#COVIDDispatch – Social worker says changes needed in approach to COVID-19 victims

Who feels it knows it. That’s how Pamela Jones-Goodridge sums up her life-changing COVID-19 experience. 

Speaking to COVID Dispatch from home isolation, Jones-Goodridge said the seven days she spent in an isolation facility have altered the way she performs her day-to-day duties as a clinical social worker. 

Always extremely careful to follow the protocols, it came as a complete shock when she contracted the virus. 

Jones-Goodridge said: “It will always remain a mystery to me because I pride myself on being pretty safe in terms of following the protocols. Monday night, I felt like a tickling in the back of my throat and I ignored it. I came home the Tuesday night, took a shower, went to bed and I woke up in the early hours of Wednesday morning with chills.”  

But again, she brushed off the symptoms and reasoned that it was because she had been sleeping directly under a fan. However, things took a turn for the worst in the morning. 

“I took my temperature and I realized that it was high, and I said, ‘well that is odd’ so I took it a half-hour later and then 15 minutes after; it was still high. By then, I started to feel pain in my eyes and in my upper nasal cavity, but it didn’t feel like a headache, it just felt like sinus pressure,” she explained. 

Jones-Goodridge said she called her doctor and was directed to get a COVID-19 test. She was given some Zyrtec and told to get some rest until the results came in. 

She recalls getting the dreaded email at 4:30 on Thursday morning. It was at that point that she began to panic, not for herself initially but for all her close contacts who she said had underlying health challenges and some of whom were only partially vaccinated. 

However, after bringing her anxiety under control, the clinical social worker got a first-hand view of the problems in the process and how they can be fixed. She now believes that Government is using the wrong people to do the COVID-19 outreach.

Jones-Goodridge said: “When you bring a celebrity that, in the average Barbadian’s mind, you and I are miles apart in our experiences, in our outlook on life, the average Barbadian finds it hard to relate to that person. So that celebrity or that doctor or the politician telling persons you should take the vaccine because it will save your life amounts to nothing unless they can safely say ‘I am recommending you to take the vaccine because I know what it is to walk a mile in your shoes.” 

“Up until last week Thursday, I was like any one of those celebrities. I have been counselling a lot of people that have been positive that have been in facilities and up to that point I was very far removed from them and their situation and their experience until I found myself one of them. One of the things that I also realised when I was there was what I thought I was doing and how effective I thought I was being when I was counselling persons, I really wasn’t,” she reflected, noting that her seven days at the isolation centre at Blackman and Gollop Primary School caused her to reflect on her approach. 

Jones-Goodridge said that one of the major shortfalls throughout the whole process was the lack of information which was causing many people anxiety. 

Reflecting on her own experience, she said: “I didn’t need to speak to anyone to help me navigate. What I needed was information that I wasn’t getting, so that’s what I mean when I say when I was on the other side of this I was getting it all wrong because people would reach out to me and I would immediately start counselling them.” 

However, the experienced social worker says there is still a place for counselling but more must be done to put patients’ minds at ease. 

“I’m not saying there isn’t a place for counselling. When you first get your diagnosis that is not what you want; you just want someone to talk to you to explain to you what is going on.”

This article appears in the October 8 edition of COVID Dispatch. Read the full publication here.