The Hand We Were Dealt

A powerful, research-informed book about Black women healthcare workers, the weight they carried during COVID-19, and the cost of being expected to be strong for everyone else. In The Hand We Were Dealt, Dr. JeVona Maniex brings readers inside the lived experiences of Black women healthcare workers who held together patients, families, workplaces, and communities while quietly carrying fear, grief, emotional labor, workplace strain, and the pressure to keep going no matter the cost. Grounded in doctoral research and written with emotional clarity, this book explores what happened when work followed these women home, when public praise masked private pain, and when faith, coping, and community became lifelines in the middle of crisis. It also examines the deeper realities beneath the pandemic: burnout, workplace inequity, psychological strain, invisible labor, and the burden of being expected to be endlessly resilient. But this is not only a book about what was endured. It is also a book about reckoning, healing, and change. Through themes of faith, well-being, emotional survival, and restoration, Dr. Maniex shows how Black women healthcare workers began reclaiming rest, redefining strength, and naming what true support should look like. The book closes with practical lessons for leaders and policymakers who must build workplaces rooted in equity, psychological safety, dignity, and care. Part testimony, part research-based narrative, and part call to action, The Hand We Were Dealt speaks to readers interested in Black women, healthcare workers, workplace well-being, emotional labor, faith, trauma, burnout, leadership, and organizational justice. This book tells the truth about what Black women healthcare workers carried-and why workplaces must never ask them to carry it alone again.