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| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 29 2011, 08:54 PM (169 Views) | |
| Dewey | Oct 29 2011, 08:54 PM Post #1 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Wake up Friday morning at 8am. Work in living room in pajamas, transcribing parts of a book manuscript for a professor as a work-study project, till noon. Have lunch, get showered, shaved, and dressed, and head to the church, an hour away. Work at church, getting bulletins, videos, and other things ready for Sunday, from 2pm till 8pm. Drive back to Columbus, direct to hospital. Sit in lobby from 9pm till 11pm, doing at least some of the readings assigned for Saturday class. Go on duty at the hospital at 11pm. Deal with multiple families' grief in saying goodbye to loved ones. Multiple prayers. Try to get Catholic priest on call to show up for Catholic patients' requests for anointing of the sick (they never show). Perform one anointing of the sick, several hours before the patient dies. There's no oil anointing jar, so hit the cafeteria and top off with the cruet of EVOO at the salad bar. Handle decedent care process for these folks as they die during the night. Coordinate with organ donor coordinator, who wants to personally come in and discuss the possibility of organ donation with the family of one dying patient. Sit with the family, asking them to reminisce about the patient, helping them to remember the good times and memories, while also buying time for the organ donation person to arrive, before the family decides to withdraw, allowing for cardiac death and thereby eliminating the possibility of organ donation. Coordinator arrives. Family declines, as is often the case. Overall, work is constant, not allowing even a 15 minute nap. Release several bodies from morgue to coroner or funeral home. Report to oncoming chaplain on call, change into a clean shirt, and get out of the hospital at about 7:20am Saturday morning. Drive directly to the seminary for class starting at 8am. Get there and realize the class doesn't start until 9am, when the building is unlocked. Recline seat in car and try to get a nap. As soon as my eyes close, get a phone call from brother who talks for the next 30 minutes nonstop. Building is open by the time brother's done talking. Go to class, which runs from 9am till 4pm. Get home at 4:30pm. Take a 2-hour nap, then get up and continue working on unfinished sermon for Sunday morning. Finish sermon at 12:15am Sunday. Save files, collect up things needed to take to church in morning. Review lesson plan for adult ed class, and theme of children's sermon. Take a few minutes to write a post, bitching about the whole crazy schedule, and post it to TNCR. Go to bed at 12:55am. Alarm clock set for 6am. |
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"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685. "Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous "Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011 I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14 | |
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| LWpianistin | Oct 29 2011, 09:09 PM Post #2 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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That's a LONG couple of days! Hope you get a good night's sleep
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| And how are you today? | |
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| Optimistic | Oct 30 2011, 07:27 AM Post #3 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Holy CRAP, Dewey. How did you manage to sit in class from 9-4? Did you not fall asleep??
Would be interested to hear a little elaboration on this point, if you donīt mind. I would think this should be one of the biggest priorities for a priest, no? Why do they tend to not show? |
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PHOTOS I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up. - Mark Twain We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. -T. S. Eliot | |
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| Dewey | Oct 30 2011, 02:29 PM Post #4 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Opti, as far as I know it was a pretty uncommon occurrence. We don't have a Catholic priest on staff, and even if we did, we'd need to have multiples of them to assure that a staff priest would always be available to any patient, any time. Of course, then there would be the same issue for Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Bhuddist, and other patients as well. So we have a rotation of local priests who come in for religious matters specific to RC patients. They have regularly hours during the week, and a team of volunteer Eucharistic Ministers are also in pretty much every day, covering the various units. We try to help them by making extra copies of the Catholic census, highlighting the units where the EMs are assigned that particular day. The priest covering during the daytime is also involved in anointing the sick, and there's a logbook kept so we can know which patients have recently had anointing, etc. After daytime hours, there's a set rotation schedule of on-call priests. If the lone (and Protestant, or in one current case, Jewish) on-call chaplain gets a request like this one, we try to help the patient *first* get in contact with their own priest to take care of it. If he isn't available, then we go to our on-call person, and if it's a true emergency they're usually there relatively quickly. In this particular case, there was a wrinkle. The patient had received anointing just ten days ago. I don't know what the exact cutoff time is - I'm sure there's some church ruling that an anointing (in such a case as this one, where it's what laypeople might generically term "last rites") is good for a certain length of time, before is should/can be done again. And in my voice mail messages, I made sure to tell these priests that the patent had been anointed, giving the date. So they may have declined responding to the request because the former anointing was still "in force," and it didn't justify getting up in the middle of the night. Even if that were the case, I would certainly have appreciated a callback from our ON-CALL priest, so I could give some information and guidance to the grieving - and increasingly annoyed - family. I was getting pretty annoyed, too. If you're on-call, dammit, you're on call, and if you can't answer your phone, the least you can do is return the call within a reasonable time - even within a few hours, since the priest may, himself, be dealing with some parish emergency. I understand that. But still - return the damned call, so I can give the family an update. Grr. |
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"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685. "Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous "Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011 I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14 | |
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