My Teachings

“Chaplain, we need you,” These were the first words I heard when my badge finally opened the doors of the ICU on a sunny day this past July. Before I knew it, I was pulled into a room where a patient’s heart had stopped and there were a large amount of nurses and family members, all trying to talk at the same time. Emotions were high and so was the volume of all of the machines and monitors helping the medical team. The following few hours are a bit of a blur in my memory, but I can tell you one thing--even though the patient technically survived, kept alive only by a ventilator and continuous dialysis, very few people walked out of that room the same way they had walked into it.