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They said we were heroes but they treated us like villains

Title (Dublin Core)

They said we were heroes but they treated us like villains

Description (Dublin Core)

My experience with the covid 19 pandemic was very different from a lot of people’s. Instead of staying home and not going outside, I had to work. I wasn’t a nurse or doctor or even a service industry employee. I did work in health care but registration. I also didn’t work at an ER or hospital. I worked at an urgent care that didn’t treat covid but did test for it. This urgent care was also in the middle of Los Angeles, California. I was doing patient registration in Los Angeles, California, at the peak of the pandemic when one in every three people had covid.
Since we were so understaffed and overworked, I easily worked about 60 hours every week for almost a year.
Now I’ve worked many jobs throughout my adult life. These include retail during Christmas, a theme park during summer and Halloween haunts, and the graveyard shift at a casino. Out of all those, the worst people and treatment I encountered were from the patients who wanted to be tested for covid 19 when we ran out of tests. We were a private company, and Los Angeles had multiple free test sites available to anyone in the LA area. You didn’t have to even to be a resident or have insurance. But none of that mattered; they were there and wanted to be tested. Even though it was 9 o’clock at night and we ran out of tests over four hours ago.
I know I’ll always be able to find an administration or clerical job in health care. I have over ten years of experience in that field. But, after what I went through during covid, I don’t think I will ever work in health care again. Every time someone says health care works are heroes, all I can think is, they have a funny way of showing it.

Date (Dublin Core)

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Type (Dublin Core)

text story

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Collection (Dublin Core)

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

10/04/2021

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

10/10/2021

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This item was submitted on October 4, 2021 by Carissa Edwards using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive

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