Jonathan Bartels is a nurse working in emergency care. He says witnessing death over and over again takes a toll on trauma workers — they can become numb or burned out.
But about two years ago, after Bartels and his team at the University of Virginia Medical Center, in Charlottesville, Va., tried and failed to resuscitate a patient, something happened.
"We had worked on this patient for hours, and the chaplain came in and kind of stopped everyone from leaving the room," Bartels recalls.
"She said, 'I'm just going to pray over this patient and then you all can leave,' " he says. "And I watched it and I felt — it was the act of stopping people that really inspired me."
[For more of this story, written by Kara Lofton, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...s-life-after-a-death]
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