Item

Silent Hospital – Giving Birth in Quarantine

Title (Dublin Core)

Silent Hospital – Giving Birth in Quarantine

Disclaimer (Dublin Core)

DISCLAIMER: This item may have been submitted in response to a school assignment prompt. See Linked Data.

Description (Dublin Core)

The Covid-19 quarantine started on March 16th, 2020. I gave birth to my daughter four days later. Thankfully my labor was very quick and there were no complications. By 8:44 a.m. on the 19th, my daughter was in my arms. After the commotion of the nurses and doctors coming to check on my daughter and myself, there was just silence. Newborns, as a quickly discovered, slept a lot. There were long stretches of silence for the two days we were in the hospital. I would look at my husband and say, “It is eerily quiet in here.” I was only one of three mothers giving birth in my area of the hospital, there were no visitors, and we were told to stay in our rooms unless we absolutely needed to walk around. My husband would order food and have to wait at the front of the hospital for them to drop it off. Every time he left and came back, he talked about how he had barely seen anyone, and that it was completely silent in the hospital. When it was time for us to finally leave, walking out of the hospital was also silent. There were no phones ringing, no nurse pagers, no talking between nurses, nothing. The only sounds were my flip flops squeaking off of the floors. When we finally made it outside, the birds were chirping and I remembering thinking, ‘thank goodness for some background noise!’

Date (Dublin Core)

March 19, 2020

Creator (Dublin Core)

Kendall McCurley

Contributor (Dublin Core)

Kendall McCurley

Event Identifier (Dublin Core)

HST643

Partner (Dublin Core)

Arizona State University

Type (Dublin Core)

photograph
text story

Controlled Vocabulary (Dublin Core)

English Public Health & Hospitals
English Home & Family Life

Curator's Tags (Omeka Classic)

birth
daughter
silence
sound
hospital
empty

Contributor's Tags (a true folksonomy) (Friend of a Friend)

Sensory History

Linked Data (Dublin Core)

Date Submitted (Dublin Core)

08/19/2022

Date Modified (Dublin Core)

08/27/2022

Item sets

This item was submitted on August 19, 2022 by Kendall McCurley using the form “Share Your Story” on the site “A Journal of the Plague Year”: http://mail.covid-19archive.org/s/archive

Click here to view the collected data.

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