Front Burner - Fed up: Your pandemic breaking points

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

Many Canadians' lives are being stretched really thin in this third wave of the coronavirus pandemic — it can be hard not to buckle under the strain and fatigue. In this episode, Front Burner checked in with people across the country to see how Canadians are holding up, and what's keeping them going.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I think the breaking point was last night at 12 30 a.m in the morning looking desperately for a flight to go via a Russian airline to Moscow and then having and then you know desperately writing an email to the medical facility. They're asking, what is the cost of a medical and can I get an appointment? Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and that is Cassandra Lord.

The love of her life, her husband, Pedro, he's in Cuba, and she wants him to come here to Canada to be with her in Mississauga, Ontario. here to Canada to be with her in Mississauga, Ontario. But spouses who immigrate to Canada, they need a medical exam by a doctor approved by Canada's immigration department. And they've explored a few different countries that Pedro could go to get this done. But it's come down to Russia. Something that's made Cassandra really worried because, well, we're in a pandemic, and Russia isn't doing so hot when it comes to COVID. It's a pandemic. And Moscow is, you know, I'm talking to people that I know who do research there.

They have a different level in terms of how they're attending to the pandemic. You know, attending to the pandemic. So some people wear masks, some people don't wear masks. And my husband is not vaccinated, right? So that's another issue. And the irony of actually traveling to a third country in a pandemic to get an IRCC medical is what I can't imagine that this government would allow people to eventually maybe die in order to get an immigration medical without even looking at you know specific cases. The situation it's really starting to affect Cassandra's everyday life.

It's psychologically I have a therapist, I'm a woman, I'm a Black you know academic trying to you know get my tenure my file goes up next year I can't focus on my work so having to attend to goes up next year, I can't focus on my work. So having to attend to teaching, research, and the ongoing living away from my husband and not knowing every day if I'm gonna ever see him again, is, has taken its toll. Today we're doing something a little bit different on the podcast. We're going to bring you a whole bunch of stories just like Cassandra's. People at the end of their rope trying to navigate really challenging situations, totally burnt out from a year of, well, this.

On Tuesday, we put this call out online and we got inundated with stories, big ones and little ones from all across the country. And we want to share them with you today because hopefully these stories will make you feel a little bit less alone. My name is Jocelyn. I'm 32 years old. I am a nurse in Alberta. I have two little kids. I'm married. I live in Airdrie. So his parents are very much anti-vax and very much COVID deniers. I know that I'm a nurse. I'm not an epidemiologist or a virologist or any sort of expert on pandemics, but I feel like I have useful knowledge to share and they don't care about what I have to say when it comes to COVID. They will always believe someone else's anecdote, someone else's evidence, other healthcare professionals who say what they want to hear because they just don't, they don't believe me. They don't believe in the

science that's being put out there to prove what's going on. And it's really difficult to deal with because I love them. That's unconditional. It's not going to change. But it's a very strange position to be in. We've had a few sort of heated discussions, especially around the fact that I had a newborn in September. And they all really wanted to visit and meet my new child, which I completely understand. And it's been an ongoing conversation of how we're willing to do things in a certain way and they aren't. And it feels terrible. It feels overwhelming to have people think that you're crazy, essentially, that on the other side of history that you'll be proven wrong and that you will look stupid. There's no middle ground.

But what breaks me really is seeing how much this has affected my husband. He is definitely very preoccupied by the opinions of his family. He tries so hard to see it from both sides. He spends a lot of time reading the things that they send him and trying to understand and kind of come at it from a point of kindness, which we've always tried to do. We've never wanted to shove anything down their throats or actively tried to convince them of anything. I sort of mourn the loss of his relationships with his family because

it's hard for me to imagine how things will go back to quote unquote normal. I'm Mary Fraser Hamilton. I'm a high school drama teacher in Brampton, Ontario, and my husband is also a high school teacher, and we have three elementary age children who are in SK grade two and grade four. So we have the whole gamut of the pandemic, virtual, hybrid, homeschool, hot mess in school experience. So I think I made it till almost about a week and a half ago. In Ontario, our March break got moved. And the week before Easter, I teach and live in Peel region, and our person, our health guy sent us all home, which was an excellent decision because the schools were just not safe. So I'm in the main floor teaching, my kids are all upstairs,

trying to learn from home, my husband's in the basement trying to teach his class. And my son, who's in grade two, comes running down the stairs because it's time to read the poem of the week out loud. And he just won't do it. And so I'm trying to teach this complicated thing to the class. Our internet keeps cutting out. I keep freezing. The board systems keep crashing. My daughter has run out of her kindergarten meeting because her usual teacher is not there. And my son is throwing a full blown tantrum over the poem of the week. And I realized in that moment that I am not good at any of the jobs that I have to do right now. I was not being a good mother at the time because I did not react well to his anti-poem of the week tantrum.

