A Year of COVID
Editor’s note: Woodland resident Melissa Pond is a program manager with Clark County Public Health’s COVID-19 Response Team. She started working for Public Health at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a case investigator before shifting into her program manager role. The following is an oral history, told from Pond’s perspective, about her work, losing an uncle to the virus in April, and her own illness in October. This is part of a series of stories focused on local people’s experiences during the pandemic.
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The first few weeks of the pandemic, cases were just trickling in. I thought, “Maybe it’s not going to be this big thing.”
At the beginning it was like, “We just have to protect our elderly. They are the most at risk.” But one of the first cases that hit me was this young woman, who was in her early 20s and pregnant. She was one of our cases that was hospitalized. That’s when I realized this could be bigger than what it feels like right now.
It’s not just our elderly that are impacted. Here’s a young person, who’s probably in some of the best shape of her life, and she’s carrying a baby. We don’t know how this baby is going to be affected.
Editor’s note: Woodland resident Melissa Pond is a program manager with Clark County Public Health’s COVID-19 Response Team. She started working for Public Health at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a case investigator before shifting into her program manager role. The following is an oral history, told from Pond’s perspective, about her work, losing an uncle to the virus in April, and her own illness in October. This is part of a series of stories focused on local people’s experiences during the pandemic
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The perspective of public health has been interesting for me. My nursing career has pretty much been all case management. Really in-depth, one-on-one care. I had to shift my mindset to where the community is our patient. One of my colleagues made that statement, and all of the sudden things made sense to me. It’s the community, as a whole, that you are trying to keep healthy. You just can’t dive into one case and live in that case for weeks on end, or you lose track of the community.
When we had our first major outbreak at Firestone Pacific Foods, that was my first view into how broad and deep this is. Not only was it a large number of people, all at one employer, who were infected, but because it was spring, it was peak harvest season for fruit and peak season for freezing. It impacted fruit growers down in California because that’s where they import from. This one outbreak in one business affected farmers in another state because there was nowhere to send their fruit. There’s all these other impacts from COVID-19 that often go unseen.
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When I was doing case investigations, I would call people who had tested positive, or if they weren’t available, a family member or spouse, to try to get as much information as possible.
In the course of a day you would talk to two or three people who had tested positive and been exposed, but were hardly having symptoms or had no symptoms. Then you would talk to people who could barely carry a conversation and you would shorten the interview to the bare facts because you could tell they were struggling just to have a conversation.
One of the hardest things was when you called and got hold of a spouse whose partner was hospitalized. It was often the first time in these long-term marriages they really had spent nights away from each other. They might say, “My spouse is in one of the scariest situations of their life and we can’t be together, and you’re not helping.”
Those are hard conversations, where you’re trying to get detailed information about their activity, where they had been, what they were doing and how they had gotten sick, and all they can think about is that they can’t be with their loved one.
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Different periods of the pandemic have been intense. Sometimes it’s eat, sleep and breathe COVID. It can feel like I’m doing something, but not helping individual people, so there has been that stress.
Recently I was watching a medical show on TV, and they were going through a dramatization of the first two weeks of the pandemic. I just got super emotional. I thought, “Well, I haven’t processed emotion around this yet.”
I think it has taken a toll over the last year. I’m just starting to look back over the last year. So much has happened, and yet nothing has happened.
It’s been a challenge to de-stress because it feels like you’re never off duty. I’ve got my regular work hours, but people in the community know I’m doing this. Before and after work, I have family members calling with questions. I have friends calling with questions. They have been exposed. It doesn’t get shut off. That’s why I don’t watch the news. I can’t take any more COVID information at the end of the day.
As has everybody, I’ve had to cook a lot more at home – more elaborate dinners, which I hadn’t done as much before. That has been therapeutic for me. I bought a bunch of carrots and didn’t use them in time and created this creamy carrot soup and that has become my favorite this fall and winter.
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Working with an interpreter on case investigation can be challenging. You have language and cultural barriers. It’s a pretty complex disease, figuring out who needs to isolate and who needs to quarantine, especially in a household where there are multiple adults and multiple children and you have the person who’s positive and they have an isolation period, but then everybody else in the house has a quarantine period.
Depending on if you’ve got Parent A who’s positive, if Parent B ends up positive five days later, then that whole quarantine period for the household shifts. It’s a very complex situation to explain to somebody even if you’re talking to them in their native language.
Plus, you’re telling people they have to stay home for weeks. You’re already in a household where you need three people bringing in an income to get by, and now no one can leave the house. Then if people rotate through getting sick, it could be six weeks before you are released for work. Even if you’re working with an interpreter you can feel the anxiety coming up as you know they are getting the information that they won’t be able to leave for work for weeks on end.
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I got sick with COVID at the end of October.
I was flat in bed for five days. I had been thinking, “I’m healthy. I take care of myself. I eat well. I take all these supplements. I’ll be fine. Even if I do get it, I’ll be a light case.” It was really shocking to see how sick I got.
When the county health person called me, I coughed through the whole conversation. I remember thinking, “It’s so hard to talk. I hope I was really patient with people when I called them.”
If I took a 15-minute shower, I would go back to bed and sleep for four hours. The week of Thanksgiving was the first week I was able to work a full 40 hours, even at my home office. I just had no energy. I could get through about five to six hours of work, then I had to take the rest of the day off and nap.
I lost my senses of smell and taste. I went out and got a fresh-cut Christmas tree the Friday after Thanksgiving. I love that aroma and I remember thinking it was a small tree, but it was still unusual it didn’t have more fragrance.
It wasn’t until Christmas week that I was able to smell it for the first time.
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My uncle died in mid-April in Colorado. He was my mom’s brother. We are a tight-knit family, even though we are spread out between the Dakotas, Colorado and the West Coast. I have one aunt who lives in Denver with him and she was his primary caretaker. He was in an assisted living facility.
We all went to the same high school, through my grandma, to my mom and her siblings, and then me and my siblings. We were planning on being together in June for a school reunion.
I helped my aunt emotionally because she felt kind of alone dealing with his death. She was not able to visit him. To not be able to grieve, it’s almost like it hasn’t happened.
It’s the little things that hurt most about his death. My uncle was adamant he wanted to be buried in the cemetery where the rest of the family is, and because we couldn’t make that happen, he had to be cremated. It’s hard to know that somebody has very specific wishes and you are not be able to honor those.
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I’m pretty sure I cried the day or so after he passed, but I haven’t really thought seriously about it. It’s like, “OK, we can do that when we all go back for the school reunion.” You go into logical thinking, but when you stuff those emotions down, eventually they are going to come up, one way or another. I probably need to take time and maybe intentionally process that and have some conversations with my mom and my aunt.
About a month after he passed we tried to get everybody together on a Zoom call and we just had too many elderly people in our family so we couldn’t quite get that together. We have all been in communication, and we are hoping the school reunion gets rescheduled for this coming summer. We do have plans that when we are back for the reunion we will do a service at the gravesite where he wants to be. We’re all kind of hanging on for that.
