March 17, 2020, when normal stopped working.

What we took for normal throughout our lives died in March 2020. As individuals and societies, we've been striving ever since to find it again like it was first love. We have been searching to find our balance ever since and without much luck. What happened four years ago when Covid came was a ground zero that now defines our age the way World War Two defined the generation that endured total war.

I will remember March 17th 2020, until I am dead. It was when the world stopped- and Canada, along with most other countries, went into lockdown. It was also the day, I began, in a city far from my home, radiation treatment for rectal cancer. I honestly didn't know if I was going to make it through cancer during a time of plague. I some how did as did many others. But there were millions wo didn’t.

Below is how I remember it and why it haunts my life- to this day. The Covid pandemic and Cancer, for me, are different sides of the same coin, and no matter which way the toss is made, it always lands on precarious ground. As far as I can see personally, I am not out of the woods from either, despite the time travelled.

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Photo by Harry Shelton on Unsplash

Toronto, like New York, was a city that never slept until the pandemic arrived and put an end to our old normal. That all changed in the middle of March 2020, when the metropolis and every other major city in Canada was put to bed by a government-ordered lockdown to stem the spread of COVID-19. It was unsettling for me that the exact moment the deadly tide of the pandemic began to lap around the shores of Canada, my radiation treatment began- at the Odette Cancer Centre, located beside Sunnybrook Hospital.

I came by train, from Belleville on the day my radiation treatment was to commence. There was an air of normality to my rail journey. Breakfast was still served in business class, and passengers sat closely together. Fewer people were on the train, but there was no nervous talk among the riders about the new restrictions or the virus. I noticed, however, that many passengers, including myself, doused our hands with sanitisers with the frequency of someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

As we travelled closer to the city, it was apparent normal was on hiatus. The 401 was deserted of traffic, including transport trucks.

When I stepped out of Union Station and travelled to my hotel, the streets were as empty of cars as a Sunday in the 1960s, when the city was renowned for its wholesomeness and called “Toronto, the Good.

There was a feeling of dystopia in Toronto. The city was now widowed from its regular occupants and activities because of the COVID-19 lockdown. Toronto was nervous and jittery because of the unknown qualities of the plague that had come. Unless they had to, most people stayed away from the downtown core. But there were a few who rebelled against the abnormality of our new reality. They walked on the pavement near me, in their business suits, chatting into their cell phones thinking that making money came before public safety. Aside from that, Toronto’s exterior was deserted of human beings, except for the homeless, because they had no place to shelter from the approaching Covid pandemic.

They appeared skittish and apprehensive because they knew the virus was not the immediate threat to their survival, but the absence of passers-by whose alms kept them from going hungry. I even witnessed a few street people digging through the bins in front of fast-food restaurants disappointed to find their feral energy rewarded them with slim pickings when they tore open rubbish bags in search of half-eaten hamburgers.

When I checked in to my hotel, the lobby was empty, except for staff who loitered, waiting for instructions from management on what to do next. From a distance, I talked to a doorman, who voiced his concern about how long they could collect a paycheque before being laid off. Officious front desk staff served me as if it were 2019 and everything was fine. I was advised that if I wanted dinner, room service was the only option because public health regulations had closed all restaurants in Toronto to in-house dining. Only a month earlier, I stayed at this same hotel and remembered a crowded mezzanine restaurant where guests dined on "buck a shuck" while drinking ten- dollar-a bottle- pinot grigio. Now, the bar and eating area was desolate and roped off with a sign that read: “No, Entry.”

I told the staff I was in Toronto for radiation treatment. The woman who checked me in sighed and said, “My father died of cancer last year,” and then quickly segued to if I needed assistance with my baggage.

I said, “No,” and hurried off to the bank of elevators that idled on the main floor like grounded jets on a tarmac. I rode the elevator alone up to my floor, which was empty, except for nervous housekeeping staff who talked loudly about the dangers they faced cleaning rooms of potentially infected people.

I had brought Lysol disinfectant, so when I entered my hotel room, I wiped down every surface top, door, nob, and television remote in hopes that if COVID was present, I had killed it off with my cleaning. I was petrified the virus could get to me by the simple act of touching an inanimate object.

