When Covid Hushed the City of Toronto and only the sick ventured outside for medical treatment.

Below is an excerpt from my memoir about me, my dad, my cancer and the covid times we live in. I wrote much of it during the years of lockdown. So, the writing has the feel of a diary from an arctic explorer trapped in his tent, while a blizzard blows outside, and he is unsure whether he will make it home or die in the elements.

It's a good book. I am not sure if it will ever find a publisher. When I sent the manuscript for: Standing With Harry to my dad's agent ten months ago at his request, I knew his response would be slow. But as I never heard back from him, even after a few reminder emails, I suspect he has passed on the project.

But he should be held harmless because agents in the book trade or even the booze trade I once belonged to are a particular bunch. And, the hustle to sell can be exhausting and make one forget common courtesies because it is an unforgiving business. Set backs, up and down health issues, money complaints aside, I persevere because it is the only thing I know how to do and that is keep buggering on.

After all, it took me from 2010 to 2013 to get my father discovered by the deciders and the gatekeepers of the news media, political institutions and publishing houses. In truth, it will be a long struggle for me to get this book published or the play Harry's Last Stand that I am currently working on produced or for that matter his unpublished Green and Pleasant Land or for another matter the book I am writing about our life in Portugal whilst Harry’s Last Stand germinated in our heads. It is what it is. I write well, and I am proud of what I've written. So here's a bit more about my story and the story of Harry Leslie Smith because without me, his life would never have been told to you. Cheers, John

Chapter Five:

A city hushed by Plague.

Hi Dad:

Toronto, before the pandemic, like New York, was a city that never slept. 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. 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 commenced at the Odette Cancer Centre, located beside Sunnybrook Hospital, in Toronto.

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, many passengers, including myself, doused our hands with sanitisers with a frequency that wouldn’t have been out of place for someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

As we travelled closer to the city, it became more apparent that the normal world everyone was used to was on hiatus. Everything outside my window was still and 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 feel of dystopia to Toronto. The Covid Lockdown widowed the city from its regular occupants and activities. Toronto was empty but those left in the streets or tending the few shops that remained open were jittery because of the unknown qualities of this plague. It wasn’t a snow day but a bring out you dead day.

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. They appeared skittish and apprehensive because they knew it wasn’t the virus that was 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.

Photo by Yulia Matvienko on Unsplash

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, and 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 a 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 of 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. 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 was going to 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 lockdown. I had no company to divert me from my constant thoughts about the cancer growing in me or the catastrophe coming to the world from this pandemic. So, I spent too much time reading online news about the pandemic or googling information about my cancer and 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 even feel safe going outside to take a walk, because everything then was unknown about Covid. 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, to normal that 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 corona virus sweeping the world, now 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; 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 from the dreadful reality that I was here at this hospital because I had cancer.

After I signed in, an attendant would call my name at my prescribed appointment time. They would take me through a closed door towards an empty cubicle dressing room where I was to disrobe. Each piece of clothing I took off from my body before being irradiated made me aware of how vulnerable, and fragile I was as a human being.

After I had taken off my clothing and put on two smocks to prevent my arse from sticking out like a burrow, I went and rested 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. Every one of us played with our phones, and each of us 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 of delivering radiation into my body began to move and shift to points along my abdomen and back. Flesh, tumour, sperm, lymph nodes whatever was in its path were burned to death, like Monsanto’s Round-Up, eviscerates a lawn of weeds and anything living.

Chapter Six:

The Shadow Lands of Cancer

Dear Dad:

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.

Being treated for cancer made me acutely aware that I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live and finish what I started with you during Harry’s Last Stand. I wanted hope and to enjoy the morning sun, for as long as possible. I would accept cutting, amputation, burning, baking, or being sickened by chemotherapy to barter some more life out of my diseased body.

I did not want to be divorced from my flesh. The hereafter is to float on a tide of nothingness the way amoebas ride the oceans.

I had an immense urge to live. Mum did too even during her last years, crippled by illness and many disappointments. If mum could endure the endless grinding down of her connective joints from Rheumatoid Arthritis and then undergo quadruple bypass surgery, I was willing to take the punishments my own sick body was throwing at me. But I also realised mum’s determination to live despite her chronic pain altered her personality. Her physical discomfort made her short-tempered, melancholic, and depressed. So, I wondered how much I would be altered by my journey across cancer’s shadowlands.

When my treatments finished, I was ready for nightfall like the sky at dusk. I should have been pleased I had crossed another milestone on my journey towards a return to good health. Instead, it simply reaffirmed to me how sick I was. To live, I required large doses of a toxic element beamed at my abdomen to stop a growth intent on killing me. I was in this struggle alone and it scared me shitless. Covid magnified how desperate my health situation was, and I couldn’t get the phrase “plague is coming” out of my head. I imagined my cancer that ate away at my intestines  as if it were a bird of prey gnawing on carrion at the side of the road...

Thank you for getting this far in my post. I need your help and appreciate that you are kind enough to read my sub stack posts because I really need your assistance to keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. 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