1. Al Green - "Tired of Being Alone"
2. George Clanton - "Warmpop"
3. Joe Hertler & the Rainbow Seekers - "Old Love"
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NOTES:
Today's episode is a heavier one. Our guests are all healthcare workers from different areas of the field - all based in the Rio Grande Valley - and all with stories to tell.
Our opening conversation is with a good friend of mine, Evy Rendon, who up until the arrival of the pandemic had been embarking on a new career as a speech pathologist. Evy tells us about becoming unemployed, and shares her experiences navigating the increasingly complicated unemployment benefits system. On top of speech pathology, Evy also DJs under the name Ojitos with the Rio Grande Valley's chapter of the world-class Chulita Vinyl Club. You can find the RGV chapter's recent pandemic-inspired "Dancing With Myself" mix online at the club's Soundcloud page along with other mixes from various CVC members.
Our second conversation is with John, a developmental health case manager with Tropical Texas Behavioral Health, a mental health clinic in Edinburg. He shares how his job has changed under the current stay-at-home orders - under normal circumstances he would be able to make home visits to clients to assess the progress of their rehabilitation through the services of the clinic - with social distancing measures in place, he's had to adapt to maintain the same level of support for his clients. This, as you will hear, is not without its own challenges.
The closing conversation of today's broadcast is with Briana, a Registered Nurse at the Edinburg Children's Hospital who has personally lost people to the virus, and who shares experiences from working on the frontlines. From the rise in potential COVID-19 patients to the lack of available personal protective equipment (PPE) for her and her coworkers to the lack of support from superiors, Briana's time at work has become more challenging than ever. She talks about a rise in child abuse cases coinciding with the arrival of the pandemic in the Rio Grande Valley, which is likely a result of current shelter-in-place orders keeping children at home with abusive family members - similar to the reported rise in domestic abuse cases in which people have had to stay home with their abusive partners. We also talk about best practices for minimizing spread of the coronavirus including but not limited to: using proper PPE, minimizing travel outside your home to essential activities, and doing our best to disinfect and isolate items and clothing that could potentially carry the virus after being out and about.
Since these conversations happened almost a month ago, I reached out to Briana for updates on what we talked about, and will share those follow-ups below:
AS: So when we talked, the time it took for testing results to arrive was about 3 days. Has that changed?
B: There have been improvements from the length it got to get results back. It actually was closer to 5-7 days in the beginning. Then it went to 3-4. Now we’re at about 1-2 days. We finally are able to test in hospital so the turnaround is much quicker.
AS: You mentioned at the time that y’all had been reusing gowns and masks for extended periods of time, and that there was a limited supply of PPE in general. Are either of those still the case?
B: We reuse the masks still. We went from using the masks for a week, to a month, back to a week, [and] we now have them for one shift. Our gowns and eye shields are allowed to be thrown but the eye shields we have a low supply of so we’ve had to resort to placing [them] in paper bags and putting our names on it... same with our N95s, surgical masks, and cloth masks.
AS: You had also mentioned that cloth and homemade masks are at best minimal protection against the virus. Is this still your position on them? I know they’ve become very prevalent now and some folks believe they serve a better purpose for reducing the spread of droplets from infected people. Would you agree with that, or would you still recommend folks try to use something better than homemade masks?
B: Hm, this question is weird for me to answer. I don’t hate cloth masks, and I’m definitely not against them. I mean we all wear one at the hospital until we go into a patients room, or a heavily populated area of the hospital. It’s better to have something than nothing at all. I think my point was to compare the lengths and differences between what health care workers do to protect ourselves and what the community is told. It’s very different and I think because they’re vastly different it almost feels like we’re not telling the community the best information.
AS: Have your patient numbers gone up/down since we spoke?
B: They’ve been fluctuating. In adults and pediatrics. We go up and then go down. Today (4/27/20) I had a full and heavy load of patients while last week I breezed through the day.
B: We are actively preparing for an influx of patients. Passing COVID-19 is as easy as a parent going to buy groceries with a cloth mask and coming home and infecting their child. Which we’ve seen. It was also really surprising because they didn’t have the symptoms were constantly told to look out for. So, we’ll see what happens. You definitely won’t see me out and about though. I recently had a COVID 19 scare - just recently finished my 2week isolation - and the not knowing if I passed it on to anyone else was terrifying. I don’t want to go through that again.
Thanks to all of the brave healthcare workers doing their best to keep us healthy and safe! Thanks to you, dear listener, for taking the time to listen to these stories. Stay vigilant and stay home, even if your local government wants you to leave the house to buy things and risk getting you or those you love sick. It's. not. worth. it.
Once again, the intro and background music was made by yours truly, and the artwork for each episode was designed by me with the use of Swiss Typefaces fonts, licensed exclusively for this mini-series.
See y'all next week.
AS
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