Chaplain on the Other Side of the Rail

“  O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” I am on record stating that this prayer is the single most important prayer in the Episcopal Church. It’s not about the most prominent day. Rather, it comes up on important days pointing forward. It is the last solemn collect in the liturgy for Good Friday. It is the last collect in the Great Vigil of Easter. Finally, it is the prayer for every ordination. Now, not everyone would agree with me, I suppose, b...

  It is the morning after the night before; which is to say that I have my next procedure this morning. I could say I’m going under the robot, and it would be more accurate than saying “under the knife,” but not as dramatic.   I am hopeful. I am also a little tired of this. And I am blessed: so far this is not a new pattern. I knew there are folks for whom something like this is standard. Some pattern may become standard for me, but I’m not there yet.  There seem to be a number of verses of the Psalms that begin “When….” That thought is meaningful for me today. It is also meaningless, at least in the recognition that I don’t control much of anything. I have to hearnwhat I have said often to others: control is an illusion.  I am not your average patient. I will feel better when they actually get me back to Pre-op. That’s what comes of having spent so much of my life in hospitals. Let’s just get this started. 

    These days, I am dealing with pain. For some time now, my daily routine has involved naproxen twice a day or ibuprofen several times a day, carrying on with my arthritic knees. Right now I am in that time before a procedure, when they require that you stop all NSAIDS. And so I’m relying on acetaminophen to do what it can do, and beyond that I am simply doing less. In all of this, I’m not really wrestling with the Problem of Pain. I do have a framework to think about that, of course. Anybody who’s really wrestled with their theology figures out where they’re going to stand on that, however, difficult that stand might be. No, I am quite clear that the appropriate answer to the question of, “why me?“is just “why not me?“ Years ago, when I was the chaplain who helped open a small suburban hospital, I was asked to participate in the process improvement committee for pain management. The nurse was coordinating. It said that was because, “pain is always a spiritual issue, isn...

    I am normally a very patient person. In fact, I fear that’s been one of my most frustrating characteristics, for Karen, and for other folks. I blame it on having a Pentecostal streak, but mostly it’s the willingness to let things ride until there is something absolutely ready to do. Now that I’m less than two weeks away for the next procedure, and with delays built in before I can address cancer recurrence, I’m finding myself edgier than I expected. It’s harder waiting.  Some things we do have a timetable on. I have the next procedure on the 15th. I will have another (hopefully simpler) procedure in about a month. Sometime after the surgery, we will start looking at the possible cancer recurrence. If my PSA is higher (which would probably mean I’m marginally sicker), insurance may pay for the scan. If they won’t, we still may look into how to pay for self pay. That would let us at least start talking to an oncologist. Karen is concerned that it will be more pain...

  It has been a difficult winter, and I’m not sure now what I have said to whom. This seems as good a way as any to share this widely. Last summer I had a procedure to remove a kidney stone. At the time everything seemed to go just fine. So, when I started having back pain in December, we figured it was simply another stone. We had the appropriate CT done and and it did look like something was there.  At the same time, there was something else. Since I had my prostate removed, my PSA (prostate specific antigen) has been checked regularly. For almost two years there hadn’t been anything to find. In December that changed. I won’t wonk out on specific numbers, but going from “not measurable” to “measurable” was enough to get our attention, including my urologist. (You never want to see a doctor say, “Oh….”) So, January 2 I had a procedure to look for a stone. Unfortunately, they didn’t find a stone. They found a complete blockage between my kidney and my bladder. With enoug...

 As I was preparing for my surgery, one of the things doctors said (both my own doctors and the material I read, both in print and on line) to be upbeat was, “You should be back to normal activities in [some period of time].” Oh, don’t lift too much, and don’t plan on driving too soon, but both of those were, as I heard it, relatively short term issues. “You should be back to normal activities by….” Each time Karen and I heard that, we couldn’t believe it. We would stop and say, “That’s too optimistic. My normal activities include moderate hiking on uneven trails, maybe stopping to harvest mushrooms; or fighting through brush to lay out a trail; or, depending on the season, heavy gardening or tree work. I don’t those things professionally or for more than a couple of hours a day; but it still seemed (it still seems) unlikely that I would be back to those activities in the times the doctors suggested. Oddly enough, for most of the written sources the standard for “normal behavior” w...