Pandemic Parables: Sounds

Pandemic Parables: Sounds
Monday August 17th 2020

I have been very aware of the unique sounds of the hospital in Frederick, Maryland, where I am working as a Resident Chaplain until August 28th, less than two weeks away.

In my early twenties, fresh from England, I worked for KLBJ, Lady Bird Johnson’s radio station in Austin, Texas. There I learned about a brilliant media theorist, advertising director, and sound archivist called Tony Schwartz (not the ghost writer of the President’s book). This Tony Schwartz was known as “the wizard of sound”. One thing he did was record sounds in New York streets that were very common at the time, but now are rare, or no longer. These included boys hawking the evening editions of papers. Children playing street games. Trolleys.

Influenced by him I wanted to capture some of the sounds that have been part of my every day for the past year so I don’t forget. Sounds like the swishing of cars coming in to the staff garage every morning and evening at shift change. As they clunk over metal plates there is a roaring sound like the ebb and flow of a mighty ocean.

Unexpected laughter! The manager of KLBJ told me so many years ago that laughter in the corridors and offices of a work place are proof that it overflows with creativity and contentment. It is a hallmark of businesses of excellence with happy employees.

There is no doubt that the work done in the hospital is often life and death important. But I love walking past nurses stations on my floors and hearing a gurgle of laughter and flashing smiles.

I was going to visit a patient the other day and he had a sign on his door saying “Chemotherapy- please see the nurse before entering”. I found the nurse.  She was with one other staff member.

“There is no chance of me being pregnant,” I said. “Is it all right for me to go in?”

The two of them assessed my age and smiled.

And then the nurse said “you’ll be fine as long as you don’t touch his urine.”

“I give you my solemn promise,” I said, “that I shall go nowhere near his urine.”

It was all so silly that the three of us burst out laughing, and the visit went all the better because of it.

There is the sound of kindness everywhere. Nurses encouraging frightened patients. Happy birthday being sung to a patient who is in the hospital on their natal day, alone because of the COVID restrictions. Then the sound of candles being extinguished on the cup cakes that were paid for by a generous charge nurse.

The soft shuffle and creak as an orthopedic patient slowly walks along a hall way supported by two physiotherapists, both murmuring quiet praise. A third one walks slowly behind with a big, comfortable hospital chair so the patient knows she can sit down at any time.

The medical beeps and whistles in a patient’s room coming from drips and the like. Sounds that continue to baffle me. However there is one medical sound I will never forget. A patient was in the Emergency Department. Death was imminent. The patient’s daughter was there, in her scrubs from a different medical establishment. Everything was done to save this patient’s life. And then the doctor turned to the daughter and said: “I’m so sorry. She has gone. I’m going to turn her oxygen off now. I want you to be prepared. Are you ready?”

The daughter nodded. The rhythmic hiss of the oxygen stopped. The silence of death flooded the room. We had a Pause. Then the doctor offered his sincere condolences. And, letting humanity override protocol, the nurse hugged her fellow nurse in wordless deeply-felt comfort.

Unspoken kindness in action.

One of the dramatic sounds of the hospital is the medical helicopter arriving on the helipad, situated on the top floor of the parking garage. When it arrives and leaves it seems to hover over the chaplain’s office that is next door to a peaked glass atrium. The windows rattle and a flood of fuel fills the room. That is our cue to pray for the person who has arrived or left so dramatically.

I asked one of the heads of security about the helicopter. “You never know when they are going to come,” he said in his North of Ireland brogue. You won’t get any for ages and then, they appear. We had two arrive at exactly the same time once. One of them had to land temporarily at the airport.”

“So it’s like busses back home?” I said.

“He laughed, his kind eyes twinkling. “You’re right,” he said. “Wait an age for one and then two arrive at the same time.”

“What happens if a helicopter arrives at night?” I asked. “Do the neighbors mind?”

The hospital is right in the middle of a residential area. And that helicopter certainly makes its presence known.

“Well,” he said hesitantly. “That doesn’t happen too often. And that’s a good thing.”

