On the five-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 diagnosis in the commonwealth, the University of Kentucky released a podcast featuring pandemic memories from eight UK healthcare workers. One of those is Doctor Ashley Montgomery-Yates, who’d recently become interim chief medical officer for inpatient and emergency services. She said being interviewed was very emotional – and so was listening to the final product.
“It's good and bad, right? I mean, I think it's, it's that whole thing of when you get together with your family and you talk about, ‘Oh, do you remember when grandma died and how emotional it was? Oh, but then we were all together. Remember when little Johnny did this?’ And there's just – so there's a lot of that kind of emotion, I think, that runs through it.”
The first COVID-19 patient in Kentucky was diagnosed and treated at UK-Chandler Hospital. Montgomery-Yates and her colleagues were about to be put to a test America hadn’t seen for more than a century. There was no vaccine and no one was certain how the disease spread.
“Everybody developed special routines for, you know, you went home, you took clothes off in the laundry room, in the basement, and you didn't touch anything and everything. Got Clorox, and you didn't ride with your kids in your car, because we didn't know how long this virus could live,” Montgomery-Yates explained.
She also said treating patients without the literal human touch was hard for patients and healthcare staff alike.
UK Healthcare 5-year pandemic podcast
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