Pandemic Spotlight by Ian Hanomansing

Author:Ian Hanomansing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: COVID-19, Pandemic, Canada, Medical personnel, Doctors, Communication, Public health
ISBN: 9781771622936
Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Published: 2021-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Good, The Bad . . .

In 2019, most of us had never heard the name Lynora Saxinger. Now, lots of people across Canada know who she is, what she looks like, and have caught little glimpses of her personality, all through a small lens and microphone in her home office.

“It’s actually been very very strange,” she says. “If you pause to think how many people see that, it’s paralyzingly terrifying. So in actual fact I’m just talking to a tiny little camera perched on top of my computer. On really busy days I’m running from one thing to another and it’s, ‘whoops,’ put on some lipstick and a scarf and, boom. It was so busy I got acclimatized to it and I thought, ‘All I can do is my best and move on.’ I’ve become less stressed about it, but if I paused to think about it at all, it is kind of stressful because it’s a lot of eyes.

“I’ll actually try to not see myself. I’ll watch the news but then I’ll duck out for myself because it’s so cringe inducing. I just can’t. And if I watch, I think, ‘I have to water that plant,’ which I brought in because of the joke you made about my blank wall.”

Broadcasting live from her house, becoming a trusted national voice during a pandemic, this doesn’t come easily. But at least she’s alone with her computer. “I am actually officially tested as an introvert, as a kind of extroverted introvert, if that makes sense. I’m the kind of person that, if I have a lot of interpersonal interactions, can seem very outgoing, but then I have to turtle for a while. So it’s been kind of interesting to me that because it’s this virtual space, it actually doesn’t affect me as much as speaking to a group of people would.”

It is through that camera lens that hundreds of thousands of people have looked inside her home, listened to her words and formed opinions about who she is and what she says.

“Does it feel like an invasion of privacy? Not at the time. I’ve actually had people say, ‘I noticed you did the news from somewhere else in your house the other day,’ and I think that’s crazy. It’s like this weird all-seeing eye you can manage not to think about too much, but you realize a lot of people watch it.

“I got recognized walking my dog the other day, and a patient I was seeing in clinic who actually had Lyme disease blushed when I came in to meet her. I don’t know if I find that positive or massively strange, because I’m just an infectious diseases doctor.

“I do appreciate having people reach out and say the way I’ve said something or the way I’ve explained something is helpful for them. I do get that kind of feedback sometimes, and I do squirrel it away for down days. There are a lot of people who are consumers, they watch the flow.

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