The first envelope came on a Thursday.
I remember because I was on the phone with my sister in Romania. Our mother had just been rushed to the hospital and was in intensive care. I bent down, picked up the envelope, and felt that familiar punch in the stomach: the board’s letterhead. Deadlines, threats, and the promise of more to come. They couldn’t have known about my mother that day. But they did know about me – about the surgeries, the biopsies, the diagnosis, the anxiety that came with it. They had my medical information. And still, the letters kept coming.
There’s a saying: don’t hit someone when they’re down.
For the last three years, that’s exactly what happened.
When my doctor wrote the first accommodation letter, I thought that would be the end of it. I believed we lived in a community where compassion trumped bureaucracy by default. I was so wrong.
Then came the surgeries. Two of them. Countless biopsies in between. The kind of waiting that makes a minute feel like an hour and a night feel like a year. My anxiety was already high from the diagnosis; anyone who’s been there knows the quiet terror of “what if.” Against that backdrop, the board kept coming: more letters, more “compliance,” more threats.
I learned something during those months. Cruelty doesn’t always shout.
Sometimes it arrives folded in thirds, slid under a door, stamped “URGENT,” signed “Sincerely.”
People ask me what hurt most. The answer isn’t the surgeries or the diagnoses. Pain is honest. What hurt most was watching basic decency lose every argument. The refusal to consider a simple accommodation. The implication that I was inventing things. The way rumours grew legs and walked the corridors. I began to dread the elevator because it came with side glances – a quiet referendum on my character delivered between floors.
So let me say this plainly to everyone who knows me here and everyone who works with me: I have never lied. I don’t lie.
Not about my health, not about what happened, not about the law. I told the truth because I thought truth would be enough. It wasn’t. The board wasn’t satisfied with undermining my health; they took aim at my reputation too. That’s the part no one prepares you for: you can recover from a procedure but rebuilding trust in a place you call home is a surgery with no anesthetic.
Some will say, “But the board had a job to do.” Yes, they did. Their job was to balance rules with humanity and the law of the land, to remember that the people behind unit numbers are people. Every time they chose paperwork over conversation, they made a choice. Every time they escalated instead of listened, they made a choice. Every dollar spent on lawyers instead of solutions was a choice. Those choices have consequences – devastating consequences for me, and for every owner who will pay the bill for a fight that never needed to happen.
You might wonder what I wanted. It was embarrassingly simple:
A small accommodation supported by extensive medical documentation. A community where speaking up isn’t treated like an attack. I used every legitimate path: requests, forms, the tribunal, the courts. Not because I enjoy conflict – ask anyone who’s sat with me in a waiting room – but because silence is what got us here.
There were bright spots. Strangers who slipped kind notes under my door. A neighbour who said, “I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” People at work who saw through the noise. For a moment, those things made the building feel like a home again. But it shouldn’t require private courage to offset public harm.
So why am I telling you all this now, in one letter? Because I’m tired of the whisper network. Because I don’t want anyone else to go through this alone. Because if you’ve ever said, “Someone should do something,” this is that moment. Read this, sit with it, and then decide what kind of place you want to live in.
If you’re on the board:
Choose a different ending. Publish the truth about costs and decisions. Put policies in place that prevent this from happening again. Apologize. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.
If you’re an owner:
Ask the questions that were never welcomed. Support candidates who understand basic empathy. Demand to see the line items that turned a neighbour’s medical crisis into an invoice.
If you’re undecided:
Picture the next person who needs help here. Would you want them to receive what I received? If the answer is no, then the status quo is not neutral- it is harmful.
I didn’t pick this fight. And I’m still here- not because it’s easy, but because this is my home too, and because the truth deserves to live here as much as any of us.
There’s that saying again: don’t hit someone when they’re down.
If you’re reading this, prove we’re better than that. Stand up. Speak plainly. Vote for decency and humanity.
Claudia
Owner, neighbour, human being
