From 'whore' to 'hero': Personal support worker details life and work in the pandemic

Her words came through garbled, sounding like a hostage-taker in an action movie trying to make a ransom call with the voice scrambler turned up too high.

She's a veteran personal support worker at a long-term care home and she knows her job is at risk if she's identified as speaking with the media. So, when the Ontario NDP approached her to participate in a video press conference about the staffing crisis in long-term care, she agreed on the condition that her face was hidden and her voice modulated.

But, technology being what it is, no one could hear what she had to say. In a follow-up phone call with QP Briefing, which has agreed to shield her identity, she said her piece.

The first thing is that there is a staffing crisis where she works. It's a privately owned long-term care home in Toronto in the middle of an outbreak that has killed more than a dozen residents so far. When staff fall ill, she said, they aren't replaced, leaving as few as two personal support workers on a floor of 48 residents.

"Do the math," she said. "Let's see what kind of care they're going to get."

The pressure on staff is greater because of chronic problems with the home's laundry system — it's contracted out and only one person handles the load of five floors. It means the personal support workers are required to spend time on residents' laundry they could use caring for them and keeping them company. In the pandemic, it's also meant a chronic shortage of the gowns they wear for infection prevention and control.

But — and here she wanted to set the media straight — that staffing shortage doesn't mean any residents are going hungry at her home.

"The world has to know what is going on in these nursing homes, but the part about starving, that is not true," she said.

There was a news story that said in passing that residents were "starving" but the media doesn't see what's happening inside, she said. The cooks make good food, the personal support workers bring snacks on their carts at almost all hours of the day, and no one is deprived.

But dehydration is a problem, she said. Some of the residents have trouble swallowing and you can't force them to drink without risking choking them, even if they're being given the thickened fluids meant to prevent it, so some should be getting IV fluids.

It's particularly hard for them to drink when they're sick with the coronavirus, she said — and she'd know. She contracted COVID-19 in the outbreak. "I am telling you, I have never felt the way I feel now," she said. For weeks, she couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and was racked with pain.

Her employer didn't call to check on her wellbeing, she said, only to see when she could come back to work.

And that's another thing she wanted to talk about — how unevenly the work of a PSW is recognized. Society at large is recognizing her and her colleagues as heroes but it hasn't always been that way.

"Years ago, we wasn't recognized as nobody. You know what they used to call us? S-H-I-T cleaners. Oh, we used to be called 'whores,'" she said, of the profession that is predominantly female.

She gets called names still. Some of the residents will use racial slurs but she says they don't understand and may have dementia. It doesn't affect the care she gives them and has given others for decades.

She is proud of her work and recognizes that the nursing home staff are the only family that some residents have. In them, she is reminded of her parents, who are both gone.

"It breaks your heart for you to know that you leave a resident strong today and you come in tomorrow morning and they're gone, and gone too soon," she said. "Sometimes you cry and you don't even know you're crying."

So, when she got a letter identifying her as one of the front-line heroes of the pandemic who can go into the grocery store without having to line up, it was a milestone.

"I framed it," she said. "From 'whore' to hero — it was my second biggest honour, after I graduated."