Unhappy news of one of our dearest neighbours, a man we've known and been friends with for almost a quarter-century. When we first met it was clear that he wasn't in the best of health. Younger than us, but afflicted with a variety of ills, he also suffers from clinical depression. At the time he had a pre-teen daughter and an infant son. He was off work on sick leave, and shortly afterward he lost his job. After that he took part-time jobs, and his wife soon joined the public service in a good, reliable full-time position. She rose steadily through the ranks of the department she was with over the years, and he took a succession of jobs, eventually leaving each one.

A metalworker by trade, he had once had a good job with a large company and which had extended benefits, but he didn't take well to close supervision and had a bitter argument with a superior, a situation that led to his firing. He has close family living nearby, brothers with their own families and successful businesses, but he declined their offers for employment with them.

His daughter is now married, successful in her profession, and a mother of three very young children; her husband a professional in the medical field, and they want for no material goods. Our neighbours dote on their children just as they do with their grandchildren, and travel to Toronto frequently to 'help out' with the grandchildren. Their only other child, their son, is in between university degrees, and staying at home this summer to help his father cope with a new situation.

No one could ask for a son more concerned with his parents' welfare. He does whatever he can and more to substitute for his father's inability to be physically active, responding to his father's wishes to have things done, as pedestrian as mowing the lawn, to more complex things like tiling a floor in the house. Earlier this year his father had undergone an operation to shave down his enlarged prostate, and his recovery was hampered by a nasty infection that didn't respond well to antibiotics.

Before that, it had been two surgeries on an injured shoulder; two were required because the first one seemed to make his pain and inability to use that arm even worse. The second operation succeeded little better, merely restoring the condition to what it had been before the first operation.

And he now has undergone a coronary angiography. He was fairly suddenly struck with extreme exhaustion, so devoid of energy that it became difficult for him to take his accustomed daily walk about the block. That angiography revealed to the cardiologist looking after him that he had a 90% blockage in the major artery feeding blood to his heart. And he would need an emergency triple-heart bypass.

The surgeon who is to perform the operation at the Ottawa Heart Institute does three such surgeries a week, it seems, to give an idea how commonplace that type of thing is now. But he's on vacation for the time being, and although our friend's forthcoming surgery is considered an emergency, and it's obvious speaking with him, looking at him, that he's hanging on, he's awaiting that call that could arrive any day, to check in to the hospital.