In hospitals where “Pastoral Care” stands for more than administrative paper shuffling, the chaplains often spend as much time ministering to members of the hospital staff as they do to patients.
Working in such a high-stress environment, nurses and other hospital workers often need a friend who can prop them up and put them back together.
Years ago one of my chaplain friends received a desperate call from a nurse he had learned to respect. “Please come pray with me,” she pled. He was shocked to hear that she was hospitalized herself.
“Last month,” she told the chaplain, “we had a patient on my unit acutely ill with a lung disease so rare that most of the doctors had not heard of it.”
Tears welled up in her eyes as she up-dated the chaplain. “I was working beside that patient’s bed late one evening, checking drip meters and hanging fresh I.V. bags, when suddenly he made a sort of barking, sucking noise sort of like he had a little seizure, and then he quit breathing. Just like that.”
“What did you do?” the chaplain asked.
“I sounded the code alarm and went to work doing automatically all the things we’re trained to do in a case like that. Before any of the pulmonary equipment got to the room, I began CPR. It didn’t take long to get him breathing again.”
“And now, after giving that patient mouth-to-mouth help, you’re hospitalized . . .
“With a lung infection.”
“And the doctors are telling you . . .?”
“That I may have caught what that man later died from.” Fear etched itself on her face as she spoke the terror gripping her heart.
My friend said this good lady spent several long, scary days in that hospital bed before lab reports finally confirmed that her ailment was something different. Something treatable.
The good news this nurse received, however, in no way lessens her heroism. What kind of heart made her respond instantly to a stranger’s distress with no thought for her own personal safety? What made her risk her own life to save another?
Did she do all this because she wears the Name of One who gave his life so we can live?