Items

• 
  11/27/2021

  Rebecca Ferber Oral HIstory, 2021/11/27

  Rebecca Lynn Ferber is a resident of Oronoco, MN, and currently works for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester as a CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist). In this interview, Rebecca talks about how COVID has affected her job as a CRNA and Mayo Clinic as a whole as well as a mom and wife. She also talks about how it has affected her family and friends and how some of her relationships have been strained because of different views on COVID. She touches on how it not only affects people's physical health but mental health as well and gives some advice for future generations.
• 
  2020-03

  Navigating through medical care during the beginning of the Pandemic

  During the beginning of the pandemic, I was taking care of a sick family member who needed multiple surgeries and doctors appointments. The sickness started prior to the pandemic, but continued through the beginning of March 2020. I remember having to wait outside in my car while she was in the hospital getting surgery and not being able to go inside while she was admitted to a room in the hospital. The stress and anxiety I felt was like none other I had felt before. Not only did I feel the stress of not being in that room to be an advocate for my family member, but also the true fear of her contracting COVID19 while having a compromised immune system. During this time, my work offered a six week paid pandemic leave that I utilized to take care of this family member at home. This reduced a lot of stress because I was able to quarantine us while she healed and take care of her. I will always be appreciative of my job for allowing this opportunity. As the world adapted, so did we, but I do have to say the scariest times were navigating the health care systems while everyone was attempting to lower the Covid19 rates.
• 
  2022-01-16

  hermit HERALD, ISSUE 136

  U.S. taking a knife to a gunfight
• 
  05/06/2021

  Liz Haynes, Oral History, 2021/04/21

  Liz Haynes discusses her life pre-COVID and how she has been affected during COVID as a cancer survivor. She talks about her love of travel and hopefully future plans, politics (local and federal), and ends with positive outlook for the future.
• 
  2021-09-09

  HIST30060 Father's Day

  This is a card my siblings and I wrote for our dad. In September my father was sent into emergency as he had to have a quadruple bypass. It was rather scary as no one could visit him whilst he was recovering. We are extremely lucky that his surgery got pushed forward by his cardiologist as now our public healthcare system is now struggling and surgeries like what my dad had are being postponed. His surgery was even postponed as another cardiology ward in a nearby hospital had a covid outbreak so the nurses and doctors at his hospital had to work over there. My dad came home a couple days after Father’s Day (it was the first Father’s Day we didn’t spend with him in our lives) and is now feeling so much better. The first thing he told me when he came home was that he “never wants to get covid” because he was on a ventilator, and it was “the worst part” of the whole experience. I genuinely thought he was on the ventilator for a day or multiple days as he didn’t stop complaining about how bad it was - turns out he was only conscious with the ventilator in him for just under an hour.
• 
  2021-10-08

  Organ Transplant Debate: Get Vaccinated or Move Down the List

  This article discusses the debate between patients who are unvaccinated and those who are vaccinated. Should it be a requirement for a transplant patient to get the vaccine? Being unvaccinated puts not only the patient at-risk for contracting COVID-19, but it exposes doctors, nurses, and other patients as well. Several states have already made it a requirement to get the vaccine before being placed on the organ transplant list.
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  2020-10-27

  Banner Health COVID-19 update in Arizona from October 27, 2020

  A press release from October 27. 2020 giving an update on COVID-19 in Arizona.
• 
  2020-11-10

  Banner Health COVID-19 update in Arizona from November 10, 2020

  A press release from Banner health on November 10, 2020, giving an update on Covid-19 in Arizona.
• 
  12/08/2020

  COVID-19 Dec. 9, 2020 press conference

  Marjorie Bessel, MD, chief clinical officer of Banner Health, talks about the pandemic, increasing numbers of hospitalizations and what to expect in coming weeks
• 
  12/23/2021

  COVID-19 Dec. 23, 2020 press conference

  Marjorie Bessel, MD, chief medical officer of Banner Health, provides an update about how the six-state healthcare system is handling teh COVID-19 surge.
• 
  12/30/2021

  COVID-19 Dec. 30, 2020 press conference

  Marjorie Bessel, MD, chief clinical officer of Banner Health, gives an update on how the health system is dealing with the pandemic and the importance of masking up to contain the spread of COVID-19.
• 
  01/27/2021

