Tag: chaplain

O is for Operation

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, ChaplaincyLeave a comment

Dr. James Patrick Kinney performing early anesthesia procedure at Sisters of Charity Hospital, Buffalo, NY

(This post is part of my ongoing series ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy.)

Did you ever play that board game as a kid, the one where you had to use the little tweezers to reach into the tiny, metal-lined spaces of the cartoon man’s body to remove the little bucket of “Water on the Knee” or the very literal “Butterflies in the Stomach”? It made me a nervous wreck, and my hands would shake as I anticipated the inevitable Bzzzzz when the tweezers made contact with the metal. I was terrible at the Operation board game, so I suppose it’s a good thing I never wanted to become a surgeon. But I do spend a lot of time near the operating room at our hospital. Continue reading “O is for Operation” →

37 in Pictures

On By Stacy N. SergentIn Chaplaincy, Dating, Gratitude, Love for Neighbor and Self, Writing2 Comments

June 5th is my birthday. A lot has happened since the last time I celebrated another year of life. There have been some challenging moments, to be sure. I continue learning how to navigate through episodes of depression and anxiety attacks. I’ve experienced disappointments both personal and professional. But as I look back on the last year, the positives far outnumber the negatives. I think it’s safe to say that 37 really has been one of my best years yet! Continue reading “37 in Pictures” →

M is for Morgue

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, Chaplaincy, Grief1 Comment

(This post is part of my ongoing series ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy.)

The sign by the door reads “Decedent Affairs.” It’s a euphemism. Nobody whose loved one is being treated in the hospital, or who is actually a patient there, wants to see the word “Morgue” as they walk down the hallway. That’s the rationale, as I understand it. But the morgue is there. We all die sometime, whether or not we want to admit it, and a lot of us die in hospitals. When that happens, the morgue is where a body stays until it is picked up by the funeral home. Continue reading “M is for Morgue” →

K is for Kids

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, Chaplaincy, Grief, Women in MinistryLeave a comment

blessingElli

(This post is part of my ongoing series ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy.)

Working closely with children is one of the best and worst parts of my job. Sometimes it means I get to hold a new baby and speak a blessing over her, as I did with my friends’ daughter, Elli, in the above photo. It means playing Legos with the kid whose mom is working one of her three jobs and who just wants some company while he recovers from another round of chemotherapy. It means talking to the very tall 12-year-old boy in the emergency room in a way that lets him know I understand he’s still a kid, and that it’s okay to be scared or to cry. I love being with kids in those moments. Continue reading “K is for Kids” →

Being Called Author

On By Stacy N. SergentIn Chaplaincy, Grief, Writing2 Comments

Titlepage

We are just four days away from the ebook publication of Being Called Chaplain: How I Lost My Name and (Eventually) Found My Faith, my very first book! This is a dream come true for me, and a process six years in the making. I still remember the day, just a few months after moving to the Charleston area, that I was walking the Ravenel Bridge with my friend Anita and I told her, “I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I just don’t know what I’d write about!” The next year or so was a case of “be careful what you wish for,” as I got enough material for two books, at least. Continue reading “Being Called Author” →

I is for Invisible

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, Chaplaincy4 Comments

shipinfog

(This post is part of my ongoing series ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy.)

I took my dog, Hurley, for a walk along the Mount Pleasant waterfront, as I often do, but things didn’t look the same at all. Where I can usually look across the water to see the port of Charleston and the many church steeples of the Holy City, today there was a wall of gray nothing. A few times every minute, we would hear the low call of a foghorn, but couldn’t see the source of the sound. Then suddenly, the top of a massive cargo ship became visible, just a few phantom smoke stacks and containers that seemed to be floating on a cloud. It sounded a nearly constant alert to its presence as it made its way through the fog. If there were other ships in its path, I sure couldn’t see them.  Continue reading “I is for Invisible” →

E is for Emergency Room

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, ChaplaincyLeave a comment

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(This is the fifth in the series ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy.)

It is the beating heart of the hospital. It’s also the only place I’ve ever seen a human heart beating (or struggling to beat) inside someone’s chest, up close and personal. I never know quite what I’m walking into when I get a call to the ER. Chaplains are part of the trauma team, automatically paged in the event of a trauma call. (More on that when we get to the letter T.) But there are many other reasons we get requests to come to the emergency room. It’s one of the units where I spend the most time. My closest friends on staff at the hospital are those who work the ER. (Incidentally, it is more appropriately called the emergency department, since it comprises many rooms. But thanks to those pharmaceutical commercials, when I hear ED I can only think of erectile dysfunction, so it remains the ER for me.)

Here, it’s all about crisis. Almost nobody wakes up in the morning planning on being in the ER later that day. The things that bring people here are sudden and surprising. Continue reading “E is for Emergency Room” →

D is for Death

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, Chaplaincy, Grief11 Comments

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(This is the fourth in my series, ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy. Read other posts in the series here.)

“He then greeted Death as an old friend and went with him gladly, departing this life as equals.”

Sometimes I forget how different my perspective is from that of most “normal” people. Then my roommate asks me, “How was work last night?” I reply, “Not too bad. Just two deaths and a trauma.” She laughs and I look at her quizzically. “Sorry,” she says, “but you’re the only person I know who would call two deaths in one shift ‘not too bad.’ Your job is so weird.” I guess she has a point. Working in a hospital, encountering death on such a routine basis, is more than a little weird. Continue reading “D is for Death” →

ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy: C is for Charting

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, Chaplaincy2 Comments

When I began my first unit of CPE, way back in 2006, I remember the awesome sense of responsibility I had each time I got to document one of my patient visits. I can’t believe we get to write in the patients’ charts, I thought, just like doctors do! Over the next several years and hundreds, maybe thousands of visits, charting became much less exciting. It was part of the routine, something to check off the list of tasks that must be done. “If you didn’t chart it, it didn’t happen,” my CPE supervisor told us. So I charted my visits, over and over and over again. Every job involves paperwork, I suppose, and this is ours. (And yes, when I started out, most of the charting we did was still on paper, writing with an actual pen on a form in a binder. It’s all electronic now.)  Continue reading “ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy: C is for Charting” →

ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy: B is for Bible

On By Stacy N. SergentIn ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy, Chaplaincy6 Comments

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I’m sure it’s not true everywhere, but since the hospital where I work is located pretty securely in the Bible Belt, we chaplains get a lot of requests to bring Bibles to patients. Our office also contains copies of other sacred texts — the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the Torah, and more — but rarely do we get a request for one of those. Instead, we regularly get calls from nurses whose patients say they left their Bibles at home when they were hospitalized and would like to borrow one. We have a steady supply of Gideon Bibles, so it’s okay that we almost never get them back. One patient told me not long ago, “I just can’t fall asleep without reading God’s word!” I wondered which parts she wasn’t reading, since I have found a lot in there over the years that would keep me awake nights.  Continue reading “ABCs of Hospital Chaplaincy: B is for Bible” →