I Didn’t Freak

As I was leaving work early in July—after I was already on my bike and rolling down the street—I got a page requesting a visit for a patient right away, plus one later that evening, after she delivered her baby. I felt a little disgruntled at this order and pre-order of services: two after-hours visits for the same patient? How did she know she needed two? I turned back toward the hospital and went to see the patient. The nurse thanked me for coming, and said, “We’ll be paging the on-call chaplain later on.”

I said, “That will be me, because I’m on call all night. We are available during the night for emergencies.” I was hinting that being paged to offer prayers welcoming a well baby into the world would not be a good enough reason for me to be awoken from a hopefully sound sleep and to have to get dressed and return to the hospital.

The nurse said, “OK. We’ll page the on-call chaplain, then.”

I said, “That will be me, because I’m on call all night.”

After another loop or two of the same exchange, I asked the nurse if I could speak to her privately, and learned that the patient was going to be delivering a pre-term baby who was not expected to live. The two requests now made sense. The patient herself was quite young, and told me she was worried she would “bleed out” and die during delivery. I pulled the nurse aside again to ask if this worry was well founded. It was.

The patient told me that she did not want to see her baby, but did want him baptized if he was born alive. I agreed to baptize the baby if he was born alive, and I offered prayers for the well-being of the patient. I was now eager to be of service to this frightened young woman and told the nurse to be sure to page me later.

That happened after midnight. Back at the hospital, I found the patient in a relaxed mood. She had delivered the baby, already dead, and had asked for him to be brought to her; she had changed her mind about not seeing him. Per her worry that she would die during delivery, I expressed joy at seeing her, and she said, “I didn’t freak, because of your prayer.” That was a hugely gratifying chaplain moment.

I was not worried about seeing the pre-term child, because I have seen many pre-term children. However, when this one was brought back into the room, I realized this was something I had never seen before. The baby was perfectly formed, maybe 12 inches from head to toe, and black-red in color, which I learned is just the color babies are at that pre-birth age. The sight was disturbing. I felt a little weak in the knees and had to sit down for a moment.

I explained the Catholic church’s view of baptism, and offered the ritual as a naming ceremony rather than a sacrament. The baby’s weeping grandmother held the baby. By the time I was asked if I would like to hold the baby, I was happy to do that.

A few days later, I saw Kiss My Aztec at Berkeley Rep, which I had expected to be full of cheesy humor and/or annoyingly educational, but it was really wonderful—very funny, and with a refreshingly abrasive female lead.

When I visited my family in the summer, I shared the exciting news that I had bought a pressure cooker, and was dismayed when skilled questioning elicited the fact that I had bought a “jiggle top.” I know (now) that even a modern jiggle top has more safety features than the jiggle tops of yore, but decided that I would return this embarrassing item and get a second-generation pressure cooker.

One day during my visit I looked through my mother’s cookbooks to see if she had a pressure cooker cookbook, and indeed she did, by a woman who has written several of them. In early July, I went to Novato to see Carol-Joy. We had breakfast at Toast and dinner at a Thai restaurant. In between, we saw The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Carol-Joy mentioned that the community where she lives has begun hosting regular evenings where people can share for 15 or 20 minutes about themselves, a fun way for neighbors to get to know each other better. She mentioned a recent speaker, a well-educated food writer with a PhD. I screamed the name of the author whose book Mom has, and sure enough, it was her. She lives three doors from Carol-Joy! Carol-Joy told her about this coincidence, and she told Carol-Joy, “Next time Bugwalk visits, come on over!”