It's been a busy night here on my on-call shift. I've come to enjoy my on-call shifts because there usually seems plenty for me to do and I get to experience areas of the hospital that I don't normally get to see. Looking at my on-call log tonight you'd think I really had a slow night, but the trauma that came in just as I arrived has taken a significant part of my time (lots of family, lots of friends - all needed pastoral care). In the middle of that there was a death on 8 (oncology) and that's always real sad. Nothing to be done. Hope of the hopeless up there. I prayed with the wife of the patient and we hugged for a while. Cancer deaths are very different in their dynamics, from the chaplain's perspective, because they are long in coming and are expected. They are still sad but don't experience the shock of a traumatic expiration or arrest. This week has just been a hellish time - 5 deaths in all in the wards where I work, one or two more definitely pending, two traumas that I've handled, neither with a satisfactory ending. In fact, the one tonight is an ending worse than death I think. The words "subdural hematoma" are words I never want to hear in relation to me or my family. What happens to those patients the majority of the time is purgatory; it is not death, but it is certainly not life.

I wanted to write the other night about John Kerry's acceptance speech, but I was just too tired to do it and now everything that needs to be said has been said by others. I really liked how he said that we shouldn't declare God to be on "our" side, but rather should pray that we are on God's side (ref. Abraham Lincoln). Iraqi insurgents are just as much God's children as the Bush family, so let us not go around wielding God like a team captain in an intramural football game.

I think tomorrow, if it is sunny, I will go to the lake shore. And by tomorrow I mean in a few hours. That will be a nice decompressing time.

-R