What the Covid Response Did to my Father-from March 2024

In honor of his birthday, April 19 1947

This piece originally appeared in March 2024; I’m reposting it today in honor of my father’s birthday. He would have been 78 April 19.

I’ve both wanted and not wanted to talk about this story since September 2022, when I received results that put the final nail in the coffin of the story of the “Covid tests” and their accuracy. I wanted to talk about it because it’s important to hear every story of what was done to every person affected by the Covid response, but that’s also part of why I didn’t want to talk about it. Everyone and their dog has a story. Mine has a very strange, but what will also be to some of you, unsurprising, twist—read on.

Another reason I didn’t want to discuss this publicly is that I thought that my enemies would pounce on this information—the “plot twist”—as yet more evidence that I am a denialist about everything. But I don’t care anymore, and in some sense, I have to write about this for my own mental health.

My father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at some point in 2014, and retired from his work as a geology professor a few years later, after which my parents relocated to a small town in Northern Ontario near dad’s field area. In 2019, they decided to purchase a second home in Texas so that they could spend winters in a warmer climate near their American grandchildren. They came down in January 2020, and brought with them panicked stories about a viral outbreak in China and Northern Italy. I remember my husband and I laughing at this, thinking it would be another Zika. Well.

My father was completely enthralled by the story and also terrified of Covid. One interesting fact about my father is that, despite being a scientific questioner in his own field and others such as “ climate science”, he had absolute faith in modern medicine because he had nearly died of intestinal tuberculosis as a child (the story is that he caught it from raw milk and that the cows all died as well, but I don’t know its veracity) and was literally saved from death by an experimental antibiotic. Put yourself in the shoes of a person with that lived experience, and I think you can at least understand their position.

Mom was a different story. She believed the Covid narrative for about a month and then became very suspicious. Given that her father himself was a medical renegade who wrote an evisceration of state run healthcare (no wonder I am the way I am), this might not be surprising. (I’ll also give major props to my sisters Elena and Martha—they and I called bullshit IMMEDIATELY, and we were the only ones.) I can only imagine the odd dynamic in the marriage at that point—I remember some tension between my husband and I because he didn’t immediately question lockdowns (although that may be due to his being a massive introvert) and I did, and that was a minor disagreement.

At any rate, my parents left Texas in a hurry in March 2020 because we were told they were going to lock down the border, and they were never able to return, in part because of the restrictions, but also because the fear of Covid absolutely sent my father into what I can only describe as a death spiral. (He did not want the fast tracked vaccine, however, but he was very scared of other people.) I learned early on that patients with neurological conditions tended to be among the most negatively affected by the social isolation and fear based journalism that was common in the early days of Covid, and I absolutely believe that is true.

Near the end of 2021, dad took a turn for the worse and my daughter and I decided to drive up to see him, because my mother and sisters warned me that this might be my last opportunity to do so. I brought my daughter because if you’ll recall at that time, the Covid vaccines had not yet been approved for children under 12, so I could bring her; and Canada had a strict vaccine policy, including for non-resident citizens. (If you were a Canadian living in Canada wanting to go home, you didn’t need a vaccine. God, this is all so crazy looking back.)

And if you infer from that last paragraph that I took the Covid vaccine, you would be correct. I will always be totally transparent. I took the vaccine knowing full well that it would do absolutely nothing to help me or anyone else, and that it would quite possibly hurt me, but my choice was between taking the shot and never see my dying father again. Luckily, I’ve had no side effects that I’ve been aware of, and I still think I made the correct decision morally, but how ridiculous is it that this was ever the situation? (And yes, I did a whole detox protocol, so kindly leave those suggestions out of the comments. This is hard enough.)

Going into Canada in Fall 2021 was surreal. I’ve crossed the border by land many, many times, and normally there are lines of cars stretching over the bridge. The border was deserted. No cars, no trucks, but there were nurses in full PPE waiting to give my unvaccinated daughter and myself Covid tests! Not joking. At any rate, shortly after this trip, dad was admitted to the hospital for three months because my mom couldn’t physically handle his needs and the Covid crisis had resulted in an extreme lack of personal care workers in their region, so he only had six hours per week, on a good week. During this time, the entire hospital was locked down for weeks because of a “Covid outbreak” and during that time dad had no visitors allowed.

We were overjoyed when dad was able to come home in February 2022, but things didn’t last long. By summer, everything was getting worse. I got a call at the end of July that dad had been admitted again, but that the wards were full and he was stuck in the WAITING ROOM, which made him very agitated, at which point a visiting physician gave him a—contraindicated—dose of Haldol. (In the U.S. he’d have been sued to within an inch of his life for that, and this is where I’m going to come out of the closet as a huge fan of lawyers. They’re the only people protecting us from the government and Big Pharma—in bed with the government—at this point.) Then everything fell apart.

The next day I got a call that shocked me. It was one of my sisters, although I don’t recall which one (which is a really bizarre thing for me and clearly indicates how distressing this situation was, because I have a ridiculously good memory for detail; I do not forget irrelevant details) saying that dad had tested positive for Covid and that the hospital policy was total isolation for ten days. Apparently, mom flipped out and said that the isolation will kill him immediately. I should also mention that at this point his urine was the color of Coca-Cola, indicating kidney failure, although I don’t know that anyone took any blood tests—this is the Canadian healthcare system, after all. The only other option was to admit him to palliative care, which as you know is the end of the line. I was given the option to “come now or come for a funeral.” I went then. I was in shock. It still feels like I was an actress in a movie and it didn’t actually happen in real life. I don’t know how else to explain it.

