Covid is the new normal that will forever define our society

I just came from outside, where I swallowed down the bleak last dregs of October. Miserable rain, as hard as stone, splattered against my umbrella. Grey clouds hung over the sky like fat bellies protruding over belt buckles. It was tiring to be outside, and now it's despairing to be inside. It's a day you need a dog and a comfortable chair around a warm fire in an early twentieth-century pub where you are surrounded by familiar voices of good cheer.

I wanted to finish up this afternoon an essay about how our normal is changing again like another incarnation of Doctor Who. But I can't be arsed because physically I am burnt down to the quick. My body sometimes, well to be honest, most times, won't work as it did before my cancer surgery. To save a life, many times, you must change a life.

Today, instead of a new essay, I am providing you with a selection from my book about the first year of COVID-19, when I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. 2020 was a lonely, devastating time, for me. But although physically alone then millions were enduring similar if not worse miseries than me.

During the first weeks after my rectal cancer operation, I was disoriented by pain and spent most afternoons lying on my bed resting from a sleepless night. I didn’t even lock my front door because I was afraid, I would need a paramedic and be too ill to let them in to treat me. My sleep cycle lasted no more than forty-five minutes. I was in too much agony for unconsciousness, as my intestinal organs sought to establish normalcy in their truncated version, whilst my nerve endings cut during surgery struggled to reconnect and regrow.

Looking back, I am amazed I survived those first days and weeks without being rushed to the hospital. I was completely alone, and no one could come to visit or check up on me because Ontario, like much of the world, was in mortal combat with COVID 19. The staples that held my abdomen together turned my skin raw because I am allergic to nickel. Something, I impressed upon my surgical team, before I went under the knife, but I was told not to worry.

Instead of using the morphine prescribed to me, I drove out the agony by repeatedly listening to new wave dance music from my youth while sitting in a shallow bath of intensely warm water. I’d slip on a pair of headsets and blast New Order, The Art of Noise, and the Talking Heads into my consciousness, pretending I was dancing in the clubs from my long-ago days at university until the discomfort subsided.

When I rested in the scalding water, my urine that hadn’t been released for hours, from my stunned bladder, would shoot out with the force of water flowing through a statue of the mannequin piss. For weeks, I lived in an interior world unequally divided into moments of pain, unconsciousness, pissing and violent shitting.

When I began to have the strength to walk the halls, I trembled if I heard a door opening because I was afraid of being in contact with someone potentially infected with Covid. I pushed myself on to wander the halls because when you were discharged from the hospital in early 2018, I forced you to  walk the halls to build up your strength. I imagined you at the end of my desired walk, encouraging me on.

There were no doctors or nurses in Belleville willing to take my staples out because I was told the risk of Covid was too extreme. So, eighteen days after my arrival home, a neighbour drove me to our family physician in Cobourg to remove them. Before I left, I swallowed Imodium to hold my bowels in check, and sheathed myself underneath my jeans in an adult diaper leftover from when you were alive. I was mortified at the thought that I might return my neighbour’s kindness by leaving a shit stain in the backseat of his new car.

When I arrived at the doctor’s office, it was deserted. Chairs were piled up by the receptionist’s window, like barricades at the 1871 Paris commune. A community nurse removed the staples because the doctors at the clinic now worked remotely from home to diagnose a patient’s illness from a phone call or photograph of an injury. The nurse remarked my skin looked flayed.

“A bullwhip could have done this to you or an infection, but I think it was the staples. You must be allergic to nickel plated metal.”

 When the nurse removed the last of the fifty staples that after surgery held the lower part of my stomach together, she said, “Oh my.”

Near my groin, the wound hadn’t sealed properly. There remained a small hole stuffed with surgical glue.

“I’ve seen better caulking jobs, around a bathtub,” said the nurse.

For the first three months, the section of my wound that hadn’t healed over oozed like a stigmata. This unhealed, poorly sealed area of open skin wept so badly that any clothing whether underpants, sweatpants or a shirt were quickly soaked in the moisture excreting from it. I needed wound care. I needed a nurse to inspect and ensure I wasn’t developing an infection from poor maintenance. But I was denied this basic right of healthcare because the provincial service that despatched nurses to housebound patients considered it too risky for a health practitioner to attend to me.

Fortunately, I hadn’t binned the bandage supplies leftover from when my dad’s heart began to fail, and his legs wept from oedema. From January 2018 until his death that November, I changed and rehanged the dressings on his legs that were covered in open sores that let fluid drip out of you like an old roof lets in rain.

I gave up wearing pants because my wound was so messy that whenever I was clothed, they were soaking wet from the discharge. For weeks, I walked around my apartment nude with the blinds open because the vista outside was barren of human beings.

Each morning, I cleaned my wounds, attempted to eat, and in between bowel movements that had the intensity of dysentery, I applied prescribed haemorrhoid cream as if it were butter in a Julia Child recipe.

I didn’t have the strength to read or watch television. All I could do was wait out my discomfort and my pain and hope that some semblance of normal would return to me. But it didn’t return to me or the world we live in.

It's a big ask, I know, but I need your help and I need it urgently. I got sick with a mild infection last month. Even being slightly ill put me financially behind and my rent is due next week. I know how bad it was recovering from cancer during covid but then I had some savings. If I get another major illness, I will sink like a stone.

So, if you can subscribe to a paid membership, thank you. I appreciate the loyalty of each subscriber. You have allowed me to build a community.

Next month, my early pension begins. It is not much,. I couldn't live off it but it adds to the base that keeps me housed.

Right now, at around 1100 subscribers, with 10% as paid, I need to increase my subscription base to 3k or double my paid subscriber base for an income of $14k (Canadian).

So, if you can please subscribe. It is appreciated by me and it ensures the work of Harry's Last Stand has a working beachhead.

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash