Curfew.  It is a word that few Canadians needed to adhere to once through their teenage years.  After the spread of COVID-19 from Wuhan, China to Canada and the world, the word became a new and important reality.   The life altering transformation that occurred to me during the pandemic lockdown was not because of the lockdown specifically, which is why I share my lessons learnt.  

Having not long returned from being out of the country, there was little to eat in the refrigerator and cupboards.  It was a frigid January evening when I ventured out to the grocery store to stock up on what was day two of the COVID restrictions.  There was enough time to do a quick shop before the unusually early eight o’clock closure.  The streets were deafeningly quiet.  I routinely went about the aisles putting this and that into my cart and checked out.  With my wares on the back seat, I readied myself to set forth home as the grocery store began its closing procedures in the distance.  The ignition gave a ‘clink’ sound amidst the eerie silence of Montreal.  I tried the ignition again.  Nothing.  The silence was not golden.  The curfew had begun, and my vehicle would not start.  I rang for a tow truck but because of the curfew, they were not operating.  Neither it nor the Canadian Automobile Association was an option now, so I walked through the parking lot back to the grocery store.  “I’m in luck!,” I thought when I saw a staff member still closing and called to him to ask him if he would be kind enough to give me a boost.  He affirmed that he would give my car a boost, so it was with great relief that I walked back to my car to wait for him.  After about twenty minutes, I traipsed back to the grocery store to see if the employee was still there and to let him know that I was going to continue to wait in my car and that I had not left.  Not a soul was around.  It was dark.  It was silent.  

The sub-zero temperature was bitterly cold.  The curfew added an air of urgency to my problem.  Not knowing what other option, I had, I decided to call the emergency service number, 9-1-1.  I reached into my pocket for my cell phone.  It was dead.  The cold had zapped all the battery’s energy, just as it had done to my vehicle.  Unbeknownst to me, the numbing cold was about to do the same to my internal battery.  

There was not a human being in sight.  I sat bundled up and shivering in my car while I waited for a passer-by who could maybe call the emergency number for me.  My muscles were feeling stiff, I was getting hungry and really wanted to use the toilet, but I could not muster the energy to move.  As I sat feeling the chill penetrate my bones, I gazed out of the window in hopes of a passer-by.  The sense of sleepiness was overpowering.  My body, like that of my cell phone and car battery, was shutting down. 

Who are all of these strangers, I questioned myself when I roused from a comatose state.  “Where am I?” was my first question to them.  “Addis Ababa,” was the reply.  Having never been there in my life, I could not understand how I ended up in a bed in Addis Ababa.  I was disoriented and utterly confused as to what was going on.  Confusion and memory loss, I was later told, was a common event of severe hypothermia.  Addis Ababa was all in my head.  In fact, I was in the Jewish General Hospital located in Montreal.  To this day, I have no clue as to who took me to the hospital, although my suspicions are the emergency services.  Perhaps the police found me and arranged for an ambulance. The great doctors and nurses who tended to my severe frostbite had no idea who took me there either.  But whoever the stranger was, I owe to you, my life.  Thank you whoever you are.  

The pain of frostbite is excruciating, as anyone who has had the misfortune of experiencing would surely concur.  Parts of my body lost skin and were very swollen.  To this day it is very painful, especially when there is even a little chill in the air.  Enduring this pain will be lifelong.  But I have a life and I am very grateful for that. 

I publicly share this story of events to remind people to be careful.  I am not a newcomer to Montreal.  I have felt the wrath of winter for 50 years.  A car, a cell phone and warm clothing are not always enough to stave off the cold, even when it is just during a quick jaunt to the grocery store.