Matt's Homepage

Sorry about the delay in updates and the sorry state I left my RSS feed. Found a bug with the updater code, but it’s fixed now and you should be seeing this just fine.

I just finished my CPE assignment at the hospital and am continuing to decompress and process the whole experience and was given accreditation for 1 unit of CPE (A whole year would have given me 4 units).

I’m still left wondering just what to say about the whole thing. I’ve learned so much about myself, about how we process trauma, counseling techniques, emotional roller-coasters, being with people in joyful occasions like the birth of a child to the whole process of being with someone when a they are about to die. You just can’t fit that into a sound bite.

All I can say is that it has completely changed me as a person – and for the better. One of the most amazing things about the experience is that you learn and grow far more than it seems that you give to other people in those moments.

While I was at a BBQ about 2 weeks ago, someone asked me what it was like. In the course of describing what we did in the program to process events we experienced, I described how much of you gets laid bare. One tool we use is a verbatim. A verbatim is a review of an encounter you had with someone. Everything is anonymous and there is no way to track the original person down. One presents a dialogue (as best they can remember) of exactly what was said by everyone involved – including yourself. You present it to a peer group who then re-enacts the event with you. They then go through and examine what was going on, what you said, and why. It’s amazing what starts coming out – “I see that when they said they were afraid of death, you asked them about how they were getting along with their parents. Why did you ask that? What is/has gone on in your own family to make you ask that question? What do you experience when thinking about your own death?”

Well, you can guess that by the end of these sessions, most people end up in tears at some point. It’s amazing; but it’s amazingly healing too. I guess that’s why so many people see it as the real gateway to growth in relating to others. I for one have seen my relationships open in a whole new way – everything from dear friends to even the casual relationships. The change is so dramatic that I’m still trying to make sense of it all – but it is so much more mature and healthy that I find it very exciting with each new person and encounter I have. It’s like living got ‘re-charged’ somehow and all things seem to have been made new. Looks like I’ll be enjoying this newness for some time; and I’m excited for it.

I was having a talk with my CPE supervisor about the very real difficulty people have talking about their affective (emotional) selves – especially in the traumatic events people go through at the hospital. We often do not have a proper language with which to talk about what is going on inside us. This becomes very apparent when we experience the death of a loved one, a traumatic accident, or a debilitating illness. Things happen within us that we are often unable to describe. We start getting at them by using words like sadness, frustration, anger, fear, hopelessness, etc.

I have noticed this is a problem that is particularly acute in men (including myself). There is little forum for men to really learn how to build or use a language of communicating their affective states. This is particularly acute in people that are very intellectual or try to ‘think’ their way through their emotions and not ‘live’ through them. He saw this pattern and said something that I’ve been spending some time pondering: “The real challenge for you is going to be learning how to think with your heart and feel with your head.”

I finished my first 28-hour shift with all-night on-call session at the hospital this week and it was quite a wild ride.

After visiting with patients all day, I was on-call for exactly 3 minutes before the first call to a terminal patient and family came in.  I rushed to the ER and met with and prayed with the family and the patient for a couple of hours.  After the family had to go home, I would continue to drop by the patient’s room and pray with them every few hours – even though they were unconscious.  There is something amazing about walking down a perfectly quite, dark, and almost abandoned ICU at 2am, stop in to pray with someone who is unconscious and you know only has a short time left.

I had a few more smaller trauma visits (non-terminal) and then about mid-shift another patient came in.  The accident was minor; but it got worse and worse until it was clear the person wasn’t going to make it – a total shock.  I stayed with the family and the patient until the person passed away a few hours later.  Ah, then there were the individuals that thought the best way to determine the paternity of their child was to fight it out in the parking lot.  Welcome to level 1 trauma.

I would often just wander through the ER and talk to the lucid patients and families – some of whom were very funny and joking around.  We also had an on-call room which we could sit, take naps, and wait until calls came in. It’s on the top floor of the building overlooking Portland.  I watched the sun come up and break across the city.  It was so beautiful and I wished I’d brought my camera.  I’ll definitely remember it the next time.  After running such I long shift, I went home and slumped into bed completely exhausted.  I’m just now processing all that happened and where God was in all of it.  It is quite overwhelming; but amazing at the same time.

We do spiritual journaling and verbatims to sort through all the emotion, spiritual movement, and just plain raw input.  It’s amazing how experiences like this pull up every one of your own fears, sense of mortality, shortcomings, joys, strengths, and weaknesses.  You will deal with the death or life of the loved one just as much as the family or the patient themselves.  It showed me that in this kind of work you will go through all the things that the people coming in with are going through.  You enter into each pain, terminal diagnosis, fear, tear, joy, relief, joking and every other emotion yourself.  Yet, it’s amazing how people will let you come and enter into the most intimate parts of their families – even deeper than doctors or the nurses are allowed.  Just walking in and saying you are the staff chaplain they called for immediately changes the tone: softening, opening, and calming the room.  It was interesting how there would be a kind of ‘parting the waters’ as you enter and everyone leave you with the family.  There was a sense of other-ness to the place you enter. You truly enter a sacred and intimate space – it is almost palpable.  But the question it leaves the chaplain is if we have the courage to really enter that space and share all those experiences with people – again and again – often powerless to do anything practical but be in the moment with them and go through all of it with them.  It’s a good question.

After Lazarus, Jesus’ friend dies, he goes to visit the tomb and his sister who is grieving in tears the brother who died.  The first thing that Jesus does is to weep.  I think I understand why now.