Friend #11 - Lindsay
A high school friend
Week 11. Lindsay is the first friend I spoke to virtually seeing as she is based in Halifax. I’ve also updated the About and Resources sections of my site.
Since starting 52 Friends in October of last year, I often ask people how they stay positive or how they get through difficult times. The answer almost always centers around leaning on friends and then is usually followed by something like, “the show must go on.”
Lindsay is no exception.
“I tell myself ‘that’s show biz baby’,” she responds when I ask her those same questions.
The two of us met in ninth-grade science class and haven’t spoken since the twelfth grade but I quickly remember her good humour.
In May of 2021 at the age of 23, Lindsay had a stroke. She was also a newly graduated nurse living in Halifax.
“It happened all of a sudden,” she tells me.
After returning home from a walk with her dog, she began feeling dizzy and went to go lay down. Her boyfriend's brother was at home and took her to the hospital—the same one where she worked.
Because of her age, the doctors speculated that it could be a number of things but a CT scan quickly revealed that she was having a stroke. “It was caused by something called a patent foramen ovale (PFO) which is a hole in the heart that usually closes as a baby, it’s more common than we think,” she says.
Lindsay then spent six weeks in the hospital as a patient in recovery instead of a nurse on duty.
“No one could come to visit me because this was during the third wave of COVID,” she shares. It was actually her friends whom she met as a nurse that would sneak in to see her.
Lindsay’s boyfriend was incredibly helpful. “He would call and stand outside the window so it was like we were together,” she laughs. “I had to learn to walk again and used a walker at the hospital but didn’t want to once I left, my boyfriend was really supportive when we got home.”
She was off work for the next thirteen months, taking four-hour naps in the afternoon and eating mushy baby food before returning full-time this fall—admitting that it took her a long time to acknowledge what had happened.
“Did you go to school with a girl named Lindsay?” my mom asked me in my first year of university. “Her mom is the new office administrator at my school.”
When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2020, our family kept the news quiet. She didn’t want the sympathy of people constantly asking how she was doing or reminding her of what she was going through.
There was one person she wanted to speak to.
“One of the first people my mom called was yours,” I tell Lindsay.
“Oh really, that’s nice,” she responds with a smile.
Lindsay’s mom, Bev, was diagnosed with type two esophageal cancer in 2019 and after having surgery, she was rediagnosed in the summer of 2020.
Her father was her mother’s primary caregiver and with COVID restrictions in place, neither of them could travel to Halifax in the weeks following her stroke. “We spent July of 2021 in Halifax as a family,” she says.
In the months after that trip, Lindsay’s mom was in and out of emergency rooms. The cancer had spread to the lymph nodes and metastasized to other places—mostly her lungs. She died in December 2021.
“There was so much going on in 2021 that I didn’t process the fact that my mom had passed away,” she discloses. “But as a nurse, once I heard the diagnoses, I knew it wasn’t going to be very good.”
Lindsay and I talk about therapy and confess that we haven’t found it helpful. “I don’t want to talk about my problems, I want to be distracted,” I say.
“Exactly, you just want to feel normal,” she responds.
I ask her again how she remains so positive and she reminds me that it’s important to stay busy and that nothing can change what has happened.
“So what’s next?” I inquire.
She shares that she plans on buying a house in Halifax but that COVID has caused prices to increase over the last two years. “The pace of life is better and there’s less traffic than in Toronto,” she says.
I end the conversation by telling her about my plans for 52 Friends and she invites me to visit her in Halifax. “Maybe I will, I have all these new friends in new places. It could be a book,” I add.
“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted