Rakusu Rage

In mid-September, I attended Schwarz Rounds at County Hospital. The topic was treating young adults with drug problems. We also received a handout on treating various kinds of “hateful” patients. All four panelists talked about the same young patient who was seriously ill and whose mood and wishes changed constantly. In the end, two of the panelists said, all they could do was be with her, often in silence, which one of the panelists said was really challenging, but “paid off,” in that she picked up nuances over time that helped her understand how best to care for the patient.

A few days later, my CPE cohort met, as we do every two months, this time at the home of one of our members in Berkeley who has most often been our host. It was nice to sit in her beautiful back yard and eat and talk. Toward the end of our time together, we did an official check-in, with time for each person to say what she or he had been up to.

Lately I was talking with another chaplain of about my vintage—new—who is starting to move into leading trainings and writing things for publication. I felt a pang of anxiety: should I be training people and writing chapters for books? Am I falling behind? But of course I’m not even board certified yet, and I also thought about some of the extremely busy chaplains and CPE supervisors I know. Some of them clearly do not get enough sleep. I do get enough sleep, and generally, I feel quite well. So I decided to continue on my well-rested track and not teach anyone anything or write anything other than this blog. If I have to choose between being an exhausted, stressed-out person who tells other people how to feel great and being a highly refreshed person who never tells anyone anything, I choose the latter.

I shadowed a new chaplain at County Hospital, and per the way things are done in the palliative care class I attend one day a month, I asked her what she thought had gone well, and then I added what I thought she had done well. Our teachers in the class say it has been proven that this is the best way to learn. They call it “appreciative inquiry,” and point out that what we focus on increases.

The next night, I was paged while on call and had to return to work. A Catholic patient had died and the family really wanted pastoral care. When I got there, I found that they had also called their own priest, and that he had already arrived. The nurse was very apologetic, but it was all right. I just turned around and came back home.

One Sunday Tom and I went to Sacramento on the train to celebrate his birthday with Ann, his mother. She treated us to lunch at Bento Box, Tom’s choice, and then we went to her place so he could open his birthday present. On the train home, we sat with a young father and his two very delightful young sons. He and Tom are both teachers, so they had plenty to talk about, and it also turned out that they live just around the corner from us.

In Emeryville, after we got off the train and were waiting for the bus to take us back across the Bay Bridge, I saw someone who looked remarkably like Tom’s niece, because that’s who it was. The three of us went to Old Mediterranean for dinner.

On an utterly gorgeous day a few days later, I went up to Novato in a Zipcar to see Carol-Joy. We had brunch at Toast, played cards, went to see Life Itself, and returned to Toast for dinner: spinach salad and blue cheese fries, both very yummy.

Toward the end of the month, Charlie and I had tea at the Atlas Café.

I was then still working on my rakusu for Jukai next March, which must be sewn by hand. We had been instructed to take refuge with each stitch: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha.” I was working on it one day during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and found myself unable to turn off NPR. I got angrier and angrier, not so much at Kavanaugh—though I totally think he did exactly what Dr. Ford says he did, and therefore I also think he’s a liar and has no business being on the formerly Supreme Court—but at my rakusu.

I had meant to work on it for just an hour or two, but I ended up spending the whole day, getting more and more stressed out, and it was a thoroughly crappy day. I saw my tendency to blame others for my misery. (“These instructions are terrible!”) However, as angry as I got, I did not snatch up the scissors and cut my sewing project to shreds. I did do that once when I was five or six years old, when my mother was helping me to sew a skirt, and to this day it is a painful memory. After this horrible rakusu day, I set it down for several weeks, to let the bad vibes dissipate.