Late in August, I walked over to County Hospital (not its real name) for my interview with the director of the chaplaincy program there, which is all volunteers, except for her. I liked her right away. She described the chaplain training program as “CPE Light.” Along with the chaplains, there are volunteer eucharistic ministers and two Catholic priests assigned there, both of whom I know. I was in CPE with one last summer at the Very Fantastic Medical Center and the other was one of my peers in the yearlong clinical pastoral education program just completed.
That week, the director of spiritual care at Very Fantastic Medical Center contacted me and invited me to apply for two per diem positions, and told me to let her know when I could interview. I am planning to go to school part-time for two years starting in March, and also to volunteer as a chaplain at the County Hospital, so I can keep my skills current and also just because I have long wanted to hang around there. The final thing I was hoping to find was two paid days of chaplain work each week, so I was happy to be asked to apply for the per diem positions.
Sam had a job interview around that time that he said didn’t go very well—when they asked for examples of this or that, he couldn’t dredge them up on the spot. Learning from that, I made myself a cheat sheet of examples of various things: use of ritual, mediating conflict between others, offering meditation for physical pain, being with a patient who thought God was punishing him, and so forth. I thought the interview went quite well. The director said toward the end of our hour-long talk that she appreciated that I was ready to go with stories.
I made a goodbye flyer to give to my units at work, and smaller cards to hand out to people. Both had a photo of me on them (taken by a nurse on one of my units), and mainly expressed my thanks for the privilege of getting to work alongside such splendid people this past year.
The new crop of CPE students joined us in the final two weeks, and things became very chaotic and hectic and exciting: 14 of us plus 14 or 15 of them plus four extended-unit (part-time) students.
At morning meeting with one week to go, one of my peers shared about going to a meeting of respiratory therapists the evening before, at which he learned that a respiratory therapist goes to every Code Blue and that when it comes time for a patient to be transitioned to comfort care, it is the respiratory therapist who turns off, or turns down, the breathing support offered via ventilator!
Our mouths were, figuratively speaking, hanging open—we’d never thought about this before. It may be the respiratory therapist who is literally keeping someone alive, possibly a patient the respiratory therapist has come to know well and care about. Therefore, a respiratory therapist can opt out of being the one to turn off the ventilator, but my peer said he suspects this option is probably not exercised often. If you don’t want to do this, you might be in the wrong job. We were somewhat chagrined to be learning all of this so late in our program.
I learned another thing in those final days, a thing I’d been meaning to learn for months, which is who the people in the bright red scrubs are. They are vendors! I found this out by approaching one who was using a copy machine near the operating rooms. I asked why so many vendors are to be seen around the ORs, and he said it is because they are present when the equipment their company makes is used in a surgery, so that they can answer questions for the surgeons, or assist if there are problems, and can report useful information back to their bosses about how things actually go in the field.
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