Carleton’s Campbell makes memorable return
On Thursday night, when Jim Cuddy and friends took the stage at Halifax’s Carleton music venue, a familiar face planned to be sitting on his usual stool at his habitual spot at the end of the bar.
Mike Campbell’s plan was to arrive early — around 7 p.m. for a sold-out 8:30 performance — just so he could acclimatize himself to the Carleton’s surroundings.
“I have introduced hundreds and hundreds of acts on stage there and I am very comfortable,” he said a few hours before the event. “But this time is different.” Cuddy, singer-songwriter in Blue Rodeo, is a friend of the Carleton and an old amigo of Campell’s.
So, it just seemed right for Campbell to walk through the music venue’s doors again, cane in hand “just in case,” on the night of a Cuddy performance.
It was the proper moment, he felt, to see the staff again and to mingle once more with the venue’s patrons, as he has done since the place opened in 2008.
Campbell has introduced Cuddy there many times. Whether he would do so on Thursday night was “a gameday decision.”
“It is going to be very, very emotional,” Campbell told me. “My worry is that I will get up there and just be immediately reduced to a pile of tears.”
A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT
Just before Christmas, you see, Campbell headed to his 95-year-old dad’s home on St. Joseph Island, on Ontario’s Lake Huron.
By his estimation he had climbed the stairs at his father’s place a thousand times. He thought nothing of climbing them one more time in the wee hours of the morning on Dec. 24 to turn off an upstairs light that someone had left on.
“And for some strange reason, and I don’t know why and of course I don’t have a memory of it,” he said, “I was at the top with my back turned to the stairs and I fell backwards.”
When Campbell came to, wedged between the wall and the bottom stair in the basement, “a 16th of an inch from being dead,” his first thought was that he had “Christopher Reeves-ed myself.”
But he could breathe, unlike the Superman star who suffered a horseback riding accident in 1995.
The bad news: he couldn’t move a finger, just like the late actor who was left paralyzed from the neck down.
Campbell thought he had broken his neck, leaving him a quadriplegic. Not a comforting thought as he lay there in the dark for four hours until his brother heard his calls for help in “a tiny little voice” and dialed 911.
“From then on, everything is a blur,” Campbell said.
THE ORDEAL THAT FOLLOWED
We spoke last week, 81 days after his accident, in his fifth-floor room in the Nova Scotia Rehabilitation and Arthritis Centre in Halifax.
Campbell was sitting at a hospital tray, in front of the ipad he uses to chat with well-wishers, to watch the Toronto Blue Jays in spring training and to do the weekly Zoom calls he depends on to keep up on things at the Carleton, which he owned from 2008-18.
His voice is smaller than the one we know from his years roaming the country as a VJ for the Muchmusic television channel and introducing countless performers at the Carleton, where he is now the programming manager.
But the zip was there, the expletive-peppered conversation buoyant and filled with humour as he described the ordeal that followed after the ambulance showed up at his father’s home: the ride, immobilized on a backboard, to Sault Ste. Marie; the visit to the emergency department there that was supposed to take 20 minutes but ended up lasting more than three days because fog had socked in the aircraft that was supposed to medevac him to Sudbury.
For 72 hours there, on a hospital bed Campbell lay, unable to eat or drink, use a cellphone because his hands did not work, or even sleep.
A WELCOME IMPROVEMENT
Something good did happen during those interminable days.
“After I had been in the ER there for about 12 hours I awoke and realized that I could wiggle my toes, which everyone was pretty excited about.”
An MRI showed that Campbell hadn’t broken anything, although a CT scan confirmed that there was lots of pressure on his spine, making the trip to the
Sudbury hospital, with its neurological unit, critical.
On the fourth day in Sault Ste. Marie, his condition had improved enough that there was no fear that a jolt on a rough northern Ontario road would paralyze him.
It took nine hours and two ambulance rides to get to Sudbury, but once there things moved quickly.
The way he tells it, he was prepared for bad news.
“I’ve lived an astonishingly full life, seen a lot of things and done a lot of things that 99 per cent of the people in this country will never do,” said Campbell.
A BRIGHT OUTCOME
But the three-and-a-halfhour operation confirmed that his spinal column was undamaged. The neurosurgeon inserted horizontal posts between some of Campbell’s vertebrae, before fusing them together.
“Afterwards the surgeon came out and he was like, ‘There couldn’t possibly be a better outcome and you’re a perfect candidate for returning to function,’” said Campbell. “I took him on his word.”
First, he had to get home. His friend, auto mogul Rob Steele, offered to send his Gulfstream, but Campbell, lying horizontal on a hospital bed, wouldn’t have been able to get through its entrance. Instead, an aviation company that specializes in medical transfers flew him to Halifax.
Campbell was in the QEII on Jan. 12, when his 70th birthday party went on without him at the Carleton.
Soon after, he moved to the rehab centre, where the hard work began.
THE ROAD BACK
The recovery has gone well, Campbell told me. When he first arrived, he could not even sit up. Now, he’s doing physio and hitting the gym twice daily. The day before we spoke Campbell had walked 300 metres on his hospital floor without a walker.
His hands, he said” are “f***ed,” too weak to open a bottle of Gatorade, too clumsy for him to efficiently shave by himself.
“But I’m told that they are usually the last to come back,” Campbell said with characteristic cheerfulness.
The support of friends has been critical to his recovery: the well-wishers from afar who called, sent texts and even letters; the pals nearby who showed up in his room with such regularity that he had to make a visitor’s schedule.
Some of them went beyond the call of duty. Anna Zee, the Q-104 radio host who has been looking after Darcy, his Irish Wheaten terrier; Jordi Morgan, the broadcaster and communications consultant who spread the word of his accident to Campbell’s wide circle of friends; Geoff D’eon, the television producer and director who has been shooting Youtube videos chronicling his friend’s progress.
Morgan and D’eon planned to be by his side on Thursday when he made his first post-accident trip outside the hospital.
THE BIG NIGHT
When I called him, the hours to his Carleton return ticking down, Campbell was mulling his wardrobe options. “Probably my usual,” he said, “sneakers, jeans, a hoody because it’s cold out and a good jacket over top.”
Over the phone, his excitement was palpable. “I’ll probably be ready three hours before they pick me up.” Who can blame him? Campbell’s rehab has gone well enough that he is scheduled to go home from the hospital April 20.
Six weeks ago, he decided that he wanted to walk into the Carleton on March 21, just as the Juno Awards celebrations begin in Halifax. Since then, he and his therapists have been working diligently toward that date.
Campbell planned to sit at his usual seat near the entrance and maybe surprise some old friends as they came in.
“I’m not planning to go far,” he said.
If he feels up to it, he could stroll around a bit to work the room and show the world how far he has come.
When the night gets underway, Campbell may or may not find himself on stage introducing his old friend, Cuddy.
“A game-day decision,” as he said before.
One thing’s certain: if he does, there will be tears in that room. And they will not just be his.