Patrick Conlon is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster.

In recent years, he has been a radio host (CFRB Toronto) and he has written features and columns for Toronto Life, Macleans and Report on Business magazines, as well as features and columns for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. From 1990 to 2000, he was host of CBC Newsworld’s On the Line, a popular twice-weekly live program that explored the controversial issues of the day with guests and callers.

He is also the author of Sanctuary: Stories from Casey House Hospice (Prentice-Hall, 1991), a critically-acclaimed look at North America’s first free-standing hospice for people with AIDS.

As well as finishing No Need to Trouble the Heart, he is currently leading a successful public campaign to revise Ontario’s traditional hospital patient-care model, advancing a groundbreaking initiative that has the support of the province’s minister of health and a significant number of prominent health care professionals.

Forthcoming:

The Essential Hospital Handbook
What You Need to Know about Caring for Someone You Love
Yale University Press

Published:

No Need to Trouble the Heart
Raincoast, 2006

Synopsis:

No Need to Trouble the Heart

Patrick Conlon assumed his long-time partner, Jim O’Neill, was just battling a bad dose of the flu that late December morning. Some difficulty breathing and some residual weakness, yes, but no apparent cause for alarm. Thirty minutes later, he was on his way by ambulance to a local hospital emergency ward. He was then in severe respiratory failure and was swiftly transferred to intensive care. Even with full oxygen assistance, he was fighting to breathe and his organs were starting to fail. He was sliding into unconsciousness.

Intensive-care doctors were initially puzzled by the swift and devastating impact of this illness on an otherwise-healthy patient. But they had only one prognosis, and it was not guarded or conditional: O’Neill was going to die. To their surprise, he didn’t.

No Need to Trouble the Heart is Conlon’s very candid and intimate account of the crisis, and it recounts those first ten weeks of recovery with jolting honesty. A veteran journalist, from the beginning he kept notes as a way of coping with his own panic and confusion. There were complicated tests and procedures that required formal consent and as O’Neill’s official next-of-kin he had to understand quickly what was happening – and why – every step of the way.

Because he was at O’Neill’s bedside daily, he became a familiar hospital fixture. As a result, he built trusting relationships among the dozens of nurses and doctors responsible for O’Neill, ultimately becoming an active member of the care team and even participating in routine bedside nursing protocols. “ We figured you weren’t going away,” one head nurse told him after O’Neill’s discharge from hospital, “ so we decided to put you to work.”

The book opens a unique window on the foibles and patterns of day-to-day hospital life, and Conlon’s unusually-active bedside role may even be seen as a harbinger of things to come. But No Need to Trouble the Heart is more than a narrative of medical acrobatics and negotiated care.

It takes the reader deep behind the rancorous public debate about same-sex relationships and into a personal orbit where labels and stereotypes are irrelevant. It is about two life partners who journey back together from the edge of death. As it happens, they are gay. They have lived together for 30 years and they are deeply committed to each other. Against the landscape of this health crisis and all its churning unknowns, they challenge the reader to realize that human universals like love, courage, grief and hope speak a common language that crosses all borders. Their relationship endured calamity and emerged stronger than before. And in the end, their experience proves that the willing heart needs no road map to the other side of fear.

Ten weeks after admission, Jim left his recovery room for the first time, this ride in a wheelchair instead of on a gurney. On the way back from expectations that he would die, he had endured a series of rapid-advance infections, a heart attack, kidney failure and a suspected stroke. But that day, the day of his first wheelchair excursion, he sat by a hospital corridor window and looked out at a world that was finally starting to return to him. It would be weeks longer before he could actually walk to that same window and then leave the hospital. But he had already taken a giant step toward home.