The Tuesday Everything Stopped
Six years later, neoliberalism prefers we forget how it responded to the pandemic made today's world.
Six years after COVID-19 upended the world, the pandemic has begun to feel like the secret inside a dysfunctional family—something everyone remembers but no one is supposed to talk about. Since March 2020 the Western world has been living in the aftershock of that moment, yet we still seem to be waiting for our old way of life to return.
March 11th marks the anniversary of the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. It was ground zero. That day the normalcy of everyday life came to a halt. Life was altered, and today we still live in the wake of that transformation, shaped both by the pandemic and by how neoliberalism dictated our response to it.
The COVID-19 pandemic and cancer, for me, were different sides of the same coin. To this day, no matter which way the toss is made, it always lands on precarious ground.
This is how I remember the first days after the world stopped.
When lockdown arrived six years ago, I was travelling by train to Toronto for radiation treatment before rectal cancer surgery at the end of that month.
Toronto, like New York, was a city that never slept until the pandemic arrived and put an end to our before-times. That all changed in the middle of March 2020, when the metropolis and every other major city in Canada were put to bed by a government-ordered lockdown to stem the spread of COVID-19.
It was unsettling that at 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 beside Sunnybrook Hospital.
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 sanitiser with the frequency of someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
As the train travelled closer to Toronto, reality felt altered.
This Tuesday was radically different from the Tuesday of the previous week. It was the first Tuesday of a different existence rapidly evolving around me.
The highway, outside of a few stray cars, was deserted. There were no transport trucks on the 401. There were no people on the suburban streets. There were no school buses.
Everything was at a standstill.
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 nature of the plague that had arrived. 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 streets were deserted, except for the homeless, because they had no place to shelter from the approaching 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.
A few street people dug through the bins in front of fast-food restaurants. But they were disappointed when their feral energy rewarded them with slim pickings because no one was eating out.
When I checked into my hotel, the lobby was empty except for staff who loitered, waiting for direction from management about what to do next.
Keeping my distance, I talked to a doorman who voiced his concern about how long they could collect a paycheck 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 had 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.
It was a final dinner with my girlfriend. We both came to the understanding that she was not the one to go through the storms of cancer with me.
It wasn’t her rodeo.
Now the bar and eating area were roped off with a sign at the entrance: “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 asked if I needed assistance with my baggage.
I said no and hurried off to the bank of elevators idling 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, doorknob, and television remote in hopes that if COVID-19 was present, I would kill it off with my cleaning.
I was petrified that 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 Yonge 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 for 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 for a walk because so much about COVID-19 was still unknown.
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 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 treatments.
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 it did healthy people.
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-19 and cancer were the bulls running against me while I underwent radiation treatment.
We all waited with melancholic patience to have the cancer killed, shrunk, or contained by nuclear medicine.
Patients texted loved ones who, because of lockdown, were forbidden to accompany the sick to their medical treatments.
Each person waiting for radiation had the same fixed expression that seemed to ask, “Why me?”
All of them were as terrified as I was 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 exchanged pleasantries.
I was asked to lie down on a table while the technician, wearing 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—was 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 squeezing 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.
But during that first week of lockdown, death was everywhere, and it was after everyone.
In my hotel room, when I watched the news, I was transfixed by the enormity of each day’s death count.
There were no words to adequately describe what was happening to the world—mine filled with cancer, and the exterior world overwhelmed by COVID-19.
In that moment it seemed the world had stopped and perhaps could be reset to something better. Six years later we know it hadn’t stopped or reset itself to something better. It simply lurched forward into something harsher, dangerous and more unsure than the life we had before.
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Was the whole thing a billionaire power grab? They profited from it to such a scale that I can't help but wonder.
Unrelated to the writing - but made me smile to see that intersection. I was at King & Sherbourne for a few years and loved living in that neighbourhood.