New Year’s Eve Blues
New Year’s Eve is a time of change. As the clock strikes midnight, we are out with the old year and into the New Year and all the opportunity, promise, and hope that it brings.
I am writing this on New Year’s Day 2022. Yesterday, on my first New Year’s Eve suffering from a chronic illness, I felt as though I had been sucker-punched by my MS-induced depression. I started the day knowing that I have MS, and knowing that I have depression, but I was still caught completely unprepared for the tsunami of sadness that hit me. The opportunity, promise, and hope that I usually see in a New Year ahead had completely vanished. This is the first time in my life that I have looked at the New Year ahead and realized that my life is likely to be worse next year. Having a chronic progressive disease, like MS, means that I will never get better, and I can reasonably expect to get worse and worse over time.
It causes my husband alarm every time that I experience these fears about the future. He knows that stress is a contributor to MS relapses and disease progression, so when he sees me stressing (or in the case of yesterday, in extreme emotional distress), he worries that my disease will get worse. This is an entirely valid concern. I share it with him. I then get mad at myself for allowing these stresses and emotions to have bandwidth in my brain. This, in turn, leads to more stress and upset. In this way, I enter into a spiral that is difficult to pull myself out from. I have to find the right balance between allowing myself to experience sadness, but not dwelling in it, all the while trying not to feel guilty that I am sad. The truth is that on New Years Eve I couldn’t help but to reflect on the prospect of every year from here on in being worse than the last. This is the curse of a progressive and incurable disease.
Complicating an already depressing New Year’s Eve was the Ontario government’s decision to stop trying to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. They are throwing in the towel. They have decided to stop bothering with testing (and by extension contact-tracing). They are sending teachers, education workers, and students out into what appears to be the mounting crest of the Omicron-wave in an apparent effort to achieve herd immunity, with our children and their teachers leading the way. Colour me unsurprised that teachers and education workers are being thrown out there as our frontline soldiers to get infected immediately. If you had any doubt remaining in your mind that Premier Doug Ford hates teachers, let this announcement silence those doubts. When vaccine boosters were made available, were teachers and education workers given priority knowing that they would be placed into a dangerous work environment in January? No, of course not. Thankfully, my insomnia over the holidays paid off and I managed to get my husband in for one of the few pre-Christmas booster appointments available. He will have just made it to two weeks post-booster when he returns to in-person teaching. Most of my friends and family who are teachers can’t say the same. They are either waiting on their booster appointments or only recently received their booster and they won’t be afforded the recommended time for that dose to be given full effect before being sent into an in-person teaching environment. The data that I have reviewed to date seems to show that the Omicron variant is significantly less likely to result in hospitalization (roughly one third of the hospitalizations compared to the earlier Delta iteration). However, as it is infecting vastly more than triple the number of people that were infected in previous waves, I still anticipate that hospitals will be overrun, and patients will be denied ventilators and therapeutics due to supply falling well-short of demand… cue the refrigerated trucks outside of hospitals. I genuinely hope that I am wrong.
As an individual taking a CD-20 monoclonal antibody therapy, namely Kesimpta, I am immunosuppressed. While I have had three doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, it is unclear what, if any, benefit that I will gain from these doses of vaccine. Per recent research, those taking Ocrevus (a similar DMT) were 79% more likely to become infected with COVID-19 as compared to the general population once vaccines were widely available (as compared to 13% more likely prior to vaccines being available). Neurologist Dr. Brandon Beaber recently released a YouTube video summarizing this research. It didn’t give me great optimism.
A number of people have recently felt the need to approach me to justify their opinion that if several old and/or immunocompromised people need to die in order to get everyone else back to some sense of normalcy, that this is an acceptable cost. This truly blows me away each and every time that it happens. I understand that a lot of people believe this to be true. Premier Doug Ford is now on your side. Congratulations! But why the need to approach the person whose life you view to be an acceptable cost of getting back to normal to tell her that you think her life is expendable for the public good? I don’t get this. Don’t you have some other 30-something healthy friend that you can discuss your views with? Will it make you feel better to hear the person that you think should die agree with you? Well, I don’t agree. I want my son to grow up with a mother. I don’t police what you think, but if you feel the need to tell me to my face that you think my life is expendable, I will judge you harshly. I’m not going to censor myself on this issue, because I don’t want you moving on to some octogenarian or cancer patient to let them know that you consider their death acceptable too. Say it with me now: Keep. That. Toxic. Opinion. To. Yourself!
What of the argument that I should just pull myself up by my bootstraps? Look, that’s cute and all, but it fails to recognize that we are talking about a contagious virus. I work from home. I order my groceries so that I don’t have to set foot inside a busy store. I took three doses of mRNA vaccine. As soon as the government greenlights fourth doses for vulnerable individuals, like myself, I will take my fourth dose too. I lost over 70lbs. I take large doses of Vitamin C and D daily, among other supplements. My husband has also had three doses of mRNA vaccine. I wear an N95 mask covered by a surgical mask when I am out in public. I chose a small home daycare over a daycare centre in order to reduce my son’s exposure. I had every person that I saw over the holidays take a Rapid Antigen Test before seeing them. I also reduced the number of people that I saw. Heading into January, I have no plans of seeing anyone other than my husband and son. Notwithstanding all of this, I still fully expect to be infected with COVID-19 within the next month or two based on the Ontario government’s decision to throw in the towel. I would argue that, short of going off my DMT and letting MS blast new holes in my brain (an unacceptable cost in my books), I am doing everything possible to protect myself. Infectious diseases are not something that individuals can control on their own. We all have a responsibility here. The Ontario government has chosen to fail the vulnerable members of our province. Whether you believe that this was the correct decision or not, I urge you not to seek validation from those members of society that you view to be expendable.