I was not being a good teacher. I was not being a good wife because I totally yelled at my husband because he was in the basement. So why am I dealing with all of this? But that's where his office is. That's where he has to teach from. So then I cried a lot.

And I said out loud that that was impossible. A lot. And we stopped trying to make my son read the poem of the week and i have to say i'm grateful that i have such a wonderful supportive group of students because they saw how tired and miserable i was and they said miss you need to go rest and it was actually the empathy from my students that really broke me and told me that I needed to rest. Because if these teenagers who have their cameras off, because that's what teenagers do in online learning, if these teenagers who have their cameras off in their own little houses can see me through a tiny box on the computer that I'm done and I need to rest

and I need to just do fewer things and not be excellent at everything, then I need to listen to the teenagers because they're right. Mary is not the only one hitting her limit. Two months before the pandemic, Darren Rigo in Prince George, B.C., he decided to take the leap and move in with his partner. They had this whole talk about the importance of boundaries, keeping space for each other while having their own separate lives. Well, that did not really go as planned.

Yeah, hopefully Brittany doesn't hear this, but no, I'm kidding. So we found a place, we moved into this sort of small two bedroom apartment or basement suite on March 1st. And then yeah, by I think it was like March 17th or something like that, we were both working from home and it just all went out the window like we you know she was working at the kitchen table i was working in the spare bedroom and uh learning how to sort of survive that first lockdown on top of just like you know not killing each other because you load the dishwasher wrong or you know like just you get you're so squashed on top of each other because you load the dishwasher wrong or you know like just you get you're so squashed on top of each other in a situation like that um it kind of forced us to

like really speed up the living together uh conversation and compromises like i feel like i feel like we lived like one year of living together in the first two months she's this very a type personality very organized and i'm kind of laid back and you know like she's kind of like more of the deep dive cleaner and i'm the sort of like day-to-day tidy person and so we kind of go to war over that sometimes uh on like any given work week um it uh it could easily be a recipe for disaster in a weird way the pandemic and the lockdown and being trapped inside it kind of united us as kind of like against a common enemy like it was hard to fight about loading the dishwasher or like not you know rinsing your

dishes and leaving them on the counter or those kind of, you know, laundry on the bedroom floor because there was this like global pandemic happening around us. And so a lot of those kind of bickery fights that I think you, you might struggle with, we, you know, kind of had to look past those and just sort of like help each other get through the hard times and, um, be a little more gracious than maybe we would have in a quote normal world. Darren's troubles are super relatable. I know speaking for myself, I have had some barn burner fights over things like laundry and the dishwasher this year. But some people have had very different types of problems during the pandemic. Okay, my name is Dominic Saxita.

I'm a homeless resident in Toronto at Alexander Park. My encampment is about, I have nine trailers, and I have about five large tents with the capacity to house at least 12 people. Yeah, there was a couple of situations in the park here. When I first got up here, once I built my first encampment down by the Alexander Hotel over there, I had a Toronto SWAT team come in and destroy my camp 3.30 in the morning.

They were claiming to look for some individual. You know, they could have sent us regular police officers on bikes or even on cruisers to come and ask us to come out of the camp. They could have went in and searched the camp for the individual that they were looking for. It was not a search. It was a come in and destroy my camp.

I came out of my tent because I thought we were being robbed. So I came out of my tent with my big 14-pound crescent bench, and I had it behind my back, and all I heard was, I see all these lights, and I hear, get down, get down,

and I'm like, I don't get down for nobody. Like I was terrified, terrified. So finally they got me up off the ground. They started swearing a bunch of choice words at me. I go, oh, you guys are a bunch of big tough guys, eh? Coming in here, who sends a frigging fully armed tactical unit to a homeless camp like really so after uh they had us sitting on the little walkway that goes runs through the park right by the camp for almost 45 minutes and while it was drizzling rain so we were when we all said his shiver and

stuff i was watching them destroy the camp and I ended up going into a seizure because I suffered from metal biologic seizures. It was pretty bad. When that happened, apparently there was a paramedic in the group of these officers. He came over and checked on me. They put one of those emergency fire tinfoil blankets on me. He tried to warm me up a little bit. Then they ended up putting us inside of a, they brought up a, they pulled up a paddy wagon. So once they, once they put us in the paddy wagon, we were in there for another like 30, 40 minutes in there. So they finally come, they let us out because they didn't find anything.

