Saturday, January 27, 2018

A Variety of Stimulating Conversations

A week or so into January, I arrived at work and saw my boss was in her office. I greeted her and she returned the greeting coolly. I suspected she was thinking, "I hate you." But then I remembered that I also can be grumpy when someone greets me if it startles me or feels like an intrusion. "Maybe I startled her," I thought. "Maybe she's like me."

A bit later, I was walking by her office again and she called my name, and we had a perfectly pleasant little interaction. She smiled at me, sort of, and asked how school is going. I told her that school hasn't started yet; it starts in March. This was true, but another thing that was true was that I hadn't yet learned if I'd been accepted into the program, which was starting to be significant source of stress. I had applied seven weeks earlier, and had flights to book and days off work to request and cat sitters to engage, not to mention that I was hired for this job with the understanding that I'd be moving toward board certification by going to school.

That day, after talking to my boss, who mentioned she'd like to know ASAP what days I will need off, I texted three friends and asked them to pray for me. Yes, I did this. I'm laughing as I write this. I included a friend whose prayers have proven to be magically effective in the past. She texted back saying that of course she would pray for me. (Well, first she texted back asking, "Who is this?" We don't usually text.) And later that day, my acceptance email finally arrived! Whew! I was relieved and delighted.

I am going to be a board-certified chaplain! Someday.

I spent the day at one of my rehab units, where I saw eight patients. We track our minutes in two general categories: actual time with patients, and everything else: traveling to the unit, reviewing charts before seeing patients, and writing chart notes afterward. The latter can easily take twice as long as the former, but now that my procedures for reviewing charts beforehand are more streamlined—I've tinkered with this a lot
and now that I'm more practiced at doing it, the difference in time is starting to be less pronounced, and sometimes it comes out to be the same amount of time in both categories, or even more for seeing patients.

I saw my boss again later in the day and mentioned that I'd gotten a compliment from a patient: He said, "We like it when you visit us
it gives us a feeling of well-being." My boss said, "Got an MRN?" Medical record number. I sent it to her, along with the quote from the patient, and soon received an email that said, "Nice compliment," followed by a thorough critique of the visit; she had read my whole chart note. That would have infuriated me even the day before, but at this point I found myself chuckling rather than fuming: There she goes again.

I guess I'm getting used to her way of doing supervision, and having had a pleasant interaction in the morning and having had the thought that perhaps we are similar helped a lot. She does always give me something to think about. Her critique mainly boiled down, once again, to the difference between emotional support and spiritual care. But isn't raising someone's spirits part of spiritual care? I asked her this in an email and she said, "Yes, I am sure he enjoys the variety of stimulating conversations he has with you and others," but that this patient seemed to be receiving more visits than his actual spiritual needs would warrant. This was partly because his room was right across from the charting room, which has big windows, and once the patient had caught sight of me, I felt guilty if I didn
't visit; I confessed this to my boss.

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