Boogie Fever

Late in April, there was a staff meeting at my paying job. It was fun, with frequent laughter. My relationship with my boss now seems quite genial and even playful at moments, which I am glad about.

A day or two later, I went to County Hospital for volunteer appreciation day. It was held outside—the weather was lovely—and there were beautiful decorations, fruit salad and ice cream, a certificate and gifts for each volunteer, and a raffle (tickets were free) to give away 15 or so hospital hoodies. There was a photo booth where you could put on a funny hat and pose with your own group of volunteers and get an immediate print of the picture. The playlist was right up my alley, 80s funk, like “Boogie Fever,” by the Sylvers, which still is in my vinyl collection.

I met a fellow chaplain I’d never met before, one who has been volunteering since 1991 and who worked at this hospital as a nurse starting in the 1960s. I noticed she was moving to the music a little, so I asked if she’d like to dance, and the two of us got up and danced in front of the whole crowd of maybe 100 people.

After sending the NICU person at County Hospital an email saying I’d like to be trained to hold babies, I started knocking on her door every time I passed it, and at the very end of April, she finally answered it and took me right into the NICU and introduced me to one of their baby holders, who spent an hour training me. The volunteer said, “See that blue thing? It’s an IV stand. Don’t kick it.” She also shared that she has learned that when a nurse is listening to a patient’s heartbeat using a stethoscope, that is not a good time to ask a question.

This NICU is quite small, maybe 12 beds total. The good news is that most babies in this unit will get well and go home. At the hospital where I did CPE, they have nursery after nursery for ill babies, plus a pediatric ICU and a pediatric cardiac ICU. They get the very sickest babies, and deaths are not uncommon.

One day I went in a Zipcar up to see Carol-Joy in Novato. We had breakfast at Toast, and then she introduced me to her delightful neighbor, Joan, who graciously invited us in for a bit. I think Joan would not mind me mentioning that in recent years she threw herself a “fun-eral”—a funeral where the guest of honor is still alive and gets to have fun hearing all the nice things her friends have to say about her. If I recall correctly, Carol-Joy said that Joan had a coffin for the occasion. Carol-Joy and I played cards all afternoon and then had dinner at a restaurant in San Rafael called LaVier.

The next day, I worked and it was the rare day when I was there at the same time as my colleague. I still felt a little annoyed about this and that minor thing, but when she started to talk about the various stresses in her life, I suddenly felt much more sympathetic. She said that on her way to work, she had seen a car accident and had seen a dead man, prior to the arrival of first responders. That must have been awful. We had lunch together and exchanged chaplain tips. She asked how often I end up having to work while on standby in the evening, and I said, “I don’t want to jinx myself, but not very often,” and I knocked on wood.

That very evening, just as I was about to turn off my bedside light, the pager started beeping. It was a request from a doctor to go to the campus that is farthest from my apartment building to support a family that was likely on the verge of losing a child who had been perfectly healthy not 12 hours earlier. I spent about three and a half hours with the family—by the time I got home and finished charting, it was 2:30 a.m.—and had a very good talk with another young family member, who said, “My family and I never sit and talk like this.” The parents work menial jobs and I saw that one of them was limping terribly. I could see a bit of how the various pressures in this family play out, the fundamental problem being that they are people of color, immigrants with little money who live in America. It bothers me terribly, and to think that the President of the United States goes out of his way to make it worse.