When her clients didn’t have masks to protect themselves, this CNA shared her supply

For Kay Byrum, there’s no such thing as a day off.

Seven days a week, she arrives at the New Woodland Olney Apartments, an affordable housing complex for seniors, by 6 a.m.

Byrum, 54, is a certified nursing assistant who provides in-home care. She bathes them, dresses them, and does their cooking, cleaning and shopping, making sure to remind them to take their medications.

At least 12 million people in the country depend on similar services, according to the National Association for Home Care and Hospice. Though the work is essential for maintaining the health, independence and dignity of elderly and disabled people, home health aides in North Carolina make a median hourly wage of $9.80, according to PHI, a national research and consulting organization on the direct care workforce.

Federal data show their wages, adjusted for inflation, have dropped more than 10% over the past decade. And when it comes to protecting healthcare workers from the novel coronavirus that has been killing seniors with particularly cruel efficiency, home health aides have been placed far down the priority list.

Byrum works in Northampton County, a rural area near the Virginia border that has North Carolina’s highest infection rate. She is haunted by the prospect of inadvertently carrying the virus into one of her clients’ homes.

She has worked in the apartment complex since 2002. The residents feel like extended family. In better times, they were eager to spend time with her 8-year-old daughter. Byrum got into this line of work in caring for another daughter, who contracted encephalitis through a mosquito bite.

Wearing a homemade cloth mask that she washes each night, Byrum walks down the apartment complex’s halls. She takes out tenants’ trash and fetches their mail so they don’t have to venture from their apartments into the contaminated world beyond.

The threat of the virus began to feel real to her clients after an outbreak at a nearby assisted-living facility, Pine Forest Rest Home. To help keep tenants safe, Byrum brought a box of masks from home and passed them out. Each tenant who was interested got two. So did the complex manager and the maintenance man.

Some tenants worry they will offend Byrum by wearing a mask, revealing that they see her as a threat, a possible vector for a terrifying disease.

She doesn’t tell them that she originally bought the masks to filter out the cigarette smoke that used to linger in tenants’ apartments when they were allowed to smoke inside. She has asthma and COPD, conditions that put her, like her clients, at elevated risk of complications from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Instead, she offers reassurance. “You’re protecting me, and I’m protecting you,” she says.

Facing worries

On a recent Tuesday morning, Byrum sat down at the table as her client finished the biscuits, sausage, tomato and cheese she had fixed him. He had eaten more than usual, which was good, but she knew he had been worried.

He had been watching the news constantly, and the week before, he called to tell her he was thinking about canceling her contract.

“Have you heard anything about anybody?” he asked, searching for information about who had been infected.

He is 80 years old, diabetic and fighting kidney cancer. “If I get sick (with COVID-19), you know what’s going to happen,” he told Byrum.

She tried to stay upbeat. She won’t come to work if she’s feeling sick, she promised him.

“If you don’t come in, who’s going to take care of me?” he asked.

This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 11:15 AM with the headline "When her clients didn’t have masks to protect themselves, this CNA shared her supply."