Source: Liora Engel-Smith, NORTH CAROLINA HEALTH NEWS, 11/5/20


Amaza “Rita” Hall has been to the hospital many times with severe asthma attacks, but there’s one ER run the lifelong asthmatic from Gates County remembers by date: May 19, 1999. Hall, now 73, had been admitted to the hospital yet again. With an oxygen cannula in her nose and an IV in her arm, she learned that her house was on fire. No one was hurt, but the house and all its contents were gone, she soon learned. As was customary at the rural hospital in Ahoskie at the time, Hall’s family physician, Charles Sawyer, had seen her during evening rounds before going home.

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