Jamie Lampros, Special to the Standard-Examiner

OGDEN — A group of professional caregivers met this week to discuss the challenges they have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly before vaccines were available.

Isolation, lockdowns and surging cases of the virus have forced many social workers, grief counselors and chaplains to help people over the phone or through technology instead of meeting with them face to face. This has posed many problems, especially for those helping the elderly.

“It was hard. Really tough,” said Amanda Burtenshaw, a hospice worker for Rocky Mountain Hospice. “How can I support a 92-year-old man who hates to be on the phone from my home and his home? It was so hard to work through the pandemic with people who don’t like technology.”

Burtenshaw said it was also hard to watch her staff suffer from exhaustion.

“I could see how exhausted my nurses were and other staff members as well,” she said. “We were needed more than ever, but we couldn’t see these people in person. It was almost like we felt nonessential when we are really very essential.”

Jamie Lampros, Special to the Standard-Examiner

The group met at Lindquist Mortuary, which sponsored the get-together along with Rocky Mountain Hospice.

“I constantly monitor the pulse of the community we serve, which also includes our colleagues in every area of health care, especially those who work in the senior care arena of health care,” said Todd Sidwell, a chaplain, bereavement coordinator and director of community support for Rocky Mountain Hospice. “What they have told me is that the forced isolation of the pandemic has deprived them of a very important resource for health care, so they asked me if we could find a way to get them together in one place where they could share their experience and get some tools for dealing with their grief.”

The group shared their experiences of not only dealing with their patients, but also having to deal with circumstances in their own lives.

“The hardest thing for me early on was not being able to see my grandparents,” said Kaden Hyde, senior account executive for Deseret Digital Media and senior care product manager for Agibly, which is the senior section of KSL.com. “I couldn’t hug them or see them. My cousin graduated from high school and we couldn’t be there through moments like that. It’s surreal to be able to be meeting like this today.”

Kay Tanner, director of bereavement support at Rocky Mountain Hospice, said she thought the pandemic would be over by the summer.

Jamie Lampros, Special to the Standard-Examiner

“Didn’t you think it would only last a few months and surely it would be over by summer?” she said. “We’re still battling a global pandemic, social unrest, we had an earthquake here in Utah and devastating windstorms. Major cities were burning all summer long. So along with the pandemic and all these natural and social disasters, we shared these things collectively as a group, but we’ve also had personal losses.”

Karina Sorensen, Lindquist Family Services counselor, said her family nearly lost a loved one to COVID-19.

“It’s been a nightmare,” she said. “My mom almost lost her husband to COVID. We got the call that they were going to turn off all the machines. To watch her go through all that stress and the nightmare knowing her spouse might die in 12 hours was just awful. She hadn’t seen him in months. Miraculously, he survived, but I can’t even comprehend what that must be like for families to know their loved one is passing and they can’t be with them.”

Patrice Mealey said there was a lot of anxiety in the beginning of the pandemic surrounding how to safely work with patients while so many people were afraid.

“You’re trying to settle your own fear and trying to take care of patients and help those around you to keep doing their job. We didn’t know how to do it. We had to chart new territory and it was a lot early on to take in,” she said. “I think that was really profound and exhausting.”

Jamie Lampros, Special to the Standard-Examiner

Sidwell said as a chaplain, it was challenging to have to speak with a person through the window while talking on the phone.

“We can see each other but we aren’t allowed to be in the same room,” he said. “One thing I witnessed that was very painful was the fact that people wanted to see their church leaders, their priest or visiting companions. They wanted to take communion or the sacrament. It was degrading to their life and contributed to their decline not being able to have those spiritual things in their life. I didn’t realize how important those things really were to people.”

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