  COVID-19 Jan. 27, 2021 press conference

  Marjorie Bessel, MD, chief medical officer of Banner Health, talks about the need for vaccination and social distancing as Arizona experiences slightly fewer COVID-19 cases.
• 
  2020-07

  Diminished Quality of Veterinary Care During the Pandemic

  Our pets are a part of our family. So when their health is in jeopardy, it affects us all greatly. Early on in the pandemic, we had an emergency with our lovebird, Kermit. Our larger bird, an African Grey named Greycee, landed on top of Kermit's cage. Kermie proceeded to bite her toe through the cage bars, and Greycee bit back. Luckily we heard the scuffle and intervened immediately, but Greycee had created quite the puncture wound on Kermit's upper beak/nares. Normally these two are best buddies, so this was a suprising freak incident. I cleaned off Kermit's beak, but it looked bad and her breathing was shallow and rapid. Birds in respiratory distress can die rapidly. I rushed her to the emergency vet who told me that there was a 4 hour wait to be seen. I told them that Kermit wouldn't last 4 hours, so they agreed to see her immediately (for an additional fee of course) but I had to wait in the car. My already stressed and injured baby had to go into a strange place with strange people without her mom because of Covid. They stabalized her and sent her home for the night. I feared she wouldn't make it until the morning. Luckily, she pulled through the night. I called our vet immediately the next morning. It took several tries. Since you also had to wait in the car while there, and all conversations with the vet were over the phone, their phone lines were constantly busy. I finally got through, but they told me that despite the gravity of her condition there was no way they could get her in that day. Under normal circumstances they could, but with the new covid protocols every minute of every day was totally overbooked. I tried the emergency vet again and they had a 6 hour wait. You had to wait on site in your car too, which I couldn't do with my 4 year old daughter. Since Kermit is a bird, she cannot just go to any vet. There are only 2 avian vets in my area. I took a chance and called the other one and explained the situation. They were able to squeeze us in. Again I had to wait in the car and hand my baby off. She ended up staying the night. The blood from her wound had entered her lungs causing her breathing issues. She had recovered quite a bit by the next day, and the vet even allowed me in with social distancing and masks in order to show me how I needed to hand feed her for the next two weeks until her beak healed. At least because of the pandemic I was working from home at the time, so I could care for and monitor Kermit all day. Within a week she was back to her normal self. In the fall, our Dog Evie went to the vet because a suspicious lump had grown on her toe. Evie is absolutely terrified of the vet. She is also deaf and has limited vision, so it is harder to comfort her. She needs our touch and our smell for reassurance. Of course, jsut as with Kermit, we could not go in with her. The vet techs had to carry her in because she was shaking so badly in fear. She needed to be sedated to do the biopsy of the lump. The report came back positive for cancer. She had to go back in again to have the whole toe removed as the biopsy had not gotten it all. This time she had to stay nearly all day and be pumped with anxiety meds to keep her asleep until the procedure. It was thankfully successful, but she also needed a follow up visit, so more meds. The whole experience was traumatizing for both our animals and us. What's even worse is people were treated the same way.
• 
  2021-05-24

  A Memoir of 2020-2021: How COVID-19 Affected the Lifestyle of a High school Student

  The PDF tells the story of my life over the years from 2020-2021. It explains how covid affected the lifestyle of a high school student, with many other added details.
• 
  2020-05-06

  A Bad Time for My Appendix To Act Up

  I knew Cinco De Mayo in quarantine wasn't going to be as fun, but I wasn't expecting a really concentrated stomach ache after eating my mom's steak nachos. I was slogging through a now fully online spring semester of college and adapting my school's live sketch show FreqOut to be live-streamed instead over Zoom, so I had plenty on my plate. The next day, the pain increased to the point that I could no longer get comfortable in any position. My mom, after plying me with painkillers and crackers for a few days, decided to call in a family friend and registered nurse to check on me. She poked my stomach and said it was probably appendicitis and that I had to go to the hospital. I hadn't been to the hospital since I was carried out in my mom's arms and, this time, nobody was allowed to go in with me. I stumbled through telling people my symptoms as I had many more nurses and doctors poke me in that same spot and wheel me into different rooms. My poor mom was woken up around midnight by a call from my surgeon saying that my appendix was very sick but that I wouldn't have to worry about it since it was no longer in my body. Falling asleep in a hospital bed to the dulcet tones of a terrible HGTV show was the best sleep I'd had all year. They asked if I wanted to bring my appendix home with me, to which I responded "If I wanted to keep it, I wouldn't have paid you all that money to pull it out of me."
• 
  2021-05-18

