And I didn’t even have to complain to my boss. Complaining here and to myself and my friends did the trick. Very good news! First thing in January, my boss, as predicted by me, assigned one of the new full-time chaplains to be a palliative care chaplain in my place. No more getting to call myself a palliative care chaplain at my paying job, and no more attending the weekly palliative care rounds meeting. However, I now have met all the folks who attend that meeting, so that is good.
We per diems are now back to doing what no one else wants to do: 24-hour on-call shifts. In an effort to give me as many hours a week as possible, my boss assigned me two of them per week. This is excellent. I will no longer be covering the ICUs or oncology. (Which also means no more wearying ICU rounds meetings.) Instead I will cover transplant, which has plenty of palliative care patients, so I will continue to learn about palliative care (which, as you know, is the main topic of this blog at the moment), and, best of all, I will be back to working just two days a week at my paying job.
Per the pending change of units, I have been thinking about transplant. I remember from Clinical Pastoral Education that transplant patients can be really sick: they have whatever caused them to need a transplant—heart, liver or kidney problems—plus they are on drugs that help keep their bodies from rejecting the new organ. No doubt the drugs have unpleasant side effects, plus the patient’s immune system is suppressed, so they are vulnerable in that way, on top of being quite ill and just having been through a major surgery.
Furthermore, the patient is probably receiving an organ because someone else has died, so it seems like a complex and challenging situation, including emotionally. I spoke to a patient who had been offered a possible transplant and who had turned it down. He wept as he said, “If I were to get someone else’s heart, would I still be myself?” He literally preferred to risk death than to receive the heart of another person.
I have acquired the book Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor’s Search for the Perfect Match, by Vanessa Grubbs, MD. She spoke at my monthly palliative care class a couple of months ago, and I had also heard her on NPR. (Spoiler alert: she donated a kidney of her own to a patient, and also married him.) I also got When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon, by Joshua D. Mezrich, MD. I heard him on NPR, too. Thanks to the newly instituted weekly Sabbath, I will have time to read these books soon. (I lately read and enjoyed Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between, by Theresa Brown.)
In the first week of the new year, Tom’s niece had us over for a lovely, simple dinner at her place. We had roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, and spinach. Tom picked up nice olives from Whole Foods as an appetizer.
The next day, I had lunch with one of my former Clinical Pastoral Education supervisors. I brought an entire box of Puffs Plus Lotion with me (the Cadillac of tissues) and coughed my way through our meal at Ladle & Leaf. I told her what I’ve been up to and she said I have done a good job of getting the kinds of experience that will please potential employers. She pointed out that I now have palliative care experience in three different hospital systems.
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