In mid-September, just a few days before CPE ended, volunteer training at County Hospital began with a weekend intensive (six hours on Saturday, four on Sunday). We are eight people, plus our leader. We got along well right away and our leader is wonderful, but I felt a bit overwhelmed when we received our assignments and wondered if I should have started this next spring instead. I wished it weren’t overlapping with CPE. Our assignments included words that will be drearily familiar to any CPE student: reflections, verbatims, IS, goals. On the one hand, I have just done all of this for five straight units of CPE and don’t want to do any of it any more. On the other, I can do all of this with both hands tied behind my back at this point.
In the final week, I went to see my periodontist, since my dental insurance will soon be gone. I could have signed up for this via Covered California, but it was prohibitively priced. My periodontist said it appeared I would be in need of gum surgery in the next year or so. However, since I won’t have dental insurance in a year and I did have it right that minute, he suggested going ahead ASAP, so we did.
He said he was going to augment my gums with a strip of tissue taken from the roof of my mouth, or from an amenable dead person (or, if not amenable, not in a position to refuse). Having material carved out of the roof of one’s mouth is painful, so I said I’d like tissue from a dead person. I was picturing that this was going to be sewn onto my gums, and wondered if he’d make an effort to match the colors. I couldn’t figure out how it was going to bond with my own gums, but was excited that I would never be alone again! From now on, it would be me and her, or him, or them, and I’d be able to see her/him/them every time I opened my mouth.
But on the day of the procedure, my periodontist explained that he was actually going to peel the gums away from a contiguous expanse of teeth and mash in the tissue from the dead person, stretch my gums over it, and sew it all together. So no color matching required. I actually felt a little nervous before this, but it went very smoothly and was surprisingly quick, maybe half an hour or so once the area was numb. The post-surgical instructions called for taking the rest of the day off, but this was not an option.
I went to work and in the afternoon got a call from someone in HR at the Very Fantastic Medical Center who extended an offer of employment as a per diem staff chaplain! This will be one 24-hour shift a week, which is perfect, except for continuing to be away from Hammett one night every week. I wanted to work two days a week, and this is kind of an efficient way to do that. It was a boost to get an actual paid job as a chaplain before CPE even ended. It made me feel like a real chaplain.
I immediately had to start doing various onboarding tasks (online training, authorizing a background check) plus all the medical stuff for my new job (vaccinations, two TB tests, flu shot, physical exam), which I was still in the process of doing for County Hospital. I began to feel somewhat overwhelmed, with so many appointments and so many details to attend to.
The second-to-last day of CPE was the most tiring of the entire year. I spent the whole day training the person who is taking over my main unit, and couldn’t believe how exhausted I was afterward. I took a final look at my Patients I Have Seen list: 787 people. And my Deceased Patients list: 30. The latter is by no means every patient I encountered who died, but those who meant something to me or who I remember very clearly. I also did not see all of those patients after death, but I saw a lot of dead people, maybe 20 in the course of the year.
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