They gave me the warrant that they had to search, which was supposed to be a search, and the camp was totally destroyed. I was like, you know, it took me six months to get that place put together, to make it waterproof, and you know, it was ready for the winter, basically. And they destroyed it. They cut the roof. They slashed the tarps. They slashed all the tents. They smashed my camping stove. All of my sleeping bags

were destroyed because of the rain. Everything was gone. So, all that did was motivate me even more. So, I moved down the ways where I am now

and I built a tent that's even three times bigger than the one that they destroyed. But that was just totally uncalled for. Hey, hello. My name is Vivian Kay. I am in Hamilton, Ontario. I am a entrepreneur and single mother. So my business is Kinky Curly Aki. It's a premium textured hair extensions brand for Black women. So for me, the pandemic hit back in December of 2019. Because we sell human hair, all of our supplies come over from India and China. And so of course, China got shut down first. And then by the time March rolled around to us, we got shut down. And, you know, being at home, you know, with a with a six year old and being an entrepreneur, it just felt like my hands were just completely tied.

So my supply chain was messed up. My kid was at home. We couldn't go anywhere, you know, with an active six year old boy and homeschooling. And it was it was just overwhelming. And this past year has just been overwhelming. And it was, it was just overwhelming. Uh, and this past year has just been overwhelming and it's been frustrating. You know, I'm one of those people, I, I laugh, so I don't cry. Um, you know, one of the things that I've done is I've just become an absolute pleasure to follow on Instagram because I just use, I use my Instagram stories to sort of, to give full

transparency and it is bananas, right? You know, I, at the top of the year, I had these virtual school chronicles where every day I was just showing the crazy things that were happening on a virtual school. Things like, you know, the teacher coming up with a science project that required us to go get styrofoam cups. And she was admonishing the students who didn't have the styrofoam cups. And it's like, lady, this is a pandemic. I'm not going to go leave my house to go get these styrofoam cups. But of course we did. We, of course we left the house to go get these styrofoam cups. But of course we did. We, of course we left the house to go get these styrofoam cups because not only have we taken away my kid's school and friends and you know, that socialization, but now I'm about to, you know, quote unquote, get him in trouble because he doesn't have these cups. Right. So we got the cups and, and it turned

into this crazy project. It was just, we just need two cups, two styrofoam cups out of a pack of 24. So now I've got this running joke on Instagram where I'm sipping out of these cups and I write little sayings on them showing people that I still have these cups that this teacher made us go out and get. But yeah, that's a funny story. It's one of those, you have to see it to sort of get it. But yeah, it was like, well, can't we? Why can't you think of something where we don't have to leave the house to go get it?

You know, and it was so, it was just so, it was just like the, okay, it's just the cherry on top. And it was just like, how much more of this can we do right and now we're about to go into round three and it's honestly i just feel numb at this point like i can't cry i can't i'm not i'm just i'm just so numb My name is Alistair Woods. I live in Toronto. I'm a policy analyst in higher education. I think that the pandemic, and especially in Toronto, like these kind of endless lockdowns and open and close, it really drains everything of meaning. And that can be really hard. I think for someone like me, I've been sober for almost three years. And I think when things get drained of meaning, that's when the little voice in my head says, well, if everything is meaningless anyways, why not just pick up a

drink? And I'm lucky and feel grateful that I haven't gotten to that point yet. But that voice has been whispering away sometimes, especially on days where I felt really low, and it's felt really difficult to just kind of get through the day. A couple of weeks, maybe a month ago, I had just kind of had this like weeks long stretch of very like low grade, you know, low frequency depression. Like it was just kind of always there, never like overwhelming. And there was just a day like where I guess all the pressure that had built up like needed to get released.

And I was, I was just working away at my desk, as I always am. And I got an email that was like a totally normal email from this person. And I don't know, it just hit something in me. And I cried for the first time in years. It was just a work email. It was an email that I got from someone and I just read it as you do when you're just in a mood. I read it, I injected all sorts of like tone

and emotion into it. And of course it wasn't bad at all, but I got up and I went, I got into bed and I just cried for another like 15, 20 minutes. My boyfriend called me and I like picked up the FaceTime because he works in retail. And so he was out of the house and I picked up the FaceTime and he's never seen me cry. And so I picked up FaceTime and I was like, I'm not done crying. I'm going to call you back in a minute and like put the phone down.

