Pandemic Parables: Mysteries

Pandemic Parables: Mysteries
July 10th 2020

Mysteries abound at the hospital in Frederick, Maryland, where I am working as Resident Chaplain until the end of August. Some are more serious than others.

On the lighter side, I’ve had another strange phone call.

Some of you will remember that a few months ago the operator called me saying, “Chaplain Geraldine your husband is on the line.”

This wouldn’t be odd at all, except that I’ve never been married.

I told the operator so.

“That’s what we all thought,” said she.

Which I find pretty mysterious in itself.

It is unusual, methinks, but delightful, that the operators, who are always gracious and wonderfully efficient, but whom I’ve never met, know my marital status.

Apparently the chap was pretty insistent he speak to me. But when the operator went to connect him he had hung up.

Another one bites the dust.

I got another inexplicable call earlier in the week. Well I didn’t, our staff Chaplain from Kenya, Chaplain Peter, whom I admire greatly, did. The person asked for me and so he took a message.

He phoned me on my hospital cell phone. I was doing rounds.

“A woman just called asking for you. When you weren’t available she said you were to urgently call this number,” and he relayed it to me. “I asked for the name of the person you were to contact,” he continued. “She said you would know who it was the moment you heard the number.”

The digits meant nothing to me.

I looked them up on my personal phone wondering if a contact’s name would pop up.

Nothing.

How bizarre!

I called the number. A charming sounding man with a deep resonant voice answered.

I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me.

“I don’t remember calling the hospital,” he said. “And I can’t imagine any of my friends doing so on my behalf.

“Do you need a chaplain?” I responded.

“Noooo,” he said hesitantly.

We had reached a point where we both realized this was a very strange conversation.

“But you can stay on the line if you like,” he said finally.

I didn’t think pastoral care was what he had in mind. And so I graciously declined.

At that moment Chaplain Peter rounded the corner with two new-to-the-hospital interns in tow. (One had done a previous semester in Hospice.) He was giving them a tour. He confirmed the number, and then gave me the number of the woman who had placed the original call.

I called her. The line was malfunctioning. I tried several times. Each time the phone rang a few times before cutting off.

Was this a supernatural dating service gone askew?

Perhaps there is a simple explanation?

But in the meantime it remains a mystery.

Others are facing mysteries in the hospital this week.

The interns are among their number.

After a five-week hiatus where the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Intern Program was put on hold because of the virus, the Pastoral Care Department is approaching normal again. A normal where all the classes and supervisory sessions are on line. And when chaplains are physically in the hospital, masks and social distancing are in place.

The interns do classes on a Monday. For the foreseeable future these will take place in their own homes via computer. Every week each of them has a different day on duty in the hospital from 4pm to 9pm, followed by being on call overnight until 8am the following morning. In addition, they work one Saturday evening a month.

For one of the interns this is her first semester. Everything is squeaky new.

Chatting with her on her first day I was swept back to when I started as an Intern for the prerequisite semester needed before becoming a Resident. It seems so very long ago. An eternity.

In actuality it was last May. (My Residency started at the beginning of September.)

I am very unmedical, I had rarely been in a hospital before. It felt like I had entered a different world.

Everything was a mystery.

On walking the hospital’s halls I constantly saw things that bemused me. On one of my first evenings I did a double take when I saw a sign on a door.

I thought it said Insensitives.

“Oh my goodness,” I thought. A room for insensitive staff?”

I went back and read it again. It was Intensivists. It would be a long time before I learned that these are certified physicians who provide special care for critically ill patients.

Another time I walked past a door that was marked “Sound Physicians.” I spent far too long wondering where they put the unsound ones.

Later I was to discover that Sound was the name of an agency that supplies doctors to the hospital.

But the time when my imagination went into overdrive was one Wednesday evening near the beginning of my internship when I was the only chaplain on duty in the hospital.

The phone rang in the chaplain’s office.

“Chaplain Geraldine,” I answered.

“Chaplain,” said a female voice, “Stand by for an exhumation in about thirty minutes. The family has requested that a chaplain be there. I’ll call again when we are ready.”

At least that’s what I thought she said.

