“I was one of the first five to test positive from Monican dorm hall last year. So it made things very weird because, after the whole shut down at Monican happened–with it being like all over the news and everything–supposedly there were news vans driving around Royal like trying to find people that had tested positive to talk to them and everything. It was very strange…”
Jordan Wentworth is a senior at Merrimack College. During the pandemic, he worked both at a nursing home and as a resident advisor (RA) at Merrimack.
In the interview, Wentworth discusses key events within the COVID-19 timeline at Merrimack College. This includes his personal experiences during the pandemic, as well as his perspective as both a student and RA. Wentworth also describes the challenges of dealing with the pandemic at each of his two jobs.
Excerpt
Nathan Leclaire: So this question is a little bit personal and you don’t have to answer, if you wouldn’t like to, but was there anyone close to you that was affected by the virus?
Jordan Wentworth: I mean, I was. I had COVID. No one that I knew personally within my family got COVID because with my family everyone was very cautious. My mom was going through breast cancer treatment at the time, so she was very immunocompromised so she was very–I guess you could say vigilant on where she was going. At this time last year, my dad was going through his second heart surgery to get his aorta fixed, so he was very careful on where he went and if anyone really had a chance of getting it, it would have been my sister because she was a LNA for the NICU at the time. Yeah, no one that I know close got it. The only one that I know really close that actually got it was a family friend of mine and he didn’t get it till, God, I think, like four or five months ago, so not really too significantly close.
NL: Okay, so what did you have to do–since you caught the virus–what did you have to do? Like were you in school when it happened? And what were things that you had to do because of it?
JW: Yeah, so it was last fall. I tested positive and I had to sit in my dorm room for six hours waiting for a place to go in Royal because I could not go home. And having residents knock on my door when they needed something from me was very difficult not to answer because I didn’t want to get them sick. I was one of the first five to test positive from the Monican dorm hall last year. So it made things very weird because, after the whole shut down at Monican happened–with it being like all over the news and everything–supposedly like there were news vans driving around Royal like trying to find people that had tested positive to like talk to them and everything. It was very strange that like–who knows if they would find me or like where I was in Royal–but I think after getting COVID things really started settling in like settling in on like how COVID affects people, because for a while I was never a full hundred percent. It was like maybe after the first month and a half where I actually felt like myself and feel like I was able to get things done on a daily basis. But I think the one thing that really lingered around when having COVID was the amount of fatigue that you got from it because I was very exhausted all the time.
Interview Details
The interview was conducted in North Andover, MA, on November 22, 2021, by Nathan Leclaire.
Accession Number
2021.51.1
This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.