And later that night he came over and, you know, he was just like, well, what's wrong? And the only answer I could come up with was like everything. Everything just felt so hard. I just felt like I couldn't bear that weight of just kind of being in this endless present with no horizon of us getting out of it. That no horizon feeling is something restaurateurs have had to grow really comfortable with. But as this next person told us, even a year into this thing, there are still days that can completely throw you for a loop. My name is Daniel Lorero. I live in Montreal and I'm the co-owner of a restaurant in the whole Montreal in the corner of the Miguel Street and St. Maurice.

The name of the restaurant is Restaurante Elena. We're serving Portuguese food and beautiful Portuguese wines as well. But my restaurant is closed since October 1st. We only do takeouts and delivery as well. That's what we do. That's what we're living on for the last six months. And obviously, it's not enough for us to survive. But, well, basically what happened was on sunday night there was a

protest in the whole montreal against all the measures from the government in the pandemic situation right now we have a curfew in quebec and it started getting a little bit heat over there so they started breaking things they're starting fires and garbages on the streets like notre dame street and they went on McGill where the restaurant is located. And at that point, we were following the situation through social media. And then there's a couple that lives nearby, their customers and their friends of us. They sent us a picture of the broken window of the restaurant.

On Sunday, it was about 930, maybe 10 o'clock at night, when we saw the picture when the picture was sent to us. So the first thing, you get a little bit stressful. So the time that you get to the restaurant, you're really stressed. You don't know what the damages are, you don't know you but well, you see from the picture, there's a broken window, that's for sure. But you don't see the rest of it we live pretty much about 20 minutes from the restaurant so that 20 minutes seemed unbelievably so so long for me to get to the restaurant at that moment and when we get there we see all the damages first the first reaction that i had when i saw the broken window was i started crying i was in tears because i was so so so sad and really, really like stressed.

And I'm saying not another thing on us, not another layer on top of everything that we've been through the last year. We're really tired of all this. We're really tired of the pandemic. We can't like we're not even making money for the last year. We're losing money pretty much every day for the last year. And we're trying to survive in this on top of it. So I start crying. My mom was was beside me she started crying as well so that made me even more stressful at that moment see my mother cry besides me because pretty much all our investment is in

the restaurant so we look at each other me and my mom we have this really special connection we don't need to to say anything to each other to understand the feelings that we have at that moment. So just a little look at each other. We were crying in each other's arms. And at that moment, we took five minutes for us. I took her in my arms and I said, let's take five minutes over here. Let's cry a bit together. So we took five minutes in front of the window. We cried together. Then we started making phone calls to repair, not the window we cried together then we started making phone calls to repair not the window but at least to put something to to fix the hole for that night at least and then we said to each other okay tomorrow morning we're coming back we're cleaning everything and we call somebody to fix all the window so we had a little bit of a meltdown at that moment but thank god i guess

monday morning came and we were in another mindset and try and find solutions, obviously, again. My name is Kelly Webb and I live in Dryden, Ontario, which is located way up in northwestern Ontario. My 10, almost 11-year-old daughter started her period suddenly, and we ran out of underwear. ran out of underwear and in our town all we have to purchase children's clothing and undergarments and all that stuff is either extra foods or Walmart and because the government has deemed those non-essential items I can't buy my daughter underwear anywhere in. In order for me to get underwear for her, I have to order it online and wait anywhere between 7 to 14 days to receive it. And in big city centers, I can see that because they have the option with smaller stores to do curbside, but our area doesn't have that option for a lot of those things. And we also have

Northern fly-in First Nation communities who utilize our Walmart and our extra foods for those items as well. And they have nowhere to shop for any essential. and to them, it's essential just as much as it is to us. I felt horrible. I was crying. I felt ashamed because I couldn't even provide the basic necessity for my child because the government has deemed it non-essential. The decisions based on huge city centres and the people here in the rural areas, we're struggling.

Like I said, I can't even buy my daughter underwear. I mean, I called both Greg Rickford, who is our MPP, and Doug Ford's office, and I got the kind of standard, oh, that's so terrible, we'll look into it, and then I never heard anything back. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Hands down, one of the biggest stories we heard from people was what it meant to be separated from loved ones across the U.S. border. We got so many emails about this, including one from Tammy Scott Yonkers in Fort Erie, whose boyfriend lives a short drive away in Buffalo.

