Four Months

I think this is officially the longest I've gone without posting here.

March and April were surreal months.  The day that the WHO declared COVID a pandemic, I went to work like normal, rounded with my trainees, and went to yoga.  The following day, my city started going into lock down.  My clinics were shut down, and except in the most extreme of cases I could only do patient visits over the phone.  Schools and non-essential businesses closed.  My world shrunk down to my apartment, my cats, and my computer.

I wish I could say that I handled things better than I did.  I would like to tell you about the books I read, the fabulous sourdough I baked, and the superfit body I gained through turning my bedroom into a home gym.  But I can't.  What I can tell you about is cheese.  Because for a solid month and a half, my main activity was eating ridiculous amounts of cheese.

I had a lot of time off of work in April, because I was supposed to be in the UK at a conference and on vacation, and instead I spent most of that time on my couch eating.  Partly it was my way of resting after a really busy start to the year, but mostly it was my way of grappling with (or trying to avoid grappling with) the complete upheaval of everything I had previously considered to be stable.  I struggle with uncertainty at the best of times, and I really didn't know how to cope with *waves hands at everything*.  So I avoided, and I numbed as best as I could.

I almost started this next paragraph with "We were really lucky", but I won't, because what has happened in my province and in my country hasn't been a matter of luck:  it's been leadership.  Both federally and provincially, the government has acknowledged the seriousness of COVID and taken steps to protect its citizens.  And as a result, we've been really fortunate to mostly contain COVID.  Even though we're slowly reopening across the country, our numbers have fallen to just over 200 cases a day - for the whole country.

Four months after the start of lock down, life is starting to go somewhat back to normal.  I'm eating less cheese.  And things that were tenuous and uncertain are slowly settling, albeit not as much as they were pre-COVID.  I am so, so grateful to live in the country that I do.

For all of my American friends, I am so, so sorry.