Life, Interrupted

Wendy Dotson

Nurse and midwife with Virginia Women’s Center in Short Pump

As a certified nurse-midwife in a large OB-GYN group, I provide health care to women in pregnancy, birth, postpartum and gynecologic care. Now, women are urged to only come to the office when needed and leave their partners at home. So my schedule is light today — two women with problems and five prenatal visits.

Despite taking extra time between appointments to clean my stethoscope, my laptop and my mouse or do extra hand washing, I have time to think, and a lot of mixed feelings. I tend to hang out in the glass-half-full camp of mental health, and since the onset of this COVID-19 pandemic, I have overwhelmingly felt thankful.

The positive outlook is tempered by the crazy reality, however. The world feels “off,” and it is. My pregnant patients are worried today. Some are in tears, afraid that they will not be allowed to have their partners at the hospital with them for labor and birth. So far, it hasn’t come to that at our local hospitals, but it has in New York, so it could happen if/when things get worse. Many women are calling to ask me about home birth, even though that’s not on the menu of what I do in my practice. They imagine labor and delivery being closed due to bed shortages, and shortages of oxygen and supplies to deliver their babies. I tell them, honestly, that I don’t think any of those things will happen. But I also feel humbled by this global issue, and I have no crystal ball. I feel less sure right now.  

—As told to Tharon Giddens

Travis Hamilton

Owner, U-fab Interiors

We are obviously very affected like everyone is. I like to say that we’re kind of in the middle. We’re definitely not as affected as a restaurant or an entertainment business or a straight furniture retailer.

We’ve been fortunate. We’ve been very, very busy. We were well ahead of last year coming into this, and so we had a lot of work in the queue or in progress. So that’s fantastic. We had almost two months of work for our skilled tradesfolk.

So far, we’ve been able to keep most of them running. A lot have transferred to working from home. Even my upholsterers, I’ve got three upholsterers out of our seven who are working from home; five of my seamstresses out of seven are working from home. So we’re just kind of figuring it out, making runs back and forth. So that part of it is going really well. We’re not quite as productive as we once were, but we’re at least getting it figured out.

The first few weeks, we were still making sales. Those have started to dry up. We’re engaging with a lot of folks now. We’re talking to a lot of people about jobs that they’re planning. People are starting to think about pulling the trigger again. The last week or so, it’s been a lot of coordinating conversations and helping people with small projects, but people are still calling, and we’re still looking at lots of projects, and people are still kind of planning.

We closed our store way before everyone else, on March 14. We have some staff with spouses in law enforcement and the medical field, so we had some information that this was going to be really serious, and we kind of talked about it as a staff, and everyone was just more comfortable being proactive versus reactive. So we were able to lock our doors to the public very early for everyone’s protection, and we decided to keep working on a limited basis.

The other neat thing is that VCU approached us, and we started doing masks for them. So this week, we’re switching over a bunch of our seamstresses, and even our salespeople are cutting and sewing, and I’m cutting and sewing, or cutting and templating, and we are working with everyone at home. So it’s been a little wild, but it’s rewarding to have a project that has a deadline, that matters and will help people.

We made 1,000 yesterday, and we hope to be able to get up to 1,500 today. We scaled up to the volume a lot of bigger guys are doing in about a day. VCU needs 20,000 by next week. We’re not the only ones doing it. Our goal is to make about 10,000 of them, and we’ve got about 5,000 of them cut. So we are rocking and rolling on that for the next few days. And we will be talking with other folks if they still need the service. We’ll figure it out.

—As told to Susan Morgan 

Cristina Ramirez

Varina Library assistant manager

Henrico County closed its libraries on March 16.

It’s been hard, and it’s been easy, and I’ll explain both. It’s been hard in the sense that I’m very involved in a lot of local organizations. I do a lot of volunteering with a number of nonprofits, and I like to participate in activities after work that help the Latino community or that help minority communities, so because all of that has stopped, I don’t get to see any of my friends from those organizations.