  On Illness From a Virus and Surgery During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  In this essay, I reflect on my personal experiences with illness and recovering from surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• 2021-01-31

  Suffering and Loss

  I work as an investigations contractor assigned to assist my county health department with interviewing positive covid-19 patients. I recently spoke with an 85-year-old C19 patient who was hospitalized and awaiting surgery for a brain bleed at the time of our conversation. She explained that she had fallen in her backyard trying to retrieve her feral cat's bed from a rainstorm, tripped, and laid in the rain for almost two hours before anyone found her. Both she and her late husband contracted covid-19 around Christmas, and he died soon thereafter. The hospital where he received his final treatments allowed her to visit him just before he passed, which is an unusual and gracious blessing at this time. The medical interview that normally takes 30 minutes required almost two hours and tears from both of us. When we finished, I wished her well, offered that I looked forward to speaking with her soon, and asked God to bless her. I called her hospital gift shop and ordered a carved wooden angel to be delivered to her room, as she’s a woman of faith. I had the card signed from me and the Health Dept, so I suppose I’ll find out this week if anyone complained about it. More than anything else, I’m hoping her file shows a successful discharge and recovery by now. She told me she looked forward to trading in the cafeteria food for her son's gourmet cooking, and I pray she's already done that.
• 2020-05-28

  The Unseen Deadliness of SARS-COV-2

  I had a recent death in the family caused by the ongoing crisis. The huge spike in cases put hospitals and the whole health care system at risk of collapse. There are simply no funds, space, and people to control the rapid climb in cases. Because of this, many people who routinely need to go to the hospital had to pause their treatments. My grandpa, for example, had a small, stomach surgery to prevent his fluids from seeping into his chest cavity. A week or so after the surgery he was feeling ill again and very weak. He started getting chest pains so he went to the hospital. They found no leakage and were confused as to why this was happening. They gave him some medication and sent him home. Over the next few days, cases continued to sky rocekt...they doubled each day. He had had enough of the pain and was keen on seeing a more specialized doctor. But, he couldn't. All doctors were taking up 12-hour shifts to help with COVID-19. He finally got a slot with his regular pediatrician and she determined he must have had a small infection after the surgery. She prescribed him with many antibiotics and more pain meds and scheduled him for another appointment a week after. At that point, the hospitals were completely filled. Field hospitals were opening up, surgery rooms, and maternity wards were quickly being converted to ICUs (Intensive Care Units). He was not able to schedule a surgery to fix the problem and died at home a couple of weeks later. Although he did not die from COVID-19, COVID-19 caused him to die.
• 
  05/15/2020

  Painting and Grief

  My 82 year old grandmother has been diagnosed with a giant aortic aneurysm that has grown. Originally, surgery was not an option because of her age. Due to the growth the surgery has been scheduled to be performed at Stanford Medical Center. The surgery could be fatal and family has worked arranged her funeral in advance. Covid-19 has made the process of saying goodbye difficult. I decided to shelter-in-place with her for a long weekend. We used the time to go over family photos, listen to stories, enjoy eachother. We spent Saturday painting together. She has been an artist her entire life, this is her love language. Occasionally grabbing the brush from my hand to guide a watercolor shadow or highlight, she makes it look effortless. We said goodbye knowing it may be the last time we see each-other. The hospital will not allow for family to accompany her for her surgery or recovery. Waiting is all that can be done. Her name is Janice Simone Simon. She is 83 years old and the matriarch of our family. She is loved. Covid-19 has changed the way we say goodbye.
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  2020-04-01

  Intubation by dermatologist meme

  Meme of puppet dressed as doctor advising quarantine as alternative to surgery performed by dermatologist