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The low point of living with kids in downtown Toronto came for me just the other month.

My son and I had left our unit to take a bag of trash to the garbage chute. Then we headed to take the stairs down to play outside. I opened the stairwell door and my young son did as he always does and charged ahead. But this time he suddenly came to a stop.

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“Oh,” he said, confused. I followed behind and bumped into him. He’d stopped dead in his tracks. There on the floor right in front of us was a woman with a needle hanging from her shin. We’d interrupted her injection.

“Oh,” she said in response. My son looked up at me. I looked down at her. She looked up at me.

“Are … are you OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she stammered in a sad, apologetic voice. “I’m just leaving.”

Her arms were a mess. Her ankles were a mess. She was hanging by a thread. Her bony calf was the only clean place left to inject.

And there she was, in our building’s staircase, just a few feet away from my condo door.