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Asking for a friend
Yep, by the time this hits the news boxes it’ll be September 2nd. I don’t know if I’m sad to see the end of summer or happy to say goodbye to the chaos that June, July and August have been this year in the County. I may be experiencing a little bit of both the happy and the sad. I’ve often used the phrase “mixed emotions”, but never really experienced it like this. LOML and I had some big plans for the summer of 2020. With my radiation treatments completed at the end of 2019 and my walking mobility-stability bouncing back, we decided this would be the year to get some serious camping, cycling and hiking done. Oh yeah, we had great plans for the 2020 outof- doors season. In hindsight, maybe we should have known it wasn’t going to be a year like any other, not that 2019 was what we could have called “ordinary”. Our first hint of the weirdness to come was during a trip to Kingston General Hospital in January. We were asked a dozen questions about the current state of our health, when we arrived. Temperatures were taken, sniffles, coughs and congestion were assessed. Any travel we’d undertaken was scrutinized at several points while we made our way to Endocrinology where the whole process was repeated. Our naive assumption was “whatever type of flu the medical professionals seemed to be concerned about must be a doozy”. Little did we know.
In February we jumped through the health and travel hoops, once again, at Kingston General, both of us extremely pleased we’d had our flu shots in the Fall. Not once, in February, did we think all of this could be more than worry about spreading influenza. And then the story of the pandemic hit the news. Follow- ups to radiation appointments at Sunnybrook Hospital became much more complicated in April and May. If we arrived too early we sat in the cold, in the hospital parking lot, in the car waiting for my appointment to be called. While we waited, LOML and I sipped our 401 coffees and chattered about all of this blowing over in a month, or so. My June appointment with a Neuroopthamologist, at Sunnybrook was done by phone—not Skype or Zoom—plain old telephone. Through all of the early lockdown, we continued to make plans to sharpen the hatchet, find the Coleman lanterns and check the airbed for leaks. We were hellbent on a camping trip. Of course, and most obviously, the pandemic didn’t care about our summer plans—and it certainly didn’t disappear as politicians had planned. We eventually folded the tent on a possibility of a camping trip, said goodbye to sleeping under-thestars, or cycling on the paths of the Waterfront Trail and hiking through the back country. We were going to stay-cation, by ourselves, like the rest of the world. We even talked about backyard camping, but as July turned into an inferno, we felt we’d sleep better cuddling up to the borrowed portable airconditioner. Most of our outdoor adventures became morning runs for LOML, Trail walking for me and bicycling on the Millennium Trail. We learned to relax on the side porch with our morning coffee and occasionally ate a meal on the patio if the heat didn’t drive us indoors.
And here we are. September is scattering leaves across the yard and along the Trail. LOML and I have watched late Winter turn into Spring which became Summer and now Autumn awaits, just around the corner. It’s been months since we thought we’d only be on lockdown for “just a few weeks”. Like millions of others, we anxiously watched newscasts of how the numbers of those infected had soared. We cheered when the curve flattened and poured a glass of wine when cases soared again. We’ve embraced our circle/bubble of people, mostly our kids and their kids and occasionally ventured out beyond the produce aisle, usually to the hardware store or the farm stand. We’ve learned to pat ourselves down for “keys, wallets and face masks” before we head out to a grocery adventure. Ah, the grocery store! It’s just about the only big outing we have during the week. LOML and I don’t even mind waiting in line and are almost used to following the little directional feet and arrows. It’s part of our new normal.
Does anyone really know what normal is, anymore? Asking for a friend.
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