Richard Skipper Celebrates Beyond the Mask w/Ellen Matzer & Valery Hughes 4/5/22

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Set amid the beginning turmoil of New York's COVID crisis, Beyond the Mask is a fictional psychological chronicle of six health care workers in a callous city hospital system. 

Ellen Matzer was born in the late-fifties and was raised first in California before moving to Queens. She attended public school. Ellen, like Valery found the ICU to be over- run with young men coming in with severe respiratory symptoms progressing rapidly to death. This became the focus of her career for the following fifteen years. In 1985 she joined the staff of St. Clare’s Hospital and Health center, the first designated AIDS CENTER in NYC, the first RN hired specifically to work in the AIDS Center.  The first wave saw health care workers making ethical decisions right in the emergency departments, no time to think, discuss or plan. Intubate or not. Period. When PPE was in short supply, no vaccination available, death was inevitable.

Valery Hughes was born in the mid-fifties and was raised in Queens with her two sisters. She attended public school. She received her RN degree (as an Associate of Applied Science) from the City University at Queensborough Community College in the mid-seventies and worked as a registered nurse for several years before continuing her education. Along the way she worked in hospitals as a staff nurse in surgery, intensive care, surgical intensive care and emergency medicine. She spent a short time in Thailand working in the Admissions Ward (Emergency Department) at the hospital at the Khao-I-Dang Refugee Camp at the Thai-Cambodian border. The Cornell Clinical Trials Unit is a part of the NIH AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG).