Tina’s coronary artery disease

Tina Loewen’s coronary illness enters the story through a sequence of collapses that first seems recoverable and then becomes a medical emergency. At Ste. Odile Hospital, clinicians identify severe blockages in two arteries and prepare her for open-heart surgery. Her family is reassured that the operation should be routine, but she dies after her organs fail. The gap between the expected recovery and the actual outcome makes the illness a turning point in the family’s story of care, uncertainty, and grief.

Onset and Hospital Admission

Tina first faints at Mrs. Ernst Warkentine’s home in East Village. She comes round quickly, lies down for a while, eats something, and appears well enough that the episode does not immediately become a crisis. When she and her family drive to Ste. Odile Hospital to visit Elfrieda, however, Tina passes out again near Deacon’s Corner. This time the fall breaks her arm, and the family takes her directly to the hospital’s emergency department.

The broken arm is treated with a cast, but the more urgent concern is pain in Tina’s chest. She is admitted to acute cardiology on the fifth floor. Her family initially has to absorb two developments at once: Tina had come to the hospital to see Elfrieda, and she herself now needs hospital care. Yoli’s questions to the family establish the abruptness of the change from a visit to an emergency admission.

Diagnosis and the Family’s Response

The hospital staff clarify that Tina has not had a heart attack, but has experienced a coronary event. A nurse shows the family a sketch of Tina’s arteries and explains that two are severely blocked. There is already writing on the cast, including phone numbers and a Bible verse; the cast becomes an everyday surface on which practical information and personal expression gather while the family waits for clearer news.

Tina and Lottie joke together in Plautdietsch and keep their fear largely to themselves. Their laughter does not erase the danger; it shows how the sisters meet it without making every exchange an explicit declaration of alarm. Tina also asks for a Starbucks coffee from downstairs, and the nurse tells her that she cannot have one yet. Yoli promises to return with coffee for Tina and Lottie after visiting Elfrieda. The family celebrates this modest errand with conspicuous enthusiasm, as if an ordinary plan briefly restores a sense of agency.

Yoli also wonders whether remembered pain might have a part in a heart attack, given the family’s history of suicide and the emotional strain surrounding Elfrieda. She sets that possibility beside a physical explanation involving blocked arteries and other bodily risks, without resolving the question. The narrative presents this as a daughter’s attempt to understand an alarming event, not as a medical finding: the hospital’s concrete evidence is the coronary event and the two blocked arteries, while any connection between grief and Tina’s condition remains speculative.

Surgery and Unexpected Death

Tina’s condition worsens after an initial period when she appears stable. When Yoli and Lottie return to the hospital, Tina has been moved to a more intensive setting and is connected to more machines. The writing on her cast has changed into notes about plans she will have to cancel, including book club, tai chi, and a hair appointment. These small commitments make the change in her circumstances legible: she is no longer simply waiting to go home.

The staff say that Tina will need surgery within a day or two to ward off a massive coronary. They prepare her for open-heart surgery and seek an available surgeon. A nurse describes Tina as strong and otherwise healthy and predicts that the operation will be routine, with the prospect that she may be able to drive her van back to Vancouver after a few weeks. The family’s expectations are shaped by this reassurance, even as Yoli and Lottie navigate the long hospital corridors to find Elfrieda.

At first, the operation seems to have gone well. The doctor meets the waiting family, removes his mask, and tells them that he is pleased with how it went. Then Tina’s organs begin to fail one by one. The medical team tries to save her, but cannot, and the family loses her. The reversal is stark: an operation presented as a way to avert a larger crisis is followed by a death the family had not expected. The narrative does not identify a more specific cause of the organ failure, so the outcome remains a devastating clinical turn rather than an explained one.

Loss, Remembrance, and Burial

Tina’s death alters the family’s practical responsibilities immediately. Frank is unable to speak, and the family forgets his insulin shot while trying to make arrangements. Sheila is to take him home with Lottie and handle calls about bringing Tina’s body back to Vancouver. Yoli is tasked with telling Elfrieda and arranging groceries and coffee; Lottie goes to speak with the funeral home about an urn and cremation. The details show grief unfolding alongside the work of care rather than apart from it.

The hospital returns Tina’s belongings in a plastic property bag: fuzzy slippers, a sudoku book, a novel by Kathy Reichs, glasses, toiletries, a purple tracksuit, a camisole, and high-top white Reeboks. The inventory gives the loss an ordinary, domestic scale. These are the things she had with her in the hospital, now separated from their owner and delivered back to her family.

At Tina’s funeral, relatives take turns telling stories in a Mennonite memorial tradition called freiwilligis. Photographs trace different stages of her life, while a wooden urn holds her ashes. During one remembrance, a small child gets into the urn and scatters some of the ashes before his father restores order. The interruption does not stop Tina’s story from being told. In the account of her illness and death, this episode extends the family’s remembrance beyond the hospital: her life is held not only in medical explanations and funeral arrangements, but also in stories shared imperfectly among relatives.

The family’s decisions about burial reflect different wishes and obligations. Lottie suggests burying Tina with Jake in East Village, where a cemetery official says there would be room for three urns. Nic refuses, explaining that Elfrieda had expressly rejected burial in East Village; Tina’s ashes are instead buried beneath a large tree at Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. Tina’s illness thus ends not with a simple return to the family’s former arrangements, but with a death that requires relatives to negotiate where and how the dead will be remembered.

Significance in the Family Narrative

Tina’s coronary illness is a distinct crisis within a family already preoccupied with Elfrieda’s suicidal despair and the question of whether Yoli might take her to Switzerland. Yoli has refused that request, but the simultaneous presence of both sisters in the hospital intensifies the pressures of caregiving: she moves between Elfrieda’s psychiatric crisis and Tina’s cardiac emergency. The two situations are not medically equated; their juxtaposition shows how several forms of fear and responsibility can occupy one family at once.

The illness also exposes the limits of reassurance. Tina is described as strong, her surgery is expected to be routine, and the first report after the operation is positive. None of those signs guarantees recovery. Her death leaves Lottie without her closest surviving sibling and adds another loss to a family already marked by suicide. The narrative’s attention to the cast, the postponed appointments, the bag of belongings, and the urn keeps the coronary crisis grounded in lived consequences: a medical event becomes a change in daily plans, a redistribution of care, and a lasting absence.