Faith on the Frontlines: Healthcare Workers Battle Burnout

Carey Riffel walked out of the intubation room after a gruesome ordeal lasting more than four hours, her gown and gloves torn and spattered with blood, knowing she’d been exposed to the coronavirus, and realizing that yet another patient whom she and her colleagues had fought desperately to save wasn’t going to make it.

At times, Riffel, a critical care registered nurse in Little Rock, Arkansas, has felt like one of the many living casualties of the pandemic – frontline medical workers who, at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, have witnessed a lifetime’s worth of agonizing deaths in the course of a typical week.

Sweating profusely under layers of personal protective equipment that, at times, had to be changed up to 15 times a shift, and often without time to eat, Riffel rushed to help one patient after another. Death still won the battle most days.

“There aren’t even words for what we went through,” Riffel recalled. “By late summer, staff began to get sick, which would leave us overwhelmed with patients and frightened of what the next shift would bring. Because of the lockdown,” she continued, “family members couldn’t be there to see their loved ones take their last breath. We quickly became the patients’ family — holding their hands, comforting them, and talking to them as they died. This became an emotional struggle and challenge from the very start. We were all they had.”

“What healthcare workers are experiencing is akin to domestic combat,” Andrew J. Smith, Ph.D., director of the University of Utah Health Occupational Trauma Program at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, said in a press release from his institution.

According to a study conducted by Smith’s group, more than half of the doctors, nurses and emergency responders providing COVID-19 care could be at risk for one or more mental health problems—including acute traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety.

“It was eating me alive,” Riffel recalled. “My patients were terrified and desperate to talk to me. They just wanted me to tell them that everything was going to be okay when it wasn’t. After each shift, I couldn’t even make it to my car before I would let loose and start crying. At the same time, there was this strong feeling of not wanting to leave,” she continued, her voice breaking at the memory. “It’s not that I could even make a difference; it’s just that I didn’t want to leave my patients’ side. That back-and-forth pull left me completely emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted.”

Riffel, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, drew on the only reserve she had left — a spiritual one. She credits her faith for getting her through those anguished months.

Prayer was absolutely imperative to my mental health,” she claimed. “I’ve had a hard time relying on God in the past, but I had to quickly gain control of my anxiety and personal fear. I would pray to God in tears during the drive to work and the drive home every morning,” she continued. “There were nights that I couldn’t count how many times I prayed: ‘Please help me get through the next hour, the next shift, the next few minutes.’ I would pray out loud at a patient’s bed, ‘Help me have the strength and the knowledge to help this person.’ I would ask God for anything and everything.”

American psychological and psychiatric associations, while not advocating or endorsing any specific religion, acknowledge a role for spirituality and religious faith in coping with distress and trauma.

Lawrence Onoda, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Mission Hills, California, noted a number of ways spirituality can help, including giving people “a positive hope and meaning toward life, comfort by looking for answers and strength from a higher power, and a collective shared experience of support and community.”

That proved true in Riffel’s case. “My prayers and supplications would bring me peace in the moment,” she acknowledged, “but I had to go a step further to have peace in my down time and not obsess over whether or not a patient made it after I left the hospital.”

Riffel found solace in participating in meetings and ministry sessions on Zoom, in the cards and letters from congregation members expressing their love, and in encouraging, Bible-based video broadcasts on the Witnesses’ official website, jw.org. “I had to learn how to rely more fully on God and my family of faith for instruction, support, love and peace,” she expressed. “Studying more fervently than I have ever studied the Bible on a personal level and continuing to spend time volunteering to teach others about the sure hope for the future kept me close to God and the congregation, despite being single, alone and quarantined.”

“Many times I felt like giving up,” she concluded. “But because I was determined to build on good study and prayer habits, along with trust in God, I was able to maintain an underlying measure of peace that many around me did not have.”

(For more information on gaining comfort through the scriptures, please see https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/peace-happiness/real-hope-future-bible-promises/)