Jitterbugging for Jesus

So I get to the hospital and make my usual 3 p.m. swing through the ER triage and waiting area and then head to the patient and trauma rooms for rounds and spot a blond woman with long hair, maybe 35, who looks somewhat familiar, and appears to be in severe pain as she holds and rubs her head in one of the beds in the hallway and no one is around her and I hate to see anybody in pain, but especially anybody in pain alone.
“Are you hurting?” I ask her.
“My head is busting,” she grimaces. “I’m having a migraine and chest pains.”
“I’m sorry, do you have any family or anybody here with you?”
“Not now.”
I tell her I’m a chaplain and I’ll be around till midnight and will look in on her if she wants and she says that’d be good.
Six hours later, she’s flat on her back and pale as a ghost and I ask the charge nurse what’s going on with her.
“That’s . . . NAME HERE” . . . and the charge nurse tells me the name, which is so unusual a name you don’t forget one like it, and now I remember why she looks familiar. She’s in ER every few months heavily intoxicated and often to the dangerous level of alcohol poisoning and many’s the night I’ve prayed with her when she came in on occasions when she was sober but all kinds of maladies.
A genuinely sad case.
Later the same night, as they say . . . one of the younger but very skilled nurses runs up to the night manager and reports that she had an argument with a woman who pulled the IV out of her arm and the young nurse got excited and said something she should not have said to the patient, who claimed she didn’t pull the needle out of her arm—it just fell out of her arm while she was sleeping.
And if you’ve ever had an I.V. stuck in your arm and taped over in the hospital, you may know that those things just don’t fall out of the arm.
But the nurse had to report this and the supervisor tells her don’t worry about it. And I do too.
And then a woman who just had chemo is rushed into the trauma room with no pulse and within minutes the trauma team has her back to life with a strong heartbeat. Her husband is outside the room and the doctors makes a point to tell him that the CPR he did on his wife at home no doubt is the reason she was able to be revived and to have such a strong heartbeat after a couple of near death episodes.
The patient will be on a breathing machine for at least a couple of days and will still have lymphoma when she gets out of ICU but her husband and family are thankful that they still have her at all, at this time.
Amen.