Weyburn mom begs people to take social distancing very seriously
For Janelle Evans and her family, social distancing isn’t a choice: it’s a matter of life and death.
“News of the coronavirus reaching Canada and then Saskatchewan is terrifying,” says Evans, who wants the public to understand how necessary it is to take precautions to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.
Her four-year-old son, Isaiah, was born with multiple skeletal deformities, including cervical kyphosis. As a result, he has a 90-degree curve in his neck, which causes his airway to become partially closed off, making it difficult to breathe at the best of times. Isaiah received a tracheotomy when he was two-monthsold. Children with tracheotomies are prone to pneumonia. Hospitalized multiple times with the illness for the first half of his life, the pneumonia left scarring on his lungs each time so he doesn’t have the lung reserves he once had — and certainly not the capacity of a regular child.
What scares Evans is that her son just spent 18 days at Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital fighting respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
“We are still battling the effects of Isaiah’s last illness, so we are in no shape to tackle another one. Especially this one,” she said.
“It could kill Isaiah. The thought terrifies me.”
Evans recognizes people feel inconvenienced by doctor’s recommendations to self-isolate or socially distance themselves from others, but she says this is the every day reality of families with sick children.
“If we think we have a cold, we walk around with a mask on our face. If it’s Christmas and the cousins are sick, we don’t go to Christmas,” she said.
“The fact that it’s a pandemic right now, you’re kind of at a loss of what to do, like how to truly protect him.”
She says people need to put a face to who vulnerable people are and think about the collective good.
“Yes, it’s my son, Isaiah. But it’s also the child who just had his last chemo treatment. It’s the mother that just became pregnant … who knows what it could do to the fetus? We can’t just pretend that we don’t know who the vulnerable are.”
She says people need to understand these are important, temporary measures.
“People have kind of the ‘Superman complex,’ where (they think) it won’t happen to me. We have to get over that because there’s no reason for this virus to make it to Weyburn, Saskatchewan. We should know better.”
Evans says not only does she have to protect her son, but she needs to ensure her entire family — husband Ken and 15-year-old son, Liam — stay healthy. Same goes for their respite worker.
“If I lose respite care for three or four weeks, that takes a toll on the entire family,” she said.
Earlier this week, Evans took two weeks off from her job as a registered vet technician because she says she can’t trust people to quarantine themselves. “It shouldn’t be a big deal if you’re sick or travelled out of the country, to just stay at home. But you can’t trust people to do that.”
She hopes by speaking out and showing people who her son is, they will think twice about unnecessary trips outside their homes.
“If it can change one person’s mind,” she said, “I can make a difference.”