107: Tara Chambers
Nurse, Berks Community Health
Tara Chambers is a nurse at Berks Community Health, a center which primarily cares for under-served populations. She is a nurse coordinator, so it is her job to ensure that the patients have everything that they need and that they are up to date on all of their vaccinations and wellness procedures. During the pandemic, Tara also picked up a second job working in a nursing home on weekends because they needed help so badly. Many employees quit because they were so terrified of contracting covid. She just helps out wherever she is needed, which was in the covid wing for a long time. Both of her jobs were complicated by the national shortage of PPE, and they had to go without a lot of necessary equipment sometimes, but there was a lot of sharing between different institutions and a lot of community members making masks for them, which helped so much. One of the pharmacies even donated a huge supply of hand sanitizer. The endless support from the community and people trying to do the right thing was incredibly heartening.
Working in health care, Tara has seen more people die from covid than she can count. The death of one of her coworkers affected her deeply. It was so hard for Tara to see so many people in such despair all the time and suffering so much. She remembers one woman who came to the clinic after she and her several small children, including an infant, had been exposed to someone with covid. The woman was so terrified, and Tara recalls going home and just crying for her. Thankfully, they were all okay in the end. At the nursing home, Tara would watch every week and more and more patients would be transferred, one by one, to the covid wing, where so many of them died. There were one hundred and ten patients at the height of the pandemic, and by the end there were only sixty.
Tara lives with her husband and their five children. Her husband and one of her daughters also worked all through the pandemic. One huge struggle for Tara was being unable to see her grandmother, who lives in an assisted living home, for so long. She was so worried for her for so long but was finally able to visit her near the time of the interview. Her experiences over the course of the pandemic have really made her value her family even more. Tara does appreciate how times like this can bring out the best in people. She saw so many people going above and beyond to take care of vulnerable members of the population and to get people vaccinated. Her biggest hope for the future is that everyone who can will get vaccinated so we can build herd immunity to protect those who cannot get the shot.
