Items

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  2020-03-17

  Accessing Healthcare and Preparing for the Worst

  The attached image is a screenshot from an Instagram story I posted on March 17, making light at the end of a few days of attempting to access medicine and joke about my growing confidence in my ability to handle the pandemic situation, even if I did end up ill. Directly following the declaration of a state of emergency in Ontario, in March, I realized I was running low on a maintenance prescription I take and had no refills left on it. To have my family doctor back home, in Ottawa, fax it to a pharmacy in the London, where I was attending the University of Western Ontario at the time, it usually costs $30 out of pocket, so I wanted to see if I could get an appointment before I tried that. I checked the student health website to see if they were restricting appointments and all seemed normal so I called. Plus, with my asthma and history of respiratory infections, I thought it would be a good idea to have a Flovent (steroid) puffer (inhaler) on hand in case I do get sick. I was on hold for 40 mins only to have the receptionist get exceptionally snarky with me and eventually tell me they were not taking regular appointments at that time. So, I called my family physician's office and they/she not only faxed the prescription I was low on but also the puffer and waved the renewal fee. The receptionist said many doctors are doing this to avoid people requesting in person appointments to have prescriptions done, as those are covered in socialized health care. Having the puffer available to me if I began having difficulty breathing is greatly reassuring both in that I would be less likely to require other medical intervention with it at my disposal, but also that I would not be taking up resources from someone who might have the disease worse or be at a higher risk than me, an otherwise health young woman.
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  04/28/2020

  A Picture of New York City in Crisis

  A link to an article from Photography Collections Preservation Project about New York City essential delivery person, artist and poet Kurt Boone. As Boone travels through New York City making his deliveries, he photographs the city during the pandemic. The first paragraphs of the article relate the project: "A bustling city once teeming with urbanites on crowded sidewalks and in jam-packed subway cars comes to a grinding halt. Save an eerie silence made more deafening by the occasional ambulance siren, the events of the city beyond our apartment walls are largely left to the imagination. For most, this has been the picture of New York City ever since Governor Andrew Cuomo’s shelter-in-place order effectively shut it down in late March and indefinitely altered daily life for millions. A smaller population of New Yorkers, however, have been uniquely privy to public life in the age of the coronavirus pandemic. This is the case for the many essential employees currently working in New York City including messenger and street photographer Kurt Boone. Every morning at 7:30 A.M., Kurt Boone–a veteran New York City courier of over 20 years–prepares for a full day of making essential deliveries around the five boroughs. After checking the news for the latest coronavirus updates before leaving his New Jersey apartment, Boone arrives at the World Trade Center in Manhattan only to greet a different city each day. In the U.S. epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, around 1,000 new coronavirus patients are admitted to hospitals daily. More and more quintessential New York establishments shutter their doors, and the gripping effects of this crisis are increasingly felt by all. Worse, there is no clear end in sight. For Boone, these scenes of strife and desolation are “surreal and depressing.” As a longtime documentarian of urban culture, Boone feels a responsibility to show the world how this pandemic is unfolding in New York City. "