But I’ve also found new ways of connecting with people online and sharing information that I think is important, both in English and in Spanish, to my network, and when I do go for a walk in the neighborhood or when I see a neighbor, it’s shifted the perspective a bit because you get to be more in the moment. You’re not saying, “Hey, nice to see you, got to move on, got to run.” It’s more like, “Hey, how’s it going? What are you doing?” So there’s a little bit more of that human touch without the human touch.

Our library’s messaging has really gone from advocating and promoting both the in-house and the online to focusing on the online as being the best thing that you can do for everyone to be safe. If a parent is at home and they’re with their children, the kids can continue doing their homework, and the parent can also watch a movie or download one of our e-books, so we’re offering a lot of different things for the whole family. Everybody’s really been super creative in how we can still engage the community and promote what we have virtually.

—As told to Rodrigo Arriaza

Duron Chavis

Founder, Resiliency Garden Initiative

The former manager of community engagement at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Chavis  was laid off in late March. He has continued outreach on his own with the Resiliency Garden Initiative, which is building free raised-bed gardens for people in the Richmond region. 

The Resiliency Garden Initiative came about to help people stay in place and not have to venture to grocery stores and be out and about in the world. At the same time, with people losing their jobs, it’s a strain to get fresh fruits and vegetables when you don’t have an income, plus a lot of people in the city were already living in areas that don’t have access to healthy food. What better way to have that anxiety addressed? Plus, gardening is therapeutic — it is a form of mindfulness. 

We’ve got volunteers from across the city who are delivering raised-bed garden boxes to people’s homes. We are building boxes in places. We are raising money for soil and will be delivering that as soon as we get the rest of the money — in less than 24 hours, we raised more than $3,000. 

We have had 225 requests for garden boxes in less than two weeks. I’m glad that a lot of people are trying to tap into being self-determinant and become engaged. For me, having just been laid off myself, I needed something to keep me balanced and not depressed by the whole situation. This is definitely helping me and keeping me hopeful and optimistic.

—As told to Jessica Ronky Haddad

Feras Khan

Critical care medicine physician, Chippenham Hospital

Working in an ICU during a pandemic can be stressful, for sure. Nevertheless, part of working in any ICU setting is being adaptable and remaining calm, and this is key in a pandemic. We are all learning new things every day and trying to apply that knowledge to help our patients as best we can. There can be a sense of information overload at times, so you have to be careful to avoid that. But this is what we have trained for, and we owe it to our patients to try and fight this virus as best we can.

Having COVID-19 can be a very isolating disease, and our nurses have really done a great job of trying to help communicate with a patient’s family as often as they can. I try and practice medicine the same as always, while recognizing that the patient experience can be lonely and it is important that we try to make every effort to help lessen that effect on our patients and their families.

In terms of keeping myself and family safe, we have to follow certain guidelines in terms of what kind of protection we wear at the hospital. And to protect my family, the main thing is making sure I don’t bring anything home with me unknowingly. This begins with washing my hands prior to coming home, wiping down my iPhone and ID badge with cleaning wipes or alcohol swabs. I leave my shoes outside in the garage and basically take off all my clothes and put them in a garbage bag to eventually be washed separately. And I take a shower in the evenings now – after my shift ends. My temperature gets checked at work prior to entering the hospital, which is good because it is another way to know if I have been exposed to the virus. We wear masks when we go out now for groceries and essentials. You try and be as careful as you can, but honestly there is only so much you can do.

—As told to Tharon Giddens

Julia Battaglini

Owner, Secco Wine Bar

[Battaglini married Dave Martin at Bryan Park on Tuesday, March 24.]

We wore our 2018 Elbys outfits! I barely still fit into that green dress after all the quarantine carbs. Dave looked as handsome as always. My friend Sarah Choi surprised us that day with a homemade bouquet and matching boutonniere, birdseed and flowers for the ceremony. There were 10 of us in attendance. We’d planned on a ceremony and reception at Heritage on Wednesday April 1  —

we’re hilarious — but as the date neared my family was unable to travel for fear of COVID-19, especially my 82-year-old father. So, we scrapped it and moved it up as soon as our officiant, Will Fitzhugh, could get a new one-day license from the city. Our wedding rings were inscribed with our initials and 4/1/20, so I guess now we get to celebrate two anniversaries. We’ve been together 16 years, so it’s all gravy at this point.

