February 5th, 2025, Agatha and I interviewed my mother’s friend, Chrissy Sample. Chrissy is a mom to 2 boys, a 12-year-old and a 4-year-old. When we asked Chrissy about her previous opinion on the healthcare system, she said that she always thought that the healthcare system was flawed. Although she heard of friends and people she knew struggling with the healthcare system, she personally didn’t have a fully negative experience with the healthcare system before the pandemic. When she had her first child, she expressed that her doctor at the time was very thoughtful and attentive to her. He would check on her regularly and advise other doctors on what to do when he couldn’t be present due to Hurricane Sandy. When she was advised a C-section because she had been in labor for a long time, her doctor stood up for her and told the nurses that she didn’t need one so her hospital expenses weren’t extremely high. Giving birth to her first child was a positive experience, but everything changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. When we asked her about how the treatment she received with her second child was different, she said the care she received felt very minimal. She was pregnant with twins, so she was supposed to go to the doctor 2 times a week. However, the doctor’s office told her that she could return for a visit in 1 week. When she had to ask her doctor questions, they were extremely passive-aggressive and responded with “It’s relative”. In addition to this hurtful treatment, nobody else could join her doctor’s appointments due to COVID restrictions. Chrissy felt lonely and as though she had no one while going through this process alone. When she gave birth to her son, Cassius, the other baby wasn’t living. The doctors told her this could have been avoided if she received the proper care sooner. When she was in the hospital, recovering from her C-section, none of the doctors asked if she was okay. She went home after having her child and had to plead with one of the doctors to have an in-person appointment when one of them said they could check in on Zoom. Chrissy told Agatha and I that she didn’t want to assume that she was being discriminated against because of her race, and that she thought at first that the hospital had bad treatments and staff. Still, after hearing about experiences from white woman during their birthing experience during the pandemic, she realized race could have played a huge factor in the way she was treated. When we asked Chrissy how people can stand up for black woman being mistreated in maternal health, she told us that building community with others is the best way to spread awareness about this issue. Sharing information online, and educating yourself and others. A quote that really stuck with me during this interview was “Community sparks change, and the more information that you gather, the more conversations that you have, it propels everyone to have the conversation. These are hard conversations to sit in a room with people where they feel like, well, this doesn’t really affect me. It’s not really my problem. But it is, you should not think of anything that way. Somebody’s problem is everyone’s problem, like somebody’s injustice is everyone’s injustice.”
