Well, clearly my New Year’s resolution to write at least one post a month was a non-starter! Who knew when I wrote my last post that this was what was in store for 2020? That being said, Coronavirus started taking over my (work) life back in December. By mid-January, we had already started recalling students and from mid-February to late March, the pandemic had me working 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Looking back, I’m still not quite sure how I managed, since I’m often exhausted after a typical 8-hour workday. Pretty sure I’m still paying for it (particularly since work is still surprisingly busy), but you do what you gotta do and adrenaline got me through. And then Covid came to Calgary and here we are!
We’re currently going on week 1,000,000 of working from home and it has been interesting to see how my experience actually differs from so many around me. For one, being immunocompromised, germaphobia was already part of my norm. Now, I’m not the only one looking suspiciously and trying to subtly inch away if someone coughs or sniffles. And I’m positively gleeful at the thought that handshakes might never make a comeback!
What really struck me, though, was that the palpable anxiety that hit so many people – an understandable result of so much uncertainty – seemed to bypass me altogether. We humans are not great with ambiguity. And add to that the inability to control much about this situation, and well, you actually get a small sense of what it’s like to live with metastatic cancer. Not to say that I enjoy uncertainty any more than the next person, and I’m the first to admit that I can be a bit of a control freak! But while many are being confronted with large scale precarity for the first time, this is what I’ve been living every day for the past year.
It was actually just around this time last year that I started to realize there might be something wrong. But I was so busy with work, I kept putting off going to the doctor (although it’s important to note that my procrastination had zero effect on the end result). Anxiety and uncertainty have been my daily companions ever since. So for me, this new situation, as strange as it is, is just more of the same for the most part.
That being said, living alone, the pandemic has made me feel even more isolated at times, and it sucks having to go to appointments and treatment by myself. And when someone I love dearly was very sick with Covid-19, I felt powerless because I couldn’t go out and help. I’m also resentful that this stupid virus is stealing time from however many good years I will have – time that I could (and would much rather) be spending with family and friends, or traveling, or hiking in the mountains, or one of a million other things.
However, this too shall pass and things will return to normal (or some form thereof). And that’s where my experience will differ once again. Because for many, the anxiety, uncertainty and loss of control will eventually be a distant, unpleasant memory. But I will still be living in the space between scans.
C is for Colleen 