I was diagnosed six years ago with COPD. At the same time I had been retired from work on medical reasons, so I ended up being alone at home sick. And then COVID popped up and everything. So that part was a very, very dark place to be. I had anxiety. I was even suicidal at times. I experienced loneliness. I was scared of the future –– the lack of it –– because you don’t know. 

The doctors, they just diagnose you and they say, “Well, you have COPD, take your pumps, do this, do that.” But there’s no explanation or help. You’re just told something and they don’t give you an opportunity. I was the one to ask, “Is there something that I could do?” Of course quitting smoking was the one thing I had to do first, and I did. So I’ve been six years without smoking, and then I tried through through them to get the readaptation –– the physical things, you know, exercise and all that. And that came in with COVID, so that’s when we started with the Zoom thing. 

I told everyone: I have no voice. I don’t believe that I have a good voice.

And then all of a sudden I receive a message: There’s somebody in Sherbrooke who wants to do a mixed thing with the Zoom and the choir. And listen, I told Louise, I told everyone: I have no voice. I don’t believe that I have a good voice. And especially now with the pumps that I take… Right now my voice is very rough and I’m right in the middle of an exacerbation of COPD, so I’m taking a lot of medications and I’m not at my top here. But I said, “I’m a Celine Dion in my car when I’m alone and nobody hears me. I sing and I love singing.”

I joined that choir with a few people that I knew from the Zoom and the exercises. So now we’ve become this little community. There’s all of us in Zoom and there’s the group that we sing along with. And I’m alone in my room here, so no judgment from nobody. I can sing my heart out and even if I’m off key or something, nobody judges me. [Louise] gives us capsules of information and I learned a lot more about my disease there, how to use my lungs and and all that. 

So I can say now that this experience with the choir has given me sharing with other people, because we do have a part of sharing. You do create friendship with other people. And there is the learning, because we go a bit further. There’s songs that I I never thought of singing, and some have become my favorite, and they’re canons, you know, when you you have different people coming in at different time. And now we’re practicing one that is really nice one that I love –– Gloria. So you exercise, you learn. I never learned to read a partition before and now I’m starting to get interested by it and learning and watching. So there’s a lot of your mind working too.

I learned that I can do so much more than I thought.

It’s nice because it enables anybody to do it, whatever stage of the disease you’re at. There’s some people that sing with the oxygen tube in their nose. I learned that I can do so much more than I thought. I had given up on so many things in life. 

One thing that I had I learned from sharing that’s important: I think that at one point when I was very, very depressed and all that, I went to see my doctor and I finally asked for help because I was in that dark place. And I asked other people online, “Is anybody on anti-depressants?” We were eight online at the time and four of us were were using those. So you know when you you get diagnosed, you don’t anticipate all that. And now I find that I have made so much progress. I’m living again. I’m living again. 

It makes you feel like you took a little bit of control over something that you don’t control.

Three or four weeks ago I made the drive [to the choir] with one of the other Zoom singers, and my husband was my driver. So he drove us there. It’s a two-hour drive there. We had lunch with Louis and then we sang as a group. And I was a bit stressed for the first, I don’t know how many minutes, because for once I was singing with a group. But it’s such an experience, it’s very different. It’s nice to sing and it’s too bad for me that it’s a two hour go to, two hour come back drive, because I would do it more often for sure. But I’m so grateful that I can do it, that we’re in a stage of life where Zoom is very available and we can share and do things like that. So even when I’m not feeling that good, when it’s cold outside, when there’s snow, we’re still there, they’re still there every Friday. I never thought… I said I’m going to try it, and I tried it the first session there, and now this is my fourth or fifth session there. 

I’m so grateful for that. It does make a difference. It makes you feel like you took a little bit of control over something that you don’t control –– the disease –– but you’re helping yourself and you’re doing stuff that is positive for it. I know it won’t cure me. Wherever I’m at, I’m trying to to keep what I’ve not lost yet. It gives me hope. It gives me a lot of hope.

So thank you to everybody here who’s doing this research, Louise who’s taking such good care of us, Louis who’s been there, everyone else. I’m getting emotional here, because it’s so true that it does help people. So don’t don’t let go. Please don’t let go of us.