It was a blast — utterly simple and a beautiful day with friends we’ve known for two decades under a tree together. It was sad not to have so many of our friends or any of our parents in attendance, but we’ll have a big party on the other side. Plus, we brought a magnum of 1996 Pierre Paillard Grand Cru Champagne that we’ve been saving for ages, so that was a great way to cap it off (with disposable cups and lots of Lysol wipes). Also, it was pretty punk rock: “Love in the Time of Corona!” I think people will remember the joy and the silliness the most from that day. Our wedding pictures look like an album cover — everyone 10 feet apart on a hillside.

—As told to Eileen Mellon

Andrea Lyons

CEO and executive producer, All About Presentation

My business is planning events, mostly for corporations and for government agencies. In the event business, we’re kind of a subcategory of both entertainment and hospitality. Anything that affects hospitality and travel affects us. Anything that affects entertainment, that’s us. And so one of the hardest parts has been, not only experiencing the difficulty of COVID-19 from a personal standpoint but also kind of being in the shadow group of folks that get lost in the shuffle.

But when the government says you cannot make money or you cannot earn revenue on the thing that is your core business, that’s just difficult. The nature of what we do is interpersonal communication. It’s close up, it’s hands on. So when you can’t do that, you can’t earn any money.  It’s a very, very difficult environment.

 But for me to continue and thrive, I still have to eat tomorrow. So, the question becomes, very quickly, what is the next thing I can do? I’ve got to focus all of my energy on that, and I don’t want to do it in a way of desperation. When you have a team of people, you have to get them on board. So, it’s like if, we’re going to put all this work in, it needs to be a problem that we’re solving beyond just COVID-19 and filling in the gaps in our revenue.

What I’ve learned, and my momma taught me a long time ago, is that when you get into a pickle, like any kind of pickle, you give your way out.  I contacted the Metropolitan Business League and said, “Hey, I’m on these conference calls every day for COVID-19, and they have been so instrumental to just helping me stay motivated. I think you all should do the same thing for your members, and All About Presentation will do it, and we’ll do it for free.” And since then, we have been figuring out what are the most useful topics that every entrepreneur wants to know, and we started these MBL town hall webinar events.

After the first time doing that, we started saying, “OK, we can make this work,” because our webinars are different. They have music. They’re really structured because we’re event people. It’s not like the Wild West where everybody just comes in and starts talking. We have been doing copious amounts of research into virtual events and the various software platforms to the point where we’re excited — we’re now taking one of our largest events, what is essentially a two-and-a-half-day conference, and we’re making it 100% virtual.

I am of the mindset that when somebody asks how I’m doing, I say, “Ask me next year, I’ll be able to tell you then.” Right now, I just need to keep working. If I stop and inhale all this, I will have a good cry for probably a week and a half.

—As told to Susan Morgan

Janet Aardema

Co-founder, Broadfork Farm

By nature, Dan and I work from home. Our kids have always been home-schooled — though normally we call what we do with them “out schooling” because so little of it happens at home. We normally depend upon grandparents to help take them to their activities at this time of year, but obviously they have all have been canceled. Work is busier than ever, anxiety is heightened, and we have brand-new staff members who aren’t from the area. We are helping inform, calm, feed and monitor them. Whew!

During times of heightened anxiety, gratitude is the best medicine for the brain. We’re staying focused on our important role in our community — growing and baking food — and are so grateful for the community members seeking out our vegetables and bread right now. We try to keep at bay anxiety about whether we can meet demand this year, about how to function if one or more staff members get sick, and about how the economy may be so bad in 2021 that our community may not prioritize local organic food. So much potential for worry, so we practice lots of gratitude.

Our oldest child is experimenting with new recipes during her increased time at home, which we’ve been celebrating. She’s almost 13 and shares them on our Instagram page. We are reading books out loud to our kids in the evenings and laughing at Andrew Frieden’s antics and cracking up at the things our favorite NPR staff and magazine staff are sharing about working from home.

