Items

• 
  05/12/2020

  Kasie Meyers Oral History, 2020/05/12

  Interview with Kasie Meyers by Jack Halls. In this interview, Kasie Meyers discusses how COVID has impacted her role as a nurse and the changes she and her colleagues face. She also discusses her journey as a student and how covid has impacted her studies, she touches on her role as a mother and the difficulties that have been heightened because of the pandemic. She expresses how her relationships with friends and family have changed and also discusses her view on the government and its handling of the pandemic.
• 2021-10-04

  They said we were heroes but they treated us like villains

  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.
• 
  2020-05-27

  Hospital Beds in the City

  While coronavirus is a horror unique to itself, there are also ripple effects caused by the stress that it is putting on the healthcare system. This manifests itself in hospitals being unable to cope with regular, daily issues; for Baltimore, this is gunshot victims that are either occupying beds that could be used by coronavirus victims, or vice versa.