Although it feels like they're worlds apart. If I didn't have to work and I had a lot of money, I could see him all the time. I could go back and forth. Yeah, I still have quarantine and all that plane stuff, but it's about the money. Tammy's ex also lives in Buffalo, and her son is tired of not seeing his dad. This is my son, Aaron. Aaron's dad. Yeah, my dad's in Buffalo right now too and I haven't seen

him since August because he was able to come here then for a few days and then he had to go back over for work and stuff, right? So it's also tough too when you see like truck drivers that go across all the time for essential workers and it's like our family's not essential too because like they live you know like 30 minutes over the border, even closer from my job. Tammy and her son have been going to protests at the border between the two countries, saying families are essential. Some U.S. officials have said they'd like to start talking about reopening the border. In March, Prime Minister Trudeau said it would open eventually, but it won't be happening anytime soon. We also heard from a Calgary woman who shared this very personal story about pregnancy during the pandemic.

My name is Asia Walker. I live in Calgary. I work at a non-profit that interfaces with the city of Calgary on a pretty regular basis. So we found out in November. I was really excited. We had been, you know, planning sort of to start a family for some time. About six months into trying, surprisingly and successfully,

came up with a handful of positive pregnancy tests. And it was a day after Christmas. We had, you know, been very careful around Christmas. I dropped presents off at my family's place. And I just remember, you know, very clearly, waking up, you know, about five in the morning, and I just had this realization that, you know, just my body kind of, it sounds so stupid, but like my body just knew that it wasn't pregnant anymore. I went downstairs, I had a little cry on the couch. The hardest part is that, you know, my partner was about 12 hours behind me in the realization of this. And so it kind of hit us at different times. And, you know, he's a nurse. He's been working in a COVID afflicted ward for the last 14 months. And I think, sorry, I think the hardest part about all of this was just how excited he was. You know, it was so great to see just a little bit of joy and happiness and just like, oh, yeah, OK, we're in a pandemic and it's very hard right now.

But you know what? Like, we're going to have a new family at the end of all of this. And my parents are going to have their first grandchild and my brothers are going to be uncles. And we had built a whole life around it, even though it was a very early loss. And then on top of it, I couldn't even see my friends. I couldn't, you know, I've got a wonderful group of friends and we commiserate and celebrate everything together over dinner and wine. And man, did I need them at this time you know and we just couldn't do it couldn't do anything all I could do was drag my butt out of the house and go for another stupid walk around the stupid block Amy Dempsey is a writer with the Toronto Star, and she's an old work friend of mine.

Like a lot of us, she's been feeling like she's stuck in this continuous time warp. And one day it just became too much. There was a day earlier this year where I just completely lost it. I said to my husband, today is the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before, and tomorrow is going to be the same as today. And the next day is going to be the same. And I feel like I'm in an endless loop of doom. I've had it. and I had been resisting going on anxiety medication for like my whole adult life and this winter I just said that's it I'm done give me all the medication give me whatever you have I'll do whatever I need to do to make my brain better. If you're flying commercial, it takes three flights to get from Amy in Toronto

up to the tight-knit community of Arvia in Nunavut. And when COVID-19 showed up there, the virus started spreading like wildfire. For the voice that you're about to hear, started spreading like wildfire. For the voice that you're about to hear, getting fed up was actually not an option. Instead, he found strength in his family and Hamlet to fight the pandemic together. My name is Joe Savikata Jr. I'm the mayor of Angvet, Nunavut. I'm the mayor of Angved, Nunavut. And we had just gone to quite the ride here with COVID. We were the hardest hit community in the north with 339 cases that we had in a population of about 3,000. We are almost at the end of our tunnel now. We'll be officially COVID-free this coming Friday.

Worrying doesn't help with anything. And I have a personal life experience with this. My dad and I are both pilots. We fly an airplane that he has. And one time it was the two of us flying his airplane and the engine quit. There is absolutely no time to worry when you're a pilot in command of an airplane

that's going down. So I used that experience to navigate with the experience that we went through here. There was absolutely no time to worry while the town was going through the crisis it was at the time. Within about day seven, day ten, somewhere around there, we hit our peak of 118 cases active in the community here. It seemed like it was not going to end.

It was just going up. The cases were rising. But after about 14 days, that's when we started to see recoveries from the initial cases that came. And we knew that we could get this once the recovery started coming. And it took a while, but we did it. All right, that is all for today. I want to say thank you so much to all the people, to our listeners who reached out to us and who told these very personal stories.

We are so, so appreciative. And I also want to thank the producers on our show for pulling this together in such a quick time frame. Shannon Higgins, Katie Toth, Tatiana Fartato, Simi Bassi, Derek Vanderwyk. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thank you so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts,

go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.