The kitchen is filled with vases of flowers our kids are collecting. They are also building trails in the woods, and we took time the other evening to carefully and slowly walk one that they had made. I wore simple leather moccasins that I stitched for myself last year so that I could feel the earth. It was the most grounding few minutes of my week.

It was odd to not be at St. Stephens Farmers Market for a couple weeks; it’s such a part of our weekly rhythm. We missed seeing our customers’ faces across the market booth table. We are testing a new preorder system, which is nice because it’s not peak season. We want to get the food we grow to the people who want it, and we are determined to do that safely.

Our customers have been flexible and understanding. We are excited to see people’s faces this weekend, even if we’ll see smiles in people’s eyes as they wear masks. The market booth staff will also be wearing masks, which will be an adjustment. The chance for our customers to see our smiles is usually an important part of our week of farming.

We don’t normally sell to restaurants this time of year, so that disruption hasn’t happened yet for us. Plus, sales to restaurants are a small percentage of our harvests in a usual year. We are budgeting for us to enjoy takout meals from our favorite restaurants every couple of weeks. What this year will hold for that market channel, we don’t yet know.

—As told to Eileen Mellon

Balin Kim

New mother

My mom was supposed to be my main support person for the birth, other than my husband. And then the hospitals closed to visitors; partners were still allowed. My mother came to our house when I started labor, just to spend time with me before we went to the hospital. I definitely wish I had had someone else who had experience there, but the nurses were great. I know my mom was going crazy. She kept texting my husband, and I was like, “Get off your phone!” But it was my mom, and she was worried about things because it’s her first grandchild, but also I’m her firstborn child. It’s just kind of nerve-wracking to be in a hospital with so much going on and not really knowing if — like, I didn’t know if there were any COVID cases at the hospital or not. And then that’s also why we were trying to leave as soon as possible, just to lower the amount of time we were there.

I’m definitely glad to be home. It’s weird also with the COVID thing going on, just because it’s kind of like all the medical offices are limited, and with breastfeeding, I was having trouble, and you can’t meet in person with a lactation consultant. It has to be via video call. So lots of weird things like that, but it’s preferable to be home.

—As told to Craig Belcher

Marquis Jones

Ellwood Thompson’s store manager

I’ve been in the grocery industry since I was 18, and I’ve never seen anything like this. My nine-year anniversary at Ellwood’s was March 19. I started off stocking shelves at night and moved my way up pretty quickly. Now, I’m the store manager.

We plan for the flu every year, it’s always a big thing, but nothing of this magnitude. This wasn’t really something we could prepare for, and we’ve had to adjust — more cashiers and more staff available for stocking. We can feel the vibe inside the store is a little different, people are more cautious. It’s a little weird for us, we’re big on community and being together and having conversations, not social distancing.

We meet as a team on a daily basis to stay on top of the laws and policies rolling out. Fortunately, we have a huge staff, so were still able to employ everyone. My job is to make sure everyone is safe at work, so I’ve been spending more money on cleaning and putting in even more effort. Some [employees] are very cautious, and we’re allowing them to stay home. Others are continuing to work.

As a local business, we’ve helped and connected with a ton of other local people and businesses over the years. It’s disheartening to hear they’re closing or losing their lifelong dream with what’s happening. I try to stay positive and support them in other ways as much as we can. Last week we bought Nightingale Ice Cream Sandwiches for the staff. I’ve known [Nightingale co-owner Hannah Pollack] for a long

time, and knowing a lot of her business got cut because of restaurants closing, I wanted to support her. We know it’s a tough time; this is my small way of saying, thank you.

