New London Donna Whitehouse, a personal care assistant at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, dispenses dignity for a living, helping patients clean and dress themselves, and providing them with whatever else they might need short of medication.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the job’s gotten tougher, Whitehouse said. The tasks are more time consuming, the protocols more restrictive, the distances more frustrating.
But the hardest part is what she’s had to stop doing.
“I dream of the day I can (again) sit on the edge of someone’s bed and simply talk to them,” Whitehouse, 63, of East Lyme, wrote in an email. “I became a PCA a very long time ago (27 years or so) right after my mom passed away. When I watched how the PCAs took care of her I knew right then that’s what I needed to do for a living. When COVID started and it started limiting the time we could spend with each patient . it breaks my heart.”
Published December 28. 2020 4:34PM By
The Day and theday.com have a longstanding holiday tradition of publishing a series on interesting local people who come to our attention or more often, whom the newsroom seeks out, because the subjects are typically not in the limelight. The articles share a theme, and the one for 2020 was crystal clear: people who stepped up to help others in this difficult year. They are the bright lights of 2020.
Eleven articles in all, done by Day reporters and photojournalists, recount the response of people, through their jobs or volunteering, to the familiar litany of hardship: pandemic deaths, emergency calls, recuperation, hunger, job loss, evictions and no way to pay the rent; and in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, the need to re-assert the pervasiveness of racism. The effects of pandemic and protest often overlapped.
The vaccinations, broadcast via Zoom, were administered shortly after 8:30 a.m.
“This represents a day of hope in our fight against this pandemic that has ravaged our community and our country the last nine to 10 months,” Patrick Green, L+M’s president and chief executive officer, said at the start of the event.
He said vaccines are “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Kate Graves, an advanced practice registered nurse, received the first injection, followed by Donna Whitehouse, a patient care assistant, and Dawn Kirk, who works in the food and nutrition department.
Graves said she and a friend who is a co-worker have been working on a COVID-19 unit since the pandemic began.