where did june go?

Ok so i haven't posted in forever. Mostly because my new favorite hobby is sleeping.

Chaplain world is good. Three weeks to go. Somedays I think that I could really do this for a living, some days I think no one could ever pay me enough to do this. It was a bad week in peds, a couple of child abuse cases and one of our little guys (5 months) passed away.

Old lady visiting is going pretty well. I had a oonversation with a lady about her 20+ lb cat punctuated by speaker phone cell phone conversations with her daughter. Her daughter didn't know that it was speaker phone and that someone else was listening to the conversation. Very strange. It was a little like talking to a bored 14 year old. I'm not really sure why she wanted a chaplain, she didn't want to talk about God (not that in every visit I am cramming God down people's throats, its just that they request us, usually there is some kind of spiritual aspect to the visit) I guess she was bored. Came back two days later and had the EXACT SAME conversation almost verbatim including cell phone calls, this time with an the addition of a picture of the cat. It's not fat, it's freaking huge. I'm pretty sure it's a puma.

I'm finding friends and chaplaincy advocates around the hosiptal in the form of nurses and even a resident. In some ways I wish I was doing the CPE program that Seth is doing. We would have starved to death if I had (40 hours a week, unpaid) but the extra time and the fact that he is only on one floor lets him develop a deeper relationship with the staff. The extra time also means they can process stuff more than we can just because of time restraints.

So we read this thing for class about critical incident stress about how people react to a stress situation long after (days, weeks, sometimes months) after it happened. One of the symptoms was "cognitive loss". I'm pretty sure I have that. I call it suddenly being overtaken by ditz. I can't seem to get anywhere without taking the wrong exit or turning the wrong way to get where I'm going at least onece or twice. I'm alert, I'm not dangerous to drive, I just have lost the ability to take the right exit. Joanie has cognitive loss too, she lost her car in the hospital parking lot for 20 minutes. At least I'm not a ditz alone.

I also just get pissed off. It's a litte bit funny (I'm sure Seth would beg to differ), but I spent about 3 days this week like a petulant two year old who hasn't had a nap. We were talking in class about this book that subdivides you personality into these other personalities (warrior, sage, orphan etc) to explore why you make decisions like you do and acknowledge the conflicting voices you might have about a situation. Little bit wacky, not sure I buy it. If you were to seriously pursue this (which we didn't, thank God) you have to name your inner people and draw picture of them and you have to journal conversations with them. Just for the fun of it, lets listen in to a conversation with my inner whiny two year old.

whiny two year old: WHAAAAAA! I don't want to!
me: Don't want to what?
wtyo: I don't know.
me: Do you want to take a nap?
wtyo: NO, I'm not tired.
me: Do you want to go out?
wtyo: NO, I'm tired.
me: are you hungry?
wtyo: Yes, but there is not food in the house
me: we should probably go to walmart
wtyo: NO, I HATE WALMART
me: well, we need to clean the bathroom
wtyo: NO, it's yucky.
me: that's why we need to clean it. Want to walk the dog?
wtyo: NO, it's hot.
me: want to read a book?
wtyo: NO, I can't pay attention.
me: want to watch TV?
wtyo: NO, there's nothing on
me: what DO you want to do?
wtyo: NOT THIS
me: what's this?
wtyo: I DON'T KNOW. FIX IT.
(warrior gallups in, scopes up the wtyo, stuffs it in a ruck sack and heads to the nearest port to sell it as a deck hand on a pirate ship)

you get the point. I'm over it for now, but I spent the first half of the week feeling frustrated, useless and completely inept. But God is good and gets me through.

OK off to the dreaded mart to initiate phase 4 of the war against mice. Long story, another post.