By Yomaira Corbin, AIRnyc Community Health Worker
Rachel is 60 years old. She lives at home with her husband in East New York, Brooklyn, one of the areas that has been hardest hit by coronavirus with one of the highest rates of death anywhere.
Rachel has cancer and is going through chemotherapy. When COVID-19 first arrived in New York City, Rachel still needed to get her weekly treatment at NYU Langone in Manhattan, which meant preparing for and traveling roughly 20 miles by car, putting herself at risk of contracting the illness. (Previously Rachel would have taken the 3 train and transferred to the 5 for over an hour each way.)
She told me the cancer treatments also get her down. We talked about how much change the world is going through and that we all need love and kindness. Rachel said she feels a lot of stress and anxiety about what is happening beyond the pandemic with racism among the police and the protests against police brutality.
Rachel was referred to me by OneCity Health, the Performing Provider System (PPS) that is part of the Health and Hospitals safety-net network. She had had an asthma exacerbation and had been admitted to the Coney Island hospital on May 1, 2020, just following the most harrowing month of the COVID-19 outbreak so far. I gave her a call to help her navigate health services, get medication refills, and maintain her appointment schedule. Given her anxieties, I made a special effort to help her feel at ease. She told me this:
“When I call you take me and treat me very nice… You talk to me very polite and respectable…. You make me laugh. Sometimes we need that more than anything else…. Thank you for the good in you. I appreciate the love that you showed. I want you to continue to do what you do. Your supervisor picked the right person.”
I am grateful for these words from Rachel. This is why I do this work. I know it helps and I know people need it all over the city. Rachel reminded me that that a small kindness can make someone’s day go a lot smoother. I’ll be sure to check in on Rachel by phone or by text in a few more days just to make sure everything is okay. Maybe one day soon she and her husband can make a trip back to Trinidad to visit family, as they used to do before our world turned upside down.
(To protect this person’s privacy, I called her “Rachel” for this article instead of her real name.)
Yomaira Corbin, BS, Community Health Worker, began working for AIRnyc in 2017 and has over seven years of experience providing home-visiting services to families with young children in Brooklyn. She also brings experience working with Family Day Care providers and running Baby and Me Groups. Her interests include cooking, reading books, and spending time with her family. Yomaira received her Bachelor of Science from Boricua College and plans to pursue a master’s degree in social work.
