It’s been over 8 months.

8 months of vaccination clinics. 8 months of feeling so close to reopening. 8 months of waiting for the miserable pandemic to end. 8 months of writing attempts that never saw the ‘publish’ button. I have therefore resorted to Jurassic Park-esque imagery to help maintain my focus for another 700 words.

During these 8 months, I’ve paused on quite a few things in my life in an effort to really seek out what is important. Like you, my friends and family have handled this crisis and coped with their fear in markedly different ways. There is a spectrum of behaviours, from outright flaunting the rules, to occasionally bending them for mental health reasons, all the way to isolating from everyone regardless of public health advice. There are members of the public in staunch opposition to government mandates and to the vaccination itself. There are others who feel government hasn’t been aggressive or decisive enough with restrictions. As a healthcare provider, I do trust public health officials. Just as I have devoted my career and livelihood as a pharmacist to seek the best outcomes for the populace, I expect the same of them. Even if we may not always agree with how to get there, we are unified in the why: we need to keep people as safe and healthy as possible.

I wrote in a previous post that time seems to simultaneously drag and disappear. While the outside world continued to be consumed by coronavirus variants, personal routines with work and school have not been the same at all. If you line up all of those long, drawn-out hours spent at home where nothing happened, they somehow condense into large blocks of time where nothing happened. In fact, I was out earlier helping an elderly neighbour shovel her driveway and asked about her husband, who hadn’t been well for some time. She informed me that he had passed before the pandemic started, which was 3 YEARS ago. Between masking, bubbles, and distancing, I’ve lost touch with so many people, but that one had me swallowing a little harder.

As we re-emerge, one thing is certain: another wave of change. Change has been foist upon us at many stages in the past 2 years, most of it has been rather uncomfortable. In pharmacy, most of the changes had to do with educating the public on everything from which prescribing services were available in the absence of primary care and walk-in services, to everything vaccine: availability, eligibility, booking, cancelling appointments, testing types, public health isolation recommendations, and more were funneled though frontline teams. We’ve contributed to getting vaccines into arms and doing our best to support a fragile healthcare system. Pharmacy initiatives that have been in the works for years have been fast-tracked, and due to a worsening physician shortage, many pharmacists are finding themselves as the main point of contact for many patients and their families. These changes are extremely stressful but they a quickly becoming public expectations. Those of us who have been practicing for awhile are attempting to meet these new prescribing expectations head on. This leads me to my next point….

This dinosaur to which I have referred isn’t coronavirus, or public health, or the confusion sown by the rapidly changing evidence. I’m actually running from the thought of being labelled a dinosaur.

(to be continued)

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency, employer or affiliation.