ABCBy JOANNE ROSA, ABC News(NEW YORK) — Deserving mothers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak received the surprise of a lifetime for Mother’s Day this year.These mothers and nurses at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx experience firsthand how demanding life has become in the fight against COVID-19.Eva Calo, a head nurse at Lincoln Hospital, said on The View that she hasn’t had time to process the death of her mother-in-law, who passed away at her hospital because there were so many other patients that needed care.”We are still trying to cope. We are still trying to process actually her death. I haven’t had a time to stop to think,” Calo said. “I wasn’t able to stay with my husband to provide all of the support that I needed to because I had to also be back to work to face the challenges that we were facing in order for us to continue to provide the care that our patients needed the most.””We are, day by day, trying to just support one another an to continue what we have to do daily,” Calo said.Calo is also the mother of five children, the youngest being nine-years-old, and said it’s been a “challenge” to be a parent and a nurse during the pandemic.”Once you are here combatting this virus and trying to treat patients as much as we can, when we get home we are extremely tired,” Calo said.”We’re trying to do the best and changing all of our habits. When we go home we cannot hug our children, we cannot interact so much with them,” Calo continued adding that being around her children — even if it’s at a distance — gives her the “energy to come back to work and continue” her job.Elsie Lecour, whose been the senior client navigator at Lincoln Memorial for 17 years, has gone above and beyond to be the liaison between patients and their families during the coronavirus crisis.”Working in the emergency room when the coronavirus started, we had a lot of family members bringing in the patients and a lot of them were concerned because they didn’t have their phones,” Lecour said. “So we provided them with the access to communicate.””A lot of the family members would come in and they wanted their loved ones to have their phone, their phone chargers or maybe even food. The way we communicated in the ER as a client navigator is not only to provide a soothing mechanism, we would call the nurses or the head doctors when the aid would come out or provide phone numbers for them,” Lecour said. “We constantly kept communication with them.”Calo and Lecour are apart of the 150 working mothers and nurses at Lincoln Hospital who were surprised by singer Jimmy Buffett to reveal an early Mother’s Day gift.”On behalf of Margaritaville and friends and partners at Karisma Hotels & Resorts, 150 of you hard-working moms at the Lincoln Hospital are gonna get a first-rate dream vacation from Margaritaville when all this is over,” Buffett said on The View Friday.Once travel restrictions are lifted, these moms and their families will receive a four-night, five-day vacation that includes luxury accommodations.
Karisma Hotels & Resorts is donating 150 more vacations to those on the frontlines and their families. Learn more about how to nominate a frontline hero. Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