My first thought was. “How odd, for a hospital to be doing exhumations. And then my often over-fertile imagination took me to a misty night in England where eighteenth century grave robbers were digging furtively by the light of a flickering lantern…

I snapped out of my reverie.

“An exhumation?” I asked tentatively.

There was a silence on the other end of the line and then the now shocked voice said. “No. An extubation.”

“Oh silly me, of course,” I responded. “I’ll be ready when you call.”

And then I went and found a nurse to ask what an extubation was.

Now I’ve attended several such events where a patient is taken off a breathing tube and their family sit vigil expecting, but not knowing for certain if, or when, their loved one would slip into eternity.

I have learned it is an honor to be so close to the mystery of dying, death, and a family’s grief.

A profound, sacred honor.
 

There are other mysteries that abound in the hospital, besides the ultimate mystery of how magnificently and intricately the human body is put together.

A social worker, who has been in the hospital throughout the pandemic rather than working from home, recently talked to me about the mystery of human behavior.

She is a big hearted, enthusiastic woman who will do anything to care for the patients and their families who are under her care.

Rules have been a little relaxed in the hospital recently. The number of Coronavirus patients continues to fluctuate but is still relatively low – as of today we have six Covid-19 positive patients and five under observation. However during the height of the virus no visitors were allowed to visit Covid positive patients, and later only two people could visit a patient who was imminently dying.

My social worker friend had one patient with five offspring, all who were desperate to be by their mother’s bedside as she died. They would have done anything to all be there, but they had to make hard choices. It is heart breaking for the family, and painful for the social worker that such rules had to be enforced. And although she has been at many bedsides in full protective gear holding ipads so that families can say goodbye, she is acutely aware that nothing is like the touch of someone you trust and love.

However what concerned her the most during this season was the incredible fear that went with this dreadful virus. She has had adult children living in their parent’s house who refused to have their relative back because of fear. They would prefer to leave them in the hospital for weeks than let them return to the home that they love.

In another case, a man wept uncontrollably on the phone to my friend because he didn’t want his elderly mother, who had been released from the hospital, to have health care personnel come in and look after her. He was terrified of having people in the house in case they were contaminated with the virus. However he was unable to look after his mother by himself. Although he begged for a reprieve, he had no other workable solution for his mother’s care. In the end he had to accept the inevitable or my friend would have had to involve social services, something that she really did not want to do.

She is amazed how this virus has brought the best, as well as the very worst out of people.

This has been a strange season for all of us, and yes, frightening in so many ways. Full of changes, upheavals, financial insecurity, frustration, and for many, deep loneliness.

Our established ways of life have been upended. Our realities changed. We stay away from people because we love them.

Although some will even sacrifice a parent’s wellbeing because of fear.

The ground of our certainties has shifted beneath our feet. Is still shifting. Might be shifting for a long time.

Which reminds me of something that Steve Jobs said once: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

In other words you have to trust that as things have worked out in your life so far, so they will in the future. The ground will eventually stop shifting. There will be a solution to every looming problem, even though it might not be one that you have chosen. But perhaps that caterpillar of an answer that brought you disappointment and grief might eventually turn into a butterfly, achieving heights that you never dreamed were possible.

Or at least peace of mind and quiet joy.

It says in the Good Book that perfect love casts out fear.

There is a lot of fear in a hospital. Fear of dying, fear of letting a loved one slip into eternity, fear of a changed life less a limb or a lung. But I have seen peace slide into a room on the back of prayer and surround a patient, or a family, and in its own time, bring resignation, and with it acceptance.

Strength to face whatever lies ahead.

An inner knowledge, a quiet certainty that the dots will connect. And as love was there in the past, so it will be in the future.

May it be so for all of us.

May we feel and know the love of the One that loves us with an incomprehensible love, no matter where we have been or what we have done. May His love encircle us, push all the fear out of us, and take it far from us.

May God’s Mother Father love comfort us in these unsettling times. And provide for us.

And may we be conduits of the love that we receive. Bridges of love and understanding in a world that is far too segregated by color, creed, and political persuasion.

Then somehow we will be part of His answer.

And that indeed is a mystery.