What Happened to Gill Deacon?

Curious minds wanted to know

If a person happened to type my name into a Google search during most of 2023 and 2024, they would have seen—as I once did when looking up a detail on my own website—that the search engine’s first suggestion was not Gill Deacon CBC, nor Gill Deacon author, nor husband, children, net worth or any other such boilerplate scuttlebutt query. The presumed search question was auto-directed to What happened to Gill Deacon?

After decades of being a familiar broadcasting presence of one sort or another across the country, I seemed to vanish. Clearly a lot of people, enough to prime a Google search prompt, wondered where to and why.

The question is a good one, though it did undo me to see it in my search bar as the AI-deduction from repeated inquiries; the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of everything I thought I knew about myself, laid bare in five simple words.

What happened, indeed.

One way to answer the question is with an empirical chronology of mysterious medical miscellany:

In July of 2022 my heart began beating erratically, atrial ectopic beats, as the cardiologist explained. Was that why my workouts felt so much more challenging throughout that summer and fall? By October I had developed a relentless sinus headache no decongestant could relieve. Helming three hours of radio every day began to exhaust me; the rock n’ roll energy of live broadcasting, historically rocket fuel in my veins through decades of television and radio hosting, could not offset the increasingly leaden feeling in my limbs, my head, my mood. I felt a coming-down-with-a-cold chill but never a single sneeze. In late November, after a week of wearing a woollen toque at the office, I decided to take what I thought might be a few days off work to shake whatever was dogging me. As those Google searchers know too well, I never went back.

I wore that wool hat all day and all night for the next year and a half, even in summer’s heat. My legs buzzed from the inside, my gut roiled, my ears screamed with round-the-clock tinnitus. Energy sputtered to a crawl. An increasingly mysterious salmagundi of symptoms kept me within easy reach of a horizontal surface, and made the person I once knew myself to be into an alarmingly distant memory.

For twenty interminable months.

Parked on the couch, early 2023.

What turned out to be Long Covid sidelined me for a couple of very hard years. It kept me off the airwaves, under the radar, and mostly on the couch.

No wonder concerned radio listeners turned to almighty Google in search of clues to my whereabouts. My own internet search history over much of those twenty months tells the anguished tale of my exasperation: “how to diagnose Lyme disease” … “early symptoms of MS” … and eventually, “How long does Long Covid typically last?”

At some level that avalanche of symptoms does answer the question of what happened—that and the ferris wheel of medical appointments, expensive parking lots, masked rides in crowded elevators, perplexed specialists, clinical trials, vitamin supplements, daily symptom logs, acupuncture needles, naps, controlled exhales, legs-up-the-wall breathing techniques, slow walks and nutritional regimens that made up a full seven seasons of my life.

But what else happened to Gill Deacon?

That answer hums along a more delicate undercurrent, a fine strand spun from the fibres of a midlife medical ordeal. What really happens to us when everything we thought we knew and could count on collapses beneath us like wet cardboard? What happens when we are flayed by uncertainty, reduced to isolated glimpses of who we once were, trapped in the miasma of doubt?

In addition to its humbling destructiveness, a long period of illness offers an opportunity for reflection. My extended time spent mostly prone and alone led me to ask questions for which the breakneck pace of my healthier, active days had never made time.

Who else might I be if I am no longer the high-energy broadcast host and performer I have come to be known as?

Where else might I find purpose and meaning?

What small joys have I not yet discovered?

Even if (because for so long it did feel like an if not a when) my health is restored, what do I want to do with what remains of my one wild and precious life?

Curiosity held out a beckoning hand and I welcomed its guidance through the darkness. Leaning into the uncertainty felt like the best—perhaps the only—option.

*

If you have spent any length of time stripped of all you had dared to hope your life might look like, stewing in the belly of fear and loss, you will know that the return of energy and stamina is almost like being anointed. What’s this? A spark of ignition? A flash of delight? An ability to leap to my feet? Every bit of it magnificent. It is hard to overstate the depth of my rejoicing to have recovered from long Covid. I am in a giddy love affair with my own energy, that cherished valentine returned from time away, whose shining virtues radiate more brightly, burnished by the absence. Any built-up crud from having been taken for granted or mistreated has fallen away, a carapace removed. What has emerged is a darling newborn of possibility, a willingness to explore new things. Yes, at the risk of appearing to have joined a religious cult, I can say I feel a sort of rebirth, at age 58. Never saw that one coming.

We don’t have to undergo a gruelling health crisis in order to rethink middle age. The intersection of wisdom, loss, self-awareness and the perspective that can only come from challenges met and obstacles overcome, can actually be a centre of buoyancy; a well-buttressed starting point from which to look for pleasure and wonder. Because if not now, when?

So the honest answer, Google, should you be reading this, to What happened to Gill Deacon is that I went through something hard and emerged more committed to my curiosity and my power to navigate uncertainty. I want to see all that I am made of.

Which means the better question might be What is happening to Gill Deacon? A lot. Every day. And what a thrill to be able to enjoy every bit of it.

Headstand with Hugo. (16 and deaf but he hasn’t lost his curiosity!) December 2024