—As told to Eileen Mellon

Laquea Carter

Fitness instructor

I got into Zumba first with my own personal weight-loss journey. I just fell in love with it. It brought me back to my childhood days when I used to dance. That’s when I felt most alive —  I didn’t worry about stuff as much when I danced. [After the YMCA shut down] I wanted to be able to give my students something to look forward to, not knowing it would reach other people. I didn’t want to charge anyone because you don’t know what people are going through. It was my time to use my experience to give back to someone, to give them 30 minutes of the day to dance it out. I wanted to just be a highlight for someone to look forward to in the week, because we don’t know when this is going to end. I like to tell my participants in the class, you don’t have to get the moves right — you can be in the moment and just dance. My Y family is really like a second family to me. I get excited to see everyone’s faces, and I get excited when someone reaches out to me and says, “I was having a rough day. Your class helped.” I get joy out of making people smile and making them happy, no matter what’s going on in the world.

—As told to Jessica Ronky Haddad

Kate Bredimus

Mother of triplets

[Bredimus is associate creative director at Elevation.]

I’m quarantining in a dumpster fire. I work in advertising, and we’re busier than ever, which means there’s a constant flow of projects, layered with helping clients navigate COVID-19.

That’s not the dumpster. The dumpster is my children, who are 6-year-old triplets — all boys. Home-Schooling them on top of performing my regular, full-time job is impossible. For every five minutes spent on my laptop, there are 40 questions about some assignment I’ve given them.

“How do you spell suffragette?”

“Are photons particles, or more like vibrations in a quantum field?”  

“Can I come out of the dog crate now?”

After the first day of quarantine, I bought three tablets on Amazon.  

We’ve been looking for a house for over a year, and the perfect one popped up last week. So, in addition to working remotely and breaking up fights about who gets to be what superhero, we also had to race through listing our current house in the midst of a pandemic. That meant maintaining a safe, 6-foot distance from cleaners and landscapers, then moving our quarantine to the minivan during showings.

Maybe it’s just the glow of fire, but I think there may be light at the end of the dumpster. We sold our house in one day. Work is getting done. We’re hanging in there like Spider-Man.

—As told to Susan Morgan

Sarah Braun

Former bartender at Peter Chang’s Short Pump and The Daily

Things can happen very fast.

At the reopening party at Peter Chang’s [in early March], everybody was a little bit uneasy. Having worked in a restaurant through H1N1 back in 2009, I remember some of the same sorts of feelings. We didn’t know a lot about it, and it just so happened the restaurant where I was working at the time decided to close their doors and laid off the entire staff. About two months later my son was diagnosed with cancer. I was unemployed and dealing with a mildly life-changing health event and isolated from family and friends for a while because my son was immunocompromised, so we’re kind of used to this. A lot of old feelings are coming back. Everyone I know is feeling this.

At Peter Chang’s we did know that something was going on that was causing some changes to our business, and slowly it started to decline. It was hard to tell at first because they had just reopened and a lot of the regular customers were coming back, and then very quickly that sort of stopped. It definitely wasn’t like it was in the past where every table was full and people were waiting for takeout up front. Instead of wanting to come in to relax, people came in just because they had to get something to eat, and that’s a different feeling. There was a very tense mood, and nobody was joking about anything. The really scary thing was knowing that my co-workers weren’t able to take time off if they were sick, and that is something the restaurant industry is going to have to change if we are going to make it in the world we live in now. I’ll tell you, almost every restaurant I have every worked in has a strict you-can’t-call-out-of-work-unless-you-have-a-doctor’s-note policy.

It was very surreal. I left work, and they sent out an email 30 minutes later saying they’re closing the restaurant. The next day they sent out information saying we are all officially laid off indefinitely. I had to file for unemployment. There are no hours for anyone in the service industry, anywhere. A lot of the businesses are only keeping salaried managers on as staff. I don’t know if I’ll have a job to go back to in two or three months when we’re allowed to open again. I think a lot of places are going to have to find a new normal, which is a takeout-only routine, unfortunately. I don’t think most places will be able to handle that change.

Workers are scared and the purveyors are scared they aren’t going to be able to make it. I think that if they were to survive, it has to be from the government bailout. I don’t think restaurants are looked at as an important part of the economic community, and I don’t know why restaurants and restaurant workers aren’t taken seriously, but I think a lot of people will feel it when their favorite restaurants close.

—As told to Eileen Mellon

---

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.