Entering Canada after the Freedom Convoy was an entirely different experience than a mere nine months before. Trucks lined the bridge on both sides and I felt such immense gratitude to the truckers. Also, no one checked ArriveCan, the app that asked you where you would be during your stay and your Covid status. (I haven’t been following this too closely, but I think the Canadian Supreme Court ruled ArriveCan unconstitutional recently.) I wish I’d had this substack during the Freedom Convoy, although maybe it’s best for you all that I didn’t because I would have been FLOODING you. I’m so, so grateful to the truckers and all their supporters.

Once I entered the hospital with my daughter, it was insane. When I told them whom I was visiting, the nurse at the ER (keep in mind this is a cottage village and the hospital has like 8 rooms total) looked at me with horror and said “Are you VACCINATED?” (I replied “I’m his DAUGHTER.”) Once we got to the ward, my sister Martha emerged from his room in full PPE and there was a big red biohazard sign on the door. She said “you can’t bring Miriam in here, she needs to go directly to Elena’s because she’s an unvaccinated minor and Health Canada has been calling us.” (Yes, the government was calling my family on the phone because someone tested positive on a PCR test. Man, that country has fallen so far.)

I won’t go into all the details of the last ten or so days I got to spend with my father, but I will tell you a few things. For one, if a patient is in palliative care, even for an infectious disease, visitors are not required to wear PPE so we ditched the masks and gowns almost immediately. I’m a chronic insomniac, so I usually stayed until 2 or 3 am, when I got to know the night nurses quite well. One in particular used to come in without PPE and she’s just wink at me. She was awesome.

I should also point out that dad exhibited no Covid symptoms other than a mild fever, and none of us got sick. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to this scenario, which was admittedly far better than that of my uncle Simon, who died in November 2020 (in the U.K.) and was only allowed an hour with his wife and daughter at the end and a very restricted funeral service—my father is in the hospital, diagnosed with this virus he’d been terrified of for two years, and his own grandchildren can’t visit. That’s some fucked up shit. Excuse my language.

At one point, and I don’t recall the exact circumstances of this situation, but I had to bring Miriam onto the ward despite her unvaccinated status. I was so fed up at this point that I was doing things like entering through the ER because no one would open the front door, only to be scolded by the doctor on call. Bad pushy American. At any rate, at this point dad had stopped drinking fluids and wasn’t really communicating, but the moment I brought Miriam in, he opened his eyes and reached for her hand. Luckily Martha had the presence of mind to take photographs. At any rate, we decided at this point that we had to somehow subvert the Covid restrictions so that dad could see his other grandchildren (I have 9 nieces and nephews), and were able to bring them in, fully in PPE, two at a time. God, it was so ridiculous, yet at the time we actually felt like we were being wildly rebellious. That’s what a spell the entire world was under.

I had to leave on August 9, because I had a flight out of Detroit on the tenth. (My family lives in a place so remote that the closest Canadian airport is five hours away, and it’s way cheaper to just fly to Detroit and rent a car.) I knew at that point that I would miss the funeral, but I wouldn’t have made a different choice. That time I had with my father, the nights I spent playing him music and just hanging with him and mom and my sisters, was irreplaceable and absolutely worth having taken the worthless Covid shot. I had no choice. Unfortunately, he died the next morning, and I found out while I was waiting for my flight. (I was so upset that the flight attendant offered me complimentary wine at 10 am, which is a little early for me, but it was sweet of her to ask.)

This story feels very discombobulated, and that’s how it felt when it was happening and in some sense still feels that way, and I’m almost done. The Covid story isn’t quite over. Keep in mind my massive, repeated exposure to “Covid” in that hospital room, and also the fact that none of my family members had knowingly had Covid at any point and did not get sick after that time with dad and his allegedly rampant infection. Some months prior, I had enrolled in an antibody study for Covid, because I was curious to see whether the results I got aligned with the narrative we were given, and it was free, and I like information. I had three blood draws in spring 2022, and I thought I was done with it by the time I went to Canada and at one point actually lamented that I wouldn’t get a fourth because I was really curious what the results would be after my prolonged “Covid exposure.”

Within two weeks of arriving home, I got a text saying that the Texas CARES program was extending its antibody study and I needed to come in for a fourth blood draw. As you can imagine, I was extremely curious what these results would state. Surprise! No natural antibodies! No—according to the official story—Covid infection in the past! How could this have happened? We know the vaccines don’t stop “transmission” whatsoever, so it can’t have been that. The only conclusion I can come to is that he was so sick he’d have tested positive for anything. I guess we’re lucky they didn’t run an “HIV” test.

But seriously, people. Even assuming the mainstream narrative to be true, no one “got Covid” from massive, prolonged exposure. How do we explain this? Really—how?

I don’t know how to conclude this in a pithy way. This was so exhausting to write I can’t be bothered editing. I welcome your comments and feedback, because this story is just so crazy I almost can’t believe it happened, and I know I didn’t do it justice, because I’m still deeply grieving my father, and grieving the way he was treated by the medical system during the end of his life that must have been truly traumatic for him. Heck, it was traumatic for me. In some ways, it feels like the power is coming back on and the record is starting again, and it’s hard to believe what we were put through, and for what? It almost seems too crazy to be true, and in a way this whole Covid situation and our reaction to it enables us to understand the phenomenon of false memories or even repressed memories. There is a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Indeed, we are. And that’s all I have to say about that.