The Day Where Time Simultaneously Stopped and Flew By

I had my first call to the children's hospital this morning.  It was very, very difficult.  Those of you with babies - hug them close tonight.  Life is precious.

When I left the children's hospital and headed back to Grady, I thought I was doing okay.  I sat in on an interdisciplinary team report on the HIV/AIDS floor, accompanied one of the residents as she went to pray with the food service employees and attended midweek worship.  I ate lunch in the lounge with the other chaplains.  I pulled out my notebook and started noting some of the key points of my children's hospital call.

As I got further into my notes, I started to feel really anxious.  I didn't understand the anxiety - the only thing I had planned for the rest of my day was an hour-long individual supervision with my educational supervisor.  By the time I would be finished with the meeting, it would be time to leave.  I didn't have the on call pager - I wasn't on call tonight.  Why was I anxious?  I think I was just more affected by the call than I initially thought.  Combine that with the fact that we interns were assigned our own floors today and I had the perfect recipe for heart palpitations the inability to remember how to breathe properly.

I felt better by the time my supervision rolled around.  I walked in expecting to go over the verbatim that I had been working on the other night.  I asked her if I was supposed to read it out loud and she said no, she had read it that morning.  She asked me about a really strange detail of the case and then kind of turned the paper over and looked at me.

"So tell me about your anxiety," she said.

Crap, I thought to myself.  It's going to be a long meeting.

For the next hour, we talked about my anxiety.  We talked about what it was like in college, how I changed my lifestyle to become a healthier overall person (body AND mind), how I am affected today by it and how it might affect my summer.

I didn't think it was okay to admit that my natural instincts to get anxious were going to cause me to approach my unit of CPE differently than other people might.  I didn't think it was okay to admit to my clinical supervisor, "I'm not sure that I can handle that floor right now."  I didn't think it was okay to say, "This is really hard for me - and I need to take a minute."  I thought that I needed to compare myself and my approach to CPE the way the other interns (and residents) do.  I thought that I needed to be perfect.

I was putting unrealistic expectations on myself.

I'm working on it.

My supervisor also reminded me that I've never done anything like this before - and that Grady isn't a normal hospital; it's not even a normal trauma center!  It's one of the largest hospitals in the country and things get absolutely crazy once in awhile.  "It's countercultural" she told me - I had never thought of it that way before.

At the end of our meeting, I told my supervisor that I felt bad saying that I was only doing CPE because it was a requirement for my ordination.  This program is making me a better pastor and I appreciate that.  She looked at me, smiled and said, "Sarah, I won't be offended if you hate CPE."

And for some reason, that made me feel so much better.