HJBR May/Jun 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  MAY / JUN 2025 9 As the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic approached, leadership at Our Lady of the Lake Health sought to honor the dedication and sacrifices of their healthcare workers — and to ensure that the hard-won lessons of those years would not be lost to time or politics. In partnership with LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication and the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, they created “Under Pressure: A Louisiana Hospital’s COVID-19 Experience,” an oral history project preserving the voices of those who served on the front lines. Recorded in July and August 2024 and released in April 2025, the series consists of 13 interviews with medical leaders, nurses, and administrators who helped guide Our Lady of the Lake through the most acute phase of the pandemic. Their stories offer unvarnished insight into what it meant to work in a hospital under siege — navigating rapidly evolving science, personal loss, extraordinary stress, and innovation born of necessity. “The stories captured in this collection are a powerful reminder of what it meant to be a healthcare worker during the pandemic,” said Catherine O’Neal, MD, chief academic officer for Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System. “We witnessed extraordinary courage, innovation, and humanity. Preserving these experiences ensures we never forget those who stood strong when our community needed them most.” In a time when some are revisiting the history of the pandemic with a lens of skepticism or political intent, “Under Pressure” offers something different: firsthand accounts from those who lived it. These testimonies are not arguments. They are memories. They are moments of exhaustion, hope, heartbreak, and grace — offered not to persuade, but to be remembered. To explore the full oral history collection, visit ololrmc.com/stories-of-strength. This journal would like to thankOur Lady of the LakeHealth, LSU’sManshipSchool of MassCommunication, and the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History for entrusting us to help preserve and share this vital piece of Louisiana’s healthcare history. I think the response to disaster is noth- ing new to Louisiana. And for the trainees of Louisiana, we get a unique perspective if you train here on disaster management. Katrina was definitely the first disaster that I worked that I can say was a pivotal moment of learning in my life. And I took notes from Katrina into this pandemic. Nobody’s going to slap my hand in a disaster when we take care of people the right way. And I learned that in the field house at LSU, bringing a ton of evacuees who didn’t know their meds, left with their cat in hand, but needed to be in a field house hospital. You know, how do we take care of all these people and break and bend the rules a little? My 10 years before I was the associate PART ONE Catherine O’Neal, MD, former chief medical officer, Our Lady of the Lake, and current chief academic officer, FMOLHS, shares her memories of that time. Catherine O’Neal, MD Chief Academic Officer, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System Catherine O’Neal, MD, received a Bachelor of Science in animal science from Louisiana State University. She earned a medical degree from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center New Orleans, where she also completed an internal medicine residency. O’Neal completed an adult infectious disease fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is board certified in internal medicine and infectious diseases by the American Board of Internal Medicine.