Afterwards, I stared out my hotel window onto the King and Young intersection below me. It was desolate, but for a young couple who walked closely together, then stopped, dropped their face masks, and shared a momentary puff on a joint. After the smoke was exhaled, it hung in the space around them, reminding the couple and me of the time before COVID-19.

When it dissipated, they put their masks back up to their faces and moved on. In the distance, I heard the forlorn bell of streetcars as they glided across silent roads without passengers or purpose. I realised the world as I knew it was ending, and I didn’t know what would take its place or whether I would be alive to see it. During those early days of Covid 19, disbelief and despair clung together like lovers on a dance floor for much of the world and me.

There was nowhere to eat and nowhere to go due to the lockdown. I had no company to divert me from constant thoughts about the cancer growing in me or the catastrophe coming to the world from this pandemic. So, I spent too much time doom scrolling online news about the pandemic or Googling information about my cancer and the operation to remove it. Unhealthily, I checked and rechecked the odds of my long-term survivability after my malignancy was excised from my body. It didn’t look good.

I didn’t feel safe going outside to take a walk because everything then was unknown about COVID-19. I kept thinking- I am fucked if I get this virus before my cancer operation, as it will either kill me or make me so sick. They won’t be able to remove the tumour growing in my rectum. There was nothing to do between my daily radiation treatments but drink wine and fret, both of which I did frequently.

I travelled each day to the grounds of Sunnybrook Hospital in an Uber that drove across a dormant city- waiting anxiously for an all-clear that signalled normal had returned. But it never rang.

My drivers were always rightly nervous and said they wouldn’t be taking these risks if they didn’t have to feed their families and pay their rent or mortgages.

At my cancer centre, Covid 19 created new protocols for admission. Family or friends weren’t allowed to accompany patients to their treatment. Before entering the cancer treatment waiting area, everyone was checked for Covid 19 symptoms. Inside, the anxiety and dread were palpable, not simply because we feared cancer might kill us. But also because this novel coronavirus sweeping the world threatened us more acutely than a healthy person. Those with no need for cancer treatments or other necessary medical interventions bunkered down in their homes with their Netflix, boxed wine, and fast-food deliveries.

We, the sick, couldn’t hide. We were driven outside during lockdown to seek treatments that kept us alive. To me,- leaving the safety of lockdown was Pamplona- and COVID and cancer were the bulls running against me while I underwent radiation treatment.

Before each treatment, I was required to drink a bottle of water and not urinate until my treatment- for that day was completed. Each time I waited, my bladder pressed against me, and focused my attention on not pissing myself rather than on the dreadful reality that I was here at this hospital because I had cancer.

After I signed in, an attendant took me through a closed door towards an empty cubicle dressing room where I disrobed. Each piece of clothing I took off from my body irradiation made me aware of how vulnerable and fragile I was as a human being.

After my clothing was off, I put on two smocks to prevent my arse from sticking out and went to wait on a chair in the hallway. A dozen or so other people sat near me. Each of us- was separated by six feet marked by masking tape wrapped against a chair adjoining us. We all waited with melancholic patience to have our cancer killed, shrunk, or contained by nuclear medicine. Cancer patients texted loved ones who in a normal time would have held their hands before treatment but during this plague were forbidden to accompany the sick to their medical treatments. Each one waiting for radiation had that same fixed expression that asked why me? All of them were as terrified as me because cancer wanted to kill us, and now this new lethal virus with no known cure had a bead on our existence.

When my name was called, I was taken to another room- where I handed a technician my health card and expressed pleasantries to them. I was asked to lie down on a table- while the technician with protective PPE adjusted my body to ensure that the beam containing thousands of radioactive rads was aimed at the correct part of my abdomen. After I was positioned, the technicians left the room, and then the machine intent on delivering radiation into my body began to move and shift to points along my abdomen and back. Flesh, tumours, sperm, lymph nodes- whatever was in its path were burned to death, like Monsanto’s Round-Up, which eviscerates a lawn of weeds and anything living.

During my radiation treatment, death was so close to me I could smell its rude breath. It brushed past me like a man at a crowded pub, squeezes impatiently through patrons standing around a bar rail to return to his seat. Death was in me, and it was in everyone who waited for treatment in the hallways at that Odette centre.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John.