My day at the hospital starts with morning report, where the night chaplain explains what has happened the night before. I was intrigued when I saw the name of one of my patients on his list, and shocked when he said that he had coded and died.
When I had entered the patient’s room some 12 hours before, he was eating his breakfast and had offered me oatmeal and applesauce. I teased that he wasn’t offering to share his eggs. His wife, perched cross-legged on the bed, joyfully announced that he had had his best night yet. We talked about when they would return to their home.
The night chaplain had said it had been a tense three hours as the patient suddenly become unresponsive and could not be revived. His daughter had been with him, and was feeling remorse that she had sent her mother to the nearby motel, where they had been staying. Totally distraught, she could not drive the family car to pick her mother up, and the chaplain had to arrange for a taxis to bring the grieving wife to the bedside. The family had been in the hospital for 12 days and they and I had been celebrating this man’s apparent recovery from pancreatic surgery as a miracle. No one expected that he was cured, but it was expected that months had been added to his life.
“God led us to this place,” his wife has told me, following the successful surgery.
And all I can think of now is how do you recall a miracle. How can you celebrate survival from the surgeons’ scalpel only to code and die on the way to recovery? How does one find meaning in that?
Ironically, I had been thinking about death on the way into work that morning and come to the conclusion that life and death were a continuum, and that whatever happened would be okay in the end. I think now of my patient’s teenaged son the day before his father faced surgery. Teary and worried, he cried with the thought that he could lose his dad. I can only imagine his anguish tonight.
I had visited with the family some five or six times, generally playing my harp and singing, which calmed and relieved the patient's anxiety and pain. One day, when that I had entered the room, the son was lying in the bed as his dad was in the chair. I remember how happy he was with my confusion. I only wish I had had him walk me out of the room that day. It was an opportunity to check in with how he was doing. But I hadn’t taken it and was seemingly content with the family telling me how much they appreciated my visits and how much the patient loved the music that I offered.
I wonder now whether I was really doing good ministry, or whether I simply wanted to indulge the vision that we were all part of a miracle and that there was always hope and recovery.
We were all in collusion on that one, and I wonder where we go from here.
