At 5:30 each morning, Julie Bevers descends into the lobby of the New York City hotel that she has lived in for the last three weeks. She’s been awake since 4:00 a.m., meditating and writing in her prayer journal in preparation for her first encounter of the day: a busload of healthcare workers returning from the battle against COVID-19.
“That’s the night shifters coming in,” Bevers said. “There’s about 600 of them in just this hotel alone.”
But Bevers isn’t a doctor or a nurse; she’s a chaplain. She’s stationed in one of the many hotels housing healthcare workers who have traveled to New York, the state most ravaged by coronavirus, to lend a hand in the fight against the pandemic. Yet for Bevers and other spiritual care providers on the front lines of the crisis, the responsibility of tending for the sick and suffering isn’t just about supporting those infected with the virus—it’s about the people who provide their care, too.
“Some of these nurses will go to work and have 11 patients, and nine of them might die,” Bevers said. “It’s a cumulative, day-after-day mental, physical and spiritual fatigue.”
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