Dueling Pagers

Since my clinical supervisor is out of town today and tomorrow, I will be carrying his pager which gets all the Code Yellows on it, in addition to my pager, which gets all the Code Blues. It may be a busy two days. He is doing something really cool though. Apparently, he is nationally recognized as one of the best disaster spiritual care persons around (he headed the chaplains at 9/11) and so has been asked to present a paper at a conference on the topic in Arizona. Kinda neat!

One of the patients I've been visiting with for a few days passed away early this morning. I feel somewhat sad, but am pretty ok with it because death was a release for him. Though he died young, his disease was fatal and life support was only prolonging the inevitable. His wife and I said a prayer of committal over him, holding his hand, yesterday and today he died. I see something in that. He will be missed.

Last night I had a nice dinner with the Rev. Kathy Schillreff, Rector of St. Monica's in Naples, and Dean of the Naples Deanery. She is up here at Seabury finishing her D.Min in COngregational Studies and invited me out to supper with her. It was nice to get to know another clergy person from the home diocese and especially a Dean as I look forward to employment somewhere in that diocese. We talked about a lot of things from school to process, from COM (of which she is a part) to jobs, from CPE to news around the diocese. I enjoyed our conversation very much and look forward to more someday.

Well, now my lunch break is almost over, so I better go and visit a few patients before one of my dueling pagers goes off.

-R