CPE

Last week I began my full-time summer CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), which is a fancy way of saying chaplain internship, at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. I'm not sure how well I will be able to blog about this experience in terms of accurately reflecting the intensity of this experience, primarily because I foresee myself being so emotionally exhausted by the end of the day that I won't want to write about it. I also doubt that I will have much time to blog about it.  Plus, there are confidentiality agreements that will prevent me from describing the details of patients' lives with whom I will be ministering. But I'll do my best. Last week was orientation of every kind, from hospital orientation, to hospital tours (St. Joe's is a big hospital!), to CPE orientations. So today my clinical work finally began. I am assigned to the Renal Unit, which is an outpatient center where people with kidney failures go regularly for dialysis. This is a unique assignment in that, unlike other units like the Intensive Care Unit or ER, these patients come three times per week for three hours at a time, on average, and they come for years. This is unique for a chaplain because I will have the opportunity to build relationships with my patients over the course of the summer. Dialysis is a boring routine for many of the patients, so they tend to be much more open to talking to chaplains than people who come and go as quickly as they can. Each of the six CPE students have a different unit, and they each have a mentor, who would normally spend the first couple of days guiding the student through their respective unit as they do their "rounds", checking in on patients and seeing if they're interested in talking about anything. My mentor, unlike the others, brought me to the Renal Unit, introduced me to the nurse, and said, "Okay. There ya go. See ya!" I know he did this intentionally to "throw me out there" so I would have to muster up the courage to swim instead of giving me a life preserver, and I'm sure a point of conversation in our group time tomorrow will be how that made me feel and why (we have group time on Tuesdays and Thursdays where, I am told, we analyze and discuss everything spoken and unspoken in order to come to understand aspects in our lives that serve as impediments to pastoral care). Anyway, it was a bit scary, but I went for it, sometimes wanting to retreat back to the spiritual care center (home base), but forcing myself to initiate conversations with patients and using intuition to decide when to move on (in other words, when they're done with the conversation). I had some very significant conversations. In my mind, today was supposed to be a kind of introduction, just learning names and beginning relationships. But most people really wanted to open up. I'm really looking forward to getting to know one young man (24 years old) who was born with a tumor and had chemo that burned his kidney. He is blind in one eye, can't read or write, weighs about 85 lbs., and has had a very hard life. He has been on dialysis for ten years and there's no telling how long he will last. He's been hoping (as most of the patients here are) for a kidney transplant. He "graduated" from the pediatric section of the renal unit and was the recipient of a Make a Wish Foundation gift, which was an evening with his favorite WWF wrestler, including a ride in a limo, backstage dinner with him, and front row seats at the WWF fight. His dream is to become a WWF wrestler. On Wednesday he's going to bring a picture to show me of the night he had. He is also very open to discussing matters of faith and spirituality. I spoke with another mom whose 13-year-old daughter was just diagnosed with Lupis, out of nowhere, and she is now on dialysis 3 times per week. Each of the five conversations I had lasted about 45 minutes today. All that to say, I am exhausted but it makes me feel very grateful and honored that God would put me in this place for this summer. I pray that I will be able to provide the kind of spiritual care that these patients need this summer.