i can see thestrals

Code blue is what happens when someone's heart stops beating or they stop breathing. As you might imagine these two things often happen at the same time. When a code blue is called, the crash team comes tearing out of the woodwork to the area called. Think (what at least appear to be) 200 people (maybe 20) running into one room at break neck (often literally if you're talking about someone who got in their way) speed.

When a code blue is called, all chaplains are supposed to hurry, not run, to the area. Why all, you may ask? Because there are only certain areas where you can hear overhead announcements, so they want to make sure someone is there in case everyone else was in a patient's room or whatever.

So Wednesday morning, I'm in the library of the hospital working on a verbatim when I hear a code blue being called in the ICU. So, reluctantly I start up stairs. I'm freaking out about now. All I can do is pray that God will be with whoever the code is called for and me as I attempt to minister to whoever needs it.

But a really cool thing happened on my ride up the elevator. God answered my prayer. As I stepped on the floor, I actually felt like I could do this. Since there were a bazillion people crowding around, I thought I was the only chaplain that had heard the code and started trying to find any family members. There weren't any family members. In fact about the only thing that was known about the patient was his name. He died at 10:27, alone.

The fact that this man was all alone with no one here to mourn him was what affected me. If he is buried here using money from the "pauper's fund", he won't even have a funeral and from the sound of it, his family may not be able to come here.

We of course have to talk about this experience afterwards in our class. I feel a little guilty in saying that I am OK. As we were debriefing in class today, we were asked how we were feeling in this moment or that one. I felt good. I felt calm and in control and ready to help however I could. I wasn't really panicked or incapacitated with grief or weirded out by death.

I attribute my calmness in the situation to God and God alone and I am profoundly saddened by his lonely death, I prayed for him even as he was dying, prayed that he would know peace and not pain and that God would welcome him. I have no possible way of knowing anything about his faith, but I have to have to hope that he was a Christian. What do you pray over a dead body? Maybe in some cosmic way I don't understand, I could be an advocate for him at those last minutes, praying for him to be delivered, in this life and the next. I only wish that I hadn't been as afraid of getting in the nurses' way as they were cleaning up the room after he died and had gone in to just hold his hand, so that he could have somebody see him as a person and not just a patient or a corpse one last time.

chaplain diary

So medicine can really use terms that sound hideous. Cause in point from my day: fetal demise. Fetal demise is what happens when something happens to the baby during labor and the baby dies. I didn't even really think of this as a possibility anymore. The term "still born" is no longer relevant right? I knew that newborns are often too sick or premature to survive, but they die only after extraordinary effort of the NICU, right? They don't just DIE in labor right?

so having run out of things to do on my regular floors after an hour and a half (i'm supposed to be there for 4 hours), i went around to the areas that usually aren't assigned chaplains as i have been instructed to do. ER, heart lab, women's center (labor and delivery) etc. I went into the women's center and the nurses sent me to the room of a woman who had experienced "fetal demise" the night before. The baby was only 23 weeks when she went into labor, so it didn't have much of a chance (viable is 26 weeks minimum). i stood outside the door of this room hyper-ventilating. what was i supposed to say to this family?

and I see that i have to walk in here as the representative of a God that loves this family and that mourns with them but also of the God that allowed this thing to happen. And I can't make those fit. It's not my job to make those fit right now. I want to make them fit, but I can't.

I think the main thing that i was terrified of in the chaplain thing was i didn't feel qualified. I wasn't old enough, mature enough, mature enough as a Christian and had no experience with ministry in trajedy. But God is teaching me that I CAN walk in a door as his representative because He's there. No merits of my own other than willingness to be used.

Anticlimactically, she didn't want to talk to me and the visit lasted all of 30 seconds. But if she did want to talk to me, I knew God was there and that I was able to speak for him to those people who needed him.