Drunk Text Me Later

The title of this post was overheard at work, one RN speaking to another.

One of my fellow chaplains (one of the CPE students) shares a first initial with me. We are two years apart in age, we both have short grey hair, and we both often wear a French blue button-down shirt. It even so happens that the first three letters of her last name are the same as the first three letters of my middle name. Because we share two units, another coincidence, we are frequently confused for each other.

As I walked through the ED last week, someone called to me, “Thanks for the rock!”

I said, “Huh? Oh! You’re welcome.” For Nurses’ Week, we had handed out coin envelopes, each containing a polished stone and a piece of paper instructing the recipient to carry the stone in her pocket and to let it remind her that she is valued. I would have explained that the stone had not come from me, but I know that no one in the ED has time to chat about a thing like that.

Fortunately, my colleague is a very good chaplain, judging from the fact that patients say, “Nice to see you again,” rather than, “Get lost! I told you last time!” I can also tell my co-worker is a good chaplain from her chart notes. I have been explaining to such patients that they are seeing me for the first time, but I might not do that every time in the future; my colleague said she doesn’t bother if it seems it will merely create confusion.

I lately had an encounter that caused me to think something about chaplaincy that had never consciously occurred to me before. I visited a patient in his 50s who had been perfectly healthy until he came down with the flu. This initiated a catastrophic sequence of events, and the patient was now very seriously ill. On the wall were several large photographs of his young family; the patient said he liked having them there so that his care team “can see I’m not just a specimen.”

In the course of our talk, the patient observed that he was enjoying talking to a chaplain because what would happen was not “predetermined.” He also said, “I’m lying here and maybe someone comes in, and maybe they don’t.” He seemed to be feeling that he was at the mercy of others, and also that he had been stripped of agency.

For this patient, a visit with a chaplain was a chance to experience something open and alive that could go in any direction, and of which he was equally an author and creator.