Making COVID Lemonade
Our People, Our Stories is a special series of relatable stories recognizing our staff and the impact COVID-19 has had on our workforce personally and professionally.
Part 4: Making COVID Lemonade
How a pandemic pushed infection control to centre stage
For Public Health Inspector Denis LeChasseur, infection control has always been top of mind.
Then COVID hit and for the first time in his career, LeChasseur had company – the entire world was now talking about infection control.
Wash your hands. Scrub surfaces. Sanitize. Cover your cough. These simple messages went viral in 2020.
“People were starting to think of infection control on a broader scale and now we are not seeing as much respiratory illness or enteric illness,” says LeChasseur.
As an infectious disease guy for more than a decade with Public Health, he is encouraged by the collective momentum and awareness of infection control measures. Many of us loosely followed these guidelines to stave off seasonal colds and infections, but it wasn’t until COVID-19 that we all upped our infection control game.
Even youth, he says, who previously were not seriously affected by COVID-19, were wearing masks and physically distancing.
“I am comforted to see people thinking about infection control practices and being concerned about their elderly. It’s really touching to me to see how much people have sacrificed, that people are willing to sacrifice and willing to help other people as much as they have.”
“That’s how I get by.”
But even with world on high alert to prevent infections, sadly LeChasseur says people are still getting sick with other things.
Life and death in a COVID world
Last fall LeChasseur’s father-in-law passed away suddenly from pancreatic cancer. Due to COVID restrictions, LeChasseur was unable to visit him in hospital – a frustration many families have experienced in the past year.
“He was on all sorts of drugs, we were only getting reports from him on the phone while he was not communicating clearly,” says LeChasseur.
Funerals were also heavily restricted at the time of his father-in-law’s death.
“It’s a weird world we’re living in right now,” LeChasseur says, explaining that nothing has been normal in his life throughout the pandemic.
After losing his father-in-law, LeChasseur took on many responsibilities at the family farm. And as if that wasn’t busy enough, he, his wife and their six-year-old daughter welcomed twin girls to the family last November.
The twins were born premature, so yet again LeChasseur was personally faced with the challenges of COVID restrictions while the babies stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit.
“My wife was in post-natal with one of the babies, while the other baby was in the NICU. Only one of us could be in there at a time, so we always had to do this weird shuffle between.”
Choosing to focus on the positive
Although COVID-19 made navigating these life events more challenging, LeChasseur says he continues to focus on the positives.
“There’s been a lot of negativity, but I try really hard not to pay attention to that. It’s why I don’t watch the news,” he says, adding, he is blessed to have a healthy family and the opportunity to work from home (whenever he can) to watch his children grow.
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