I sat in my straight jacket of pain watching my parents take action.
My dad pulled out the plaid sofa bed in the basement so I could sleep upright by leaning on the back of the couch. He moved the TV close, pushed the shuffleboard out of the way.
My mom brought me warm towels to pack around my chest. When that didn’t ease the hurt, she wrapped her arms around me, trying to minimize the ripping pain that came with each breath.
They’d booked me an appointment for the following day with our family doctor, but I was without hope. After five doctors and 18 months, I already viewed the medical profession with doubt and disappointment.
But as I unspooled my story to our GP, he didn’t ...
