As some of you are aware and supported, I am going through my own perspective on COVID from what we’ve seen over the last few years…breaking out all of the information I find relevant and adding in a bit of a personal touch. I mean…who want’s to just read some dullard historical timeline that you can google and find with a specific enough query?
The book is being done in segments, as time affords and will be fully available to paid-subscribers - partials will be available to the free subs. The idea is…getting a few on board to help me edit, while maintaining a little less chatter to allow me to keep focused. All of my other substacks - with exception to the book - will be 100% free…so if you’re not much into the book and just want to keep up on my day-to-day reports - save your cash…it’s Christmas…spend it on the people who matter in your life.
First segment, in case you missed it is here:
And, I’ll just be picking back up where I left off…
We really went from 0-60 on this Pandemic thing rapidly, but given the early reports where we were seeing people lying dead on the streets in China in January…
Had brought a lot of us to every ‘Worst Case Scenario’ on a Global Scale that all apocalyptic movies that we’d seen prior into somewhat of a reality situation. We’d seen the SARS pandemic in past, witnessed the whole Zika thing, spending an entire summer being afraid of mosquitoes…because who even remembers what was going on with this but it looked pretty serious at the time…
Babies born with misshapen heads and welp…that’s pretty much the extent of what I remembered about that one…but bodies weren’t piling up in the streets and with a suggested 2 week lockdown, the Corona-Virus - Wu-Flu - seemed like a much bigger threat.
In all honesty and in the beginning of this…I was dealing with much bigger things in my life and while I kept an eye on the news, really wasn’t altogether that concerned. News flashes warned those over the age of 65 to remain safe, even while we were in the process of defining and locking down ‘Non-Essential Businesses’.
You see, on January 31st, 2020 - AKA - Superbowl Sunday 2020 - my mother collapsed at home and was taken into the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton for a suspected Heart Attack.
Ma had been staying with me in Calgary over the Christmas season and wasn’t doing that well…but given that she’d just wanted to head back home and though we’d started to do some investigating into Senior Living Facilities in Calgary, this was back-burnered with her angst about her just not being in her own home.
Off to Edmonton I went, on February 1st, 2020 - to see exactly what was going on…and for the next couple months, I’d spend my weeks in Edmonton, weekends at home in Calgary.
With my mother being in the hospital and the quality of foods she was being served being a little lacking in flavor and substance, I got to visit the grocery stores daily to see the changes in available products plus watch as things progressed inside of our Alberta Based Healthcare systems.
As it turns out, Ma didn’t have a heart attack…what she suffered from was a large mass that was growing on her lung that went un-diagnosed until she was in the hospital. X-rays revealed an 8x10x10 cm tumor and biopsies confirmed cancer.
While originally in a cardiac unit, she was thrown into Gen-Pop in The Alex, once they’d realized it wasn’t her heart, it was Cancer. Prognosis wasn’t optimistic and the cardiologist gave a shorter than 5 year prognosis on survival.