As a COVID-19 patient was dying, ICU nurse Idara Joy Inokon sang the hymn “Alpha and Omega” with the patient’s wife over FaceTime.
BP News reports that the patient, who was only 45 years old, was intubated and unconscious as he lay dying in a Brooklyn hospital. Inokon, who won Miss Nigeria USA in 2017, says she and her team did all they could to save the patient’s life, but “in the end, we just had to give it into the hands of God.”
The lyrics to the popular song say: “You are Alpha and Omega/ We worship You, our Lord/ You are worthy to be praised … We give You all the glory.”
Inokon works full time as an ICU nurse and part time as a nurse practitioner—all while running Be Well Foundation, the nonprofit she founded in 2018. Through the nonprofit, she works to serve poor communities in the U.S. and Nigeria.
The pandemic has taken a toll on health care workers, driving some even to commit suicide. But as a Christian and member of The Bridge Church in Brooklyn, Inokon says she’s relying on faith and grace to make it through the coronavirus crisis.
In an emotional Instagram post, Inokon described coming home from a long shift at the hospital one day and breaking down in tears.
“I just kept asking myself why are you crying Idara?” she wrote. “We have travel nurses to help now. You took a lunch break today. They said the ED isn’t as crazy as before…why are you sad? And all I kept thinking about was the CNN article headline ‘nearly all COVID-19 patients put on ventilators in New York City’s largest health system died, study finds’ – and although it wasn’t my hospital in the article I started to cry for how accurate it still was…how we still have 120 patients on ventilators fighting for their lives.”
Yet through it all, Inokon says she’s clinging to Scripture.
“My anchoring Scripture at the beginning of all this was 2 Chronicles 20:1-3 [KJV], where it said that King Jehoshaphat was afraid of the army that was about to attack him, but he set himself to fear the Lord,” she tells BP News. “He set himself to call a fast in the land and to bring the people’s attention towards the Lord, because he knew it was only from the Lord where he would get the wisdom of how to operate, how to function, how to thwart the attack.”