God bless the neighbors that will overlook the sound of an overhead medical emergency.

That atrium I mentioned next to the chaplains’ office is dramatic in the rain. The atmosphere darkens and it sounds as though we are in a suburban rain forest. One day we heard the swishing sounds of the rain, but the room was still bright. We looked out the window. It didn’t appear to be raining, certainly not to the dramatic level we were hearing.

A mystery!

But then we discovered that it was the large machine that cleans the floors of the hospital’s long corridors. There had been construction surrounding the chaplain’s recently moved offices for several months at the beginning of the virus. Because of that, the machine hadn’t been in our area. It was a new sound for us. This time the sound of water sloshing marked a return to normality.

One of the most prevalent sounds in the hospital are the operators announcing messages overhead. 

Celebration walks used to happen several times a day as COVID-19 patients were released. That happy announcement caused people to drop what they were doing and head for the front foyer to cheer on the exiting patient. Now those walks are rare as we have so few cases in the hospital. There were five on Sunday and none were in the ICU.

Thank you Lord. 

Much more common overhead messages from the operators are:

Vehicles that need to be moved.

Medical staff who need to phone a certain extension.

And codes.

There is a code for every emergency. For example a code green is for a combative person. A code grey for an elopement, when someone has left the hospital without being discharged, often their mind in a muddle. And then there are the three that chaplains respond to, these are usually, but not always for the Emergency Department. My beat.

Code heart - for a heart attack.

Code stroke - when someone is having a stroke.

And code blue when someone has stopped breathing and is near death.

When the overhead announcement starts, the chaplains immediately stop what they are doing, write down the details and respond. The first action is to phone the dedicated code line to tell the operator we have heard. You can’t hear the tannoy in certain parts of the hospital, for example patient’s rooms. So the operator will call to make sure we know about the code.

These operators sound universally lovely. My transporter friend told me that they are chosen for their calm voices.

“They have to be soothing so as not to alarm people,” he said. “They have to be able to announce an emergency in a way that does not create panic.”

The only time I heard a glimmer of a crack in their usual sang froid was when a code red was announced recently. This is the code for a fire. Our fire alarm system is tested often. We are warned before it happens and told to ignore the flashing lights, persistent sound and closed doors. However a real, small, fire broke out the other day on the roof. Knowing their voices well I detected that the operator, who must have been new, was not as calm as usual. The edge in her voice hinted at what she really wanted to say, and didn’t. “This is real folks. This time it’s real!”

I had no idea where the operators lived in the hospital, and so the other day I set out to find their control center.  I have a soft spot for operators. My mother was one before marrying my father and I loved to listen to her stories of loves lost and found, connections made and broken.

I phoned to make my request, directions were given, and I was welcomed with open arms.

What a delightful group of women! (And I have no idea why there aren’t any male operators. Perhaps they just don’t apply. )

It was wonderful to put faces to voices. We reminisced about some odd calls I’d had. I met the woman who told me my husband was on the line and insisted it was him, although I’ve never been married. We laughed at the memory.

One young operator came in to the room from her break and was surprised to see an outsider in this hallowed sanctum.

The others were working - and it was nonstop work. So I took the opportunity of asking this one a question before she settled down to work.

“What is the oddest phone call you’ve received?”

She giggled and said “Well there was one man who insisted that we had stolen his sperm and were using it to impregnate patients. And then there was a woman who called saying that her husband was keeping her from her children. Neither were patients at the hospital…”

I’m sure she handled it with these operators’ normal aplomb.

All in a day’s essential work.

In this Coronavirus season the soundscape of all of our lives changed. Traffic sounds hushed, birds seemed to sing louder, the world slowed down. Despite the fear and ravages of the virus, the world was a more tranquil place. There were the sounds of people helping their neighbors, taking meals to the home bound, phoning long lost friends.

My prayer is that none of us will forget the camaraderie, the bonds formed, the sounds of caring and every day kindnesses that have flooded this virus season. God’s work in action.

Let us take the best of what we have learned, the soundscapes we have rediscovered, into the future.

And then the future will be good.