Annus horribilus

Charles “Chuck” Ingvaldson
The burglar alarm of the Kitsilano drug store was routinely tripped in those days. There had been a lot of break-ins in 1994, and it wasn’t unusual for the alarm company to phone the Ingvaldsons in the middle of the night.

What was unusual was the day itself. Charles and Marnie Ingvaldson had bought a property that day in the upscale Morgan Creek area of South Surrey. “Just a hayfield” at the time, says Charles, but that’s where they planned to build their dream home. “Our lives were blessed,” says Charles. They had two children and a prosperous business, and had travelled the world – Europe, Israel, Turkey, Australia, Fiji, the Far East.

Charles Ingvaldson, now 72, was a pharmacist, a drug-store pioneer who worked with Cunningham Drug Stores before joining the legendary Sam Bass. Ingvaldson helped Bass open the first London Drugs in New Westminster and was the first manager of London Drugs on Broadway, the chain’s busiest store, processing some 2,000 prescriptions a day. Working with Bass, Ingvaldson says, “I learned more in two years than the rest of my life.”

As an innovator, Ingvaldson himself was no slouch. When he bought the Kitsilano Shoppers Drug Mart on Fourth Avenue and Vine Street, he eschewed the pharmacy counter, spoke at seniors’ centres and personally delivered prescriptions. Ingvaldson remembers, “Most of the owners said, ‘You’re crazy. You have to pay people a fortune to fill your prescriptions. Why don’t you do it yourself?’ I said, ‘No, no. I have to talk to the people, the customers. They’re the ones who bring in the business.’” Business skyrocketed. His was the first store to attract Lancôme to the cosmetic counter, and one of the first to install a post office. When the bank wanted a cash machine in his store, he said, “No, it’s going to take up too much selling space,” and convinced them to install it on the street outside, where transaction volumes became so heavy his store was the only one in the chain to get a bonus. On a per-square-foot basis, Ingvaldson says, his store had the highest sales of any Shoppers Drug Mart in Canada.

But what was not routine about that 2 a.m. phone call from the security company, says Marnie Ingvaldson, was that Charles always kissed her goodbye when he had to leave their Burnaby apartment to attend to the alarm. On this

At the store, Ingvaldson had a good look around, found nothing amiss and phoned the alarm company to tell them he was leaving. He locked up, reset the alarm and got into his Honda. He drove along Fourth Avenue, caught the green light at Burrard Street and headed for home. That’s the last thing Ingvaldson remembered before he regained consciousness in Vancouver General Hospital (VGH).

What he didn’t remember was the Ford F-350 truck – packed with three men and a woman who were all drinking – racing a van, blowing through the red light and plowing through his Honda at 100 kilometres an hour.

In one moment, from “a life that was blessed,” Ingvaldson was trapped inside a body irreparably broken. His skull was fractured, his neck snapped in four places. He could not move. He would not walk again, the attending doctor told him.

Yet Ingvaldson believed it could not be true because Jesus would not want it so. It was not the voice of the Divine that Ingvaldson heard. It was his own voice, his faith speaking to him. With his wife, Ingvaldson had long been born-again as Pentecostal, a member of the Christian Life Assembly. Church-going alone, of course, would not be enough to evoke miracles, but Ingvaldson is nothing if not a true believer.

Not to say that he did not face depression. Like any of us would, he broke down. He asked, “Why me?” He saw himself like Job: tested by God. But that inner voice was insistent: “I can get through this, but I can’t do it myself.” However strong his will – and Ingvaldson’s will is iron – he knew there was something stronger to rely upon: his faith. And ephemeral as that idea is to some, to Ingvaldson it is as real as gravity. It would ground his recovery.

At 3:15 a.m., the phone rang again at Marnie Ingvaldson’s bedside. It was Charles. He managed to say, “Don’t worry. I’m okay.” Marnie dressed and rushed to VGH to find her husband in Emergency, strapped to a gurney, his head supported by sandbags. The doctor tried to prepare her; it was unlikely her husband would walk again.

When the doctor gave Charles the news, Ingvaldson, in his drugged state, stammered, “No, I will walk.” The doctor answered, “I’m afraid you can’t be sure of that.” Ingvaldson instinctively blurted, “I am sure. I have a deep faith in Christ, Lord Jesus.”

On the second day, Ingvaldson began to move his fingers and toes. “Then I could move my legs a little bit,” he says, “and it felt pretty good.” He was in hospital six days while Marnie was taught how to adjust the cervical neck brace and take care of her husband. He spent the next seven months in a rented hospital bed in their home, on his back, unable to move, with a towel folded in half behind his head – the only pillow he was allowed.

When he started moving his legs, the specialist told him to try to sit up and be as mobile as he could, just as long as his neck was rigidly clamped. He would get his feet over the bed, swing his legs and finally learn to stand. “Next thing you know,” he says, “I could toddle off to the kitchen.” Every step was an adventure. “The hardest thing when you’re straight as a board is that you can’t see your feet. When you come to steps, you can’t put your head down to see where the steps are. You kind of feel where the step is with the toe of your slipper. You take one step at a time very carefully. A doddering old man, that’s how I was.”

He walked with a cane and he was given exercises, but his physiotherapist was so concerned about his fragility she wouldn’t let him do them. He joined the Canadian Back Institute, which runs exercise clinics, where he spent four hours a day doing “the hardest work I ever did,” he says. His neck loosened sufficiently for him to take off his brace, place one hand on his chin, the other on his head, pull and turn as hard as he could.

“You have to judge how hard,” he says. “The rule is when you can’t stand the pain anymore, count to 12. Then do 10 more on both sides.” Throughout these strenuous rehabilitation exercises, tears of pain ran down his face.

Some might argue it was character and determination that moved Ingvaldson through his darkest trial. Ingvaldson credits Christ.

“I prayed a lot, an awful lot,” he says. “I would pray in the morning before I went out for exercises. I prayed through the exercises. Prayer sustained me. Without Him I don’t think I could ever have made it.”

It was more than four years before Ingvaldson could give up the cane and nine years before he could walk safely again. Incredibly, during the first four years of his convalescence, he ran his drug-store business from his bedside. “It gave my mind something to focus on, and I was blessed to have such a good core staff.”

After Shoppers Drug Mart bought back his store in 1998, he needed something to do. When his sister-in-law died, he discovered his brother paid $12,000 for the funeral. The next funeral in the family Ingvaldson arranged himself – organizing a band, a church lunch and a cremation for about $2,000 – a memorial service that the family told him they preferred over the $12,000 model.

Ingvaldson decided that was something he could do. He joined the board of the Memorial Society of B.C. and helped renegotiate the society’s recent contract with funeral providers. The contract limits the price of services, cremations and caskets.

“This is one way I have of paying it back,” says Ingvaldson, “trying to help people when they’re most vulnerable.”