I read it somewhere on the Internet...
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| The Medieval Bestseller I read it somewhere on the Internet... |
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Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Have I got a day for you. So I go to the hospital and I start printing out my census of the units I'm covering today. In walks Inga. Inga is one of our volunteers who, I think, is 81. She is from Germany and she comes every Wednesday and is super sweet and I've gotten to know her over the past few weeks because, it seems, I'm the only one who cares enough to find her work to do. She's assigned to our Spiritual Care office and her main task is to visit the new patients, to let them know about the Spiritual Care department. But since all she does usually is hand them a brochure, she can do this in like under an hour and then she has nothing to do. Since I've been in a place where I've had nothing to do at work (read: GNP), I get that it's a horrible thing. So I try my hardest to think of various things around the office that she can work on. One day I assigned her to work on the rosaries and that ended up being fairly dramatic, but that's a story for another day. Well, last week Inga and I were talking about Oktoberfest. Now, I think you all know that I love Oktoberfest. So I was asking her about her experiences of Oktoberfest, being German and all, and she said that she was going to go to an Oktoberfest celebration in Big Bear this past weekend with her daughter and grandson. All well and good. So she walks in and I greet her and go back to studying my census. She comes up to me and places in my hand a beaded necklace. At first, I think she's handing me a rosary, and I'm thinking, "Why's Inga giving me a rosary?! I'm Protestant." I only have vague notions of what one does with a rosary. But then I look down in my hand and it's not a rosary at all...instead, I saw:  Yes...you've got that right...a dead, rubber chicken on a beaded necklace. I love it. Love it. I'm not sure I'd wear it, but maybe after a couple of beers on Sunday...we'll just have to see. So then I went to trauma rounds because the two chaplains who normally go to trauma rounds were both occupied. One was caught in a traffic jam that made him go all the way back to his house and take a completely alternate route to the hospital because they closed the freeway, and the other was dealing with the death of a trauma patient that was brought in that morning from a motorcycle accident. I was not clear whether the accident where they closed the road was the same one that was the death we had at the hospital today, but it is likely. Anyway, so I went to trauma rounds and heard about the various trauma cases that are active in the ICU right now. One of the patients has been there since August, I think, and is a victim of a shooting that basically hit everything organ his body because the bullet exploded. 2.2 million dollars later, the guy is still alive because of all of the effort the hospital has put in to saving him. He will likely go back to living a normal life (and hopefully not go down the same path he was on). Amazing. And today I heard that one of his problems, which is that his intestines are only about 40-ish inches long (instead of being like 5 feet long), will be solved in two-ish years because they will grow them back. Amazing. Really, they do amazing work in the ER/ICU at the hospital I work at. After trauma rounds, I was able to visit one patient before I heard a trauma being called. Being the on-call chaplain, I responded to the trauma, which was a car accident. The patient was OK, kinda, but it was complicated because the people she was driving with (her children) were taken to another hospital, so I had to coordinate with the people from that hospital regarding her case. After spending some time working on that case, it was time for lunch, so I got my lunch and was just sitting down with a fellow chaplain for a nice lunch outside of the craziness that was the hospital today when I was paged to yet another trauma, yet another car accident, this time involving two men who were businessmen from out of state. They were really pretty fine, but it took me the next two hours to work on their case because there were so many phone calls and back and forth action trying to get everything settled. I was finally able to eat my lunch at around 3, when I was interrupted yet again to settle the last trauma case I was working on. The last hour of work was fairly insignificant. Today, when I was going in to work I felt like I was working for the weekend...and by the end of my shift, I felt like I had earned it. But the nice thing was that it went by very quickly. So tonight I went with Chris & Tyler to a comedy show at the Upright Citizens Brigade. The gist of the show is that they ask for volunteers from the audience to show the audience their MySpace page and then they will look through the person's MySpace profile and make fun of them. (here's a short video about it that Good Morning America did...they manage to make it look not very funny.) But the thing is that it's very funny. [Side-note: I think it would be great if Carrie went to this comedy show and showed her profile and then when they asked her what she does for a living, she could say that she works at MySpace.] Anyway, so before we went to the comedy show, we had some time to kill, so we went to the used bookstore next door. While I was there, I found a book that I could have really used last fall when I was taking a class on the atonement and writing a paper of how the atonement is conveyed in art. This book basically had a bunch of pictures of the crucifixion from the 5th century (when the crucifixion started being portrayed in art) to present day. And, let me just tell you, the present day stuff gets really...interesting. I tried to take a picture of the two...well, I just want to show you so you can see for yourself. But that will have to wait for tomorrow because it is presently 12:40 a.m. and I am beat. - Jenny, 10/03/2007 11:36:00 PM |
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