12 Bored Enough to Work 12-Hour Days

I am not a homebody; I think it’s crucial to start here. As a competitive swimmer in my final year of high school, having just signed my life away to a new school and a new team, I was itching to get out of where I had spent the past 18 years of my life. Although there is nothing wrong with Ottawa, in fact, it’s a beautiful city, like many newly turned adults, I was ready for a change of scenery along with the promise of independence and new experiences.

What seems to be a shared phenomenon: I remember exactly where I was on March 11, 2020, and the scariest part was that I was very far from home. What had initially seemed like just the threat of a potential pandemic looming across the Atlantic became all too real when the Canadian government announced a lockdown and ordered Canadians abroad to come back home. Travelling with my Canadian swim team, we were away at a training camp in Southern Arizona during my grade 12 March Break, training for the Eastern Canadian Championships set to happen in early April. The call home felt like a movie. As many Canadian teams were away to train at altitude, we had to cut our training short and rush home before the Canada-U.S. border closed, like many international ones already had.

After arriving home safe and healthy, we were required to quarantine for 14 days to ensure we did not show any symptoms after travelling through some of the busiest airports in North America. The return to school had been pushed from March 16th to March 30th as the city went into full lockdown, with only businesses deemed essential remaining open. For those 14 days, I had never been more bored in my entire life. I occupied my time by going for runs outside, testing the boundaries of Netflix’s movie collection, and sleeping more than I’d ever slept in my entire life. Pre-pandemic, I spent about 10 hours a day at home, after factoring in the time I spent training, working, and attending school. When all of this was put on pause, I was forced to entertain myself in a space that I only ever used to eat, sleep, and pack up for the next day. After a month, it was announced that the rest of the school year (April-June) was to be completed online. With no future hope to see my teammates or school friends, nothing to train for, and no prom or graduation to look forward to, I was left extremely discouraged in every aspect of my life. After unwillingly slowing my life down, the only thing to stay excited about was the thought of getting to start university in September. As cases continued to rise over the summer, the hope of moving away for school was slowly lost, until eventually McMaster University announced that it would not be starting in-person classes for the Fall 2020 semester; I was to be stuck at home for even longer. When I made the assumption that I wouldn’t be in-person until the Fall of 2021, influenced by the fact that I couldn’t stand to be at home any longer, I began full-time work at a pediatric palliative care hospice while beginning my online studies.

Working in a healthcare setting during a global pandemic is not for the weak. Upkeeping protocols to meet Covid-19 sanitization standards felt like a full-time job, and that wasn’t even half of it. When a vaccine was approved for use in Canada in December 2020, all focus shifted to the vaccination efforts. Staff members from the hospital I worked at, who were considered more expendable, were deployed to work 12-hour days at pop-up vaccination clinics around the city. While I was now working amongst many unvaccinated people and therefore at a higher risk for contracting the disease, I moved in with a friend who was working the same job as me to keep my relatively healthy family safe from exposure to the pathogen.

A major theme we’ve explored in this course is the stigma that follows particular illnesses, and I found this to be the case with a relatively well-understood pathogen like Covid-19. Although we had little understanding about the long-term effects of the illness, by the time vaccines were rolled out, we definitely understood its virulence and transmissibility. It seemed that because we understood enough about this pathogen and how to avoid it, a stigma of carelessness accompanied getting sick. Moving away from home was a decision I made to avoid putting my family through this stigmatizing rhetoric. Although I was at a higher risk for getting Covid-19 because I was exposed to many people, in a healthcare setting, right before they were to be vaccinated, I was still more anxious about being seen as careless with my and others’ health than I was about actually getting sick. To this day, I still have not gotten Covid-19. Being vaccinated earlier than most, as a healthcare worker, definitely contributed to this. However, I think a bigger contribution was the idea that we would be putting others in our community—the elderly, and the immunocompromised—at risk. The hospital community I worked in most definitely played a role in this stigmatization as well. Surrounded by healthcare workers, who understood infectious disease better than most of the general public, seemed to put themselves on a very high pedestal when judging those who managed to get sick. In their eyes, if those catching the illness weren’t in healthcare, they were irresponsible and careless for getting sick amidst the many restrictions and guidelines that were in place to prevent it.

To end on a more positive note, although I do feel like I missed out on some of the milestones many my age get, like prom, high school graduation, frosh week, and moving into university residence, I do feel I gained a newfound respect for (the non-judgmental) healthcare workers. Working within a broken system at a time when the country depended on it gave me the spark I needed to pursue a degree that will eventually (hopefully) help me fight the systemic injustices within our healthcare system. While the pandemic caused a lot of social disruptions, it helped me realize the need to improve our healthcare system so that it is better equipped